Learn Windows 8 - Bitly

Learn Windows 8

Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction to Windows 8 Introduction ..............................................................................................................5 Getting Started .........................................................................................................9 Starting and Ending a Session................................................................................13 The Start Screen .....................................................................................................17 Live Tiles ...............................................................................................................22 Charms ...................................................................................................................25 Search .....................................................................................................................28 The Desktop ...........................................................................................................31 Chapter 2 – Applications and Settings Multiple Apps and Windows .................................................................................36 All Apps and Accessories ......................................................................................40 Control Panel and PC Settings ...............................................................................43 Windows Updates ..................................................................................................47 Chapter 3 – Ease of Access Ease of Access – Part 1 ..........................................................................................53 Ease of Access – Part 2 ..........................................................................................58 Magnifier................................................................................................................61 On-Screen Keyboard ..............................................................................................63 Speech Recognition ...............................................................................................66

Narrator ..................................................................................................................71 Chapter 4 – User Accounts and Action Center Types of Accounts .................................................................................................77 Adding Users, Changing Password, and Creating a Picture Password and a Pin ..82 User Management ..................................................................................................87 Action Center .........................................................................................................90 Chapter 5 – File Explorer and File History Computer: Hard Disk Drives, DVD Drive, Files, and Folders .............................94 Network, Libraries, and Favorites .........................................................................99 The Ribbon Interface – Part 1 ..............................................................................105 The Ribbon Interface – Part 2 ..............................................................................111 File History ..........................................................................................................115 Chapter 6 – Internet, Safety and Security User Account Control ..........................................................................................120 Windows Firewall ................................................................................................124 Windows Defender ..............................................................................................128 Connecting to the Internet ....................................................................................133 Internet Explorer App ..........................................................................................139 Desktop Internet Explorer ....................................................................................141 Family Safety .......................................................................................................146 Chapter 7 – Network

Network Sharing Settings ....................................................................................151 Setting Up a Homegroup .....................................................................................156 Joining a Homegroup ...........................................................................................159 Sharing on a Network ..........................................................................................161 SkyDrive ..............................................................................................................165 Chapter 8 – Media Applications and Downloads Windows Media Player ........................................................................................169 Music and Video Apps.........................................................................................173 Photo Apps ...........................................................................................................176 Store .....................................................................................................................179 Social Apps ..........................................................................................................184 Chapter 9 – Personalization, Displays, and Task Manager Personalizing your Desktop .................................................................................190 Windows Mobility Center....................................................................................196 Multiple Displays .................................................................................................209 Task Manager.......................................................................................................201 Chapter 10 – Additional Topics and Closing Clocks, Hardwares, Help and Support .................................................................204

Learn Windows 8

Chapter 1 – Introduction to Windows 8 Video: Introduction Toby: Hello and welcome to our course on Microsoft Windows 8. My name is Toby and I’m your instructor on this course. First of all, I want to tell you a little bit about Windows 8. Now I’m going to assume you have some familiarity with the Windows Operating System and that you know that it’s come through a number of versions over 20-plus years through Windows XP about 10 years or so ago, Windows Vista, and about three years ago Windows 7. Now with Windows 8, we’ve got the latest member of the Windows family. But this particular version introduces a couple of new things that really are quite significant. The first of these, and probably the most significant, is that versions of Windows up until now have primarily been intended to run on desktop PCs, laptops, and then things like netbooks, which are variants on the same type of device. It’s true that about 10 years ago a version of Windows XP came out for Tablet PCs as they were then, but there’s never really been a version of Windows that was really geared up for tablets, mobile phones, and so on. With Windows 8 that has changed. Windows 8 is now designed to run on a whole range of devices. It’s still intended to be used on desktops, laptops, netbooks, etc but it’s also now designed to be used on tablets and mobile phones. Alongside this extension of its application is much more of an emphasis of being usable with touch compatible devices. So now rather than assuming you’re using a keyboard and a mouse or that you’re using some sort of track pad, Windows 8 is also designed to let you use a touch sensitive screen. The second key point and one that goes hand in hand with the first is that until now Windows has been usable only on machines with processes from Intel or AMD. With Windows 8, you can use ARM processes, and these are the primary processes that are used in today’s smart phones and tablets. Now let me tell you a little bit about the versions of Windows 8 that are available. There are basically two categories. There is Windows 8 and Windows RT. Windows RT you will only see pre-installed on PCs and tablets that are powered by ARM processes, and you won’t normally be able to buy a copy of that as a consumer to install on a machine of your own. In fact as far as Windows RT is concerned, although much of the material in this course would apply to Windows RT, I am really going to set Windows RT to one side on this course and concentrate

