Tip of the Week: Get the Most Out of Windows 10 With These 4 New Features

Windows 10 is here and many users are becoming familiar with their new system and finding out what it can do. Like with any good OS, Windows 10 has advantages over its predecessors. Here are four of our favorite features.

OneDrive Integration
Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage solution is a big part of Windows 10, which makes sense with the cloud being so prominent these days. With Microsoft’s upgrade to Windows 10 comes a more integrated OneDrive for your data-sharing needs. For example, OneDrive is no longer exclusive to Microsoft; it now lets you access files using your Android or iOS device. Plus, you can use OneDrive to remotely access any files on your Windows 10 PC--not just the files stored in OneDrive.

Battery Saver
If you’re using Windows 10 on a mobile device or laptop, you don’t have to monitor your battery levels quite as closely as you used to. With the new Battery Saver feature, Windows 10 will automatically detect when your power levels get low and respond by powering down your non-essential background applications. This will perhaps give you a few extra minutes to make it to that wall charger. To enable Battery Saver, go to Start menu > Settings > System > Battery Saver.

Background Scrolling
One common pitfall for Windows users is to be actively working with an app, and then hovering your cursor over another open app that’s on your screen, but not one that’s selected. You then go to scroll up or down, but to no avail because the app isn’t selected as the primary app. Granted, this isn’t a huge problem because all you have to do is click once on the background app to select it and then you can scroll like you need to. Yet, it’s still enough of an inconvenience for Microsoft to address it with Windows 10. To turn on Background Scrolling so that you won’t have to again be bothered by this, go to Settings > Devices > Mouse and Touchpad.

Customize your Start Menu Apps
Windows 10 nearly eliminated the Windows 8 Metro interface. What’s left of it can be found on the new Windows 10 Start Menu. Instead of having a full screen view, you can pin your most important apps to this for quick access. To do this, click the Start Menu and click on All Apps. Scroll to an application you’d like to add, right click it, and select Pin to Start. This will put a shortcut to the application on the right side of the Start Menu. You can edit the apps on the right side of the Start Menu by right clicking them. You can change their size or unpin them if you want to remove them.

Windows 10 is poised to be a major player in both office and personal computing environments for years to come, which means that we’ll have plenty of time to discover even more of its unique and helpful features. When we do, we’ll be sure to post about it here on our blog. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest tech tips from Directive.