© Copyright 2008-2012 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Windows 8 purely on Windows 8 itself. Windows 8 is the version that consumers will normally purchase and that you’ll be able to install on your PC or laptop and, in fact, there are three versions of Windows 8. Now if you’ve used an earlier version of Windows, such as Windows 7, you’ll know that there were various versions. There was Windows 7 Home, Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate. This is considerably simpler in Windows 8, although there are still three versions of Windows 8. There is Windows 8 which is the base version. There is Windows 8 Pro which is the Professional version, and then there is a third version called Windows 8 Enterprise.

Now the Enterprise version is really primarily intended for large

business and I won’t be covering any of the specific Enterprise aspects on this course. In this course, I’ll be using a computer with Windows 8 Pro installed and there’s a couple of places on the Microsoft website, including this one, where there’s a table showing the features of Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. If you’d like to see what the differences are between Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro, if you find that table, scroll down, you’ll find out what’s involved in Windows 8 Pro that isn’t in Windows 8. It will also give you a comparison with the features of Windows RT as well. Where appropriate I will flag items that are in Windows 8 Pro but not in the basic Windows 8 version, but almost everything in this course is in both Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. One other question you’re likely to have is, “Is my PC ready to upgrade?” Can my PC run Windows 8? Well, on the Microsoft website there is a section here under Windows, if you do a search on Windows 8 system requirements you should find it okay and it gives you a list of system requirements for Windows 8. If you check through that and that should quite quickly whether your PC is ready. It also gives a link through to a Full System Requirement section and very helpfully you can also use the Windows Upgrade Assistant. The Upgrade Assistant will actually analyze your system and tell you if it’s ready to run Windows 8 or advise you of any deficiencies in the specification of your system that you’ll have to put right in order to be able to run Windows 8. Now if you’d like to know what’s new in Windows 8 compared to earlier versions of Windows, there are a couple of great places in the Microsoft website with a lot of information about this. There’s one here, Get to know Windows, with an overview of the changes and then categorized


Learn Windows 8 details of all the changes in Windows 8. Now clearly in this course I’m going to cover many of these in quite a bit more detail, but if you’d like to see a sort of snapshot summary before we get started I suggest you go to one of these pages within the Microsoft site and have a look through to see what’s new or different. One other question you might have is whether you should run the 32 bit version or the 64 bit version. If you have an older machine with less than 4 GB of RAM, then the 32 bit edition will probably do the job for you fine. If you’ve got a newer computer, you should always use the 64 bit edition if you can. You get improved performance and security, but you also get support for larger amounts of RAM. So I mentioned the Upgrade Assistant just now. That is a good starting point. I always suggest you run that if you’re upgrading an existing installation of Windows. Then you need to acquire the version of Windows that you’re going to use. This might be for a new installation or for an upgrade, and then you have to actually perform the installation or upgrade. Now for details of installing and upgrading, you really need to look at the Microsoft website. I am going to show you a little bit about the upgrade here, but primarily the information you need with the full technical support is available from Microsoft. So once you’ve checked which version to get, you’ve got that version, and you’re ready to start, you need to go through the installation or upgrade procedure and then the next section of the course will assume that that installation or upgrade is complete. For the rest of this section, I’m going to quickly show what happens when you start to do an upgrade. So I’ve got a Windows 7 installation here that I’m running on and I’ve got an upgrade disk and I’m going to upgrade this machine to Windows 8. If you’re looking to upgrade, then this will show you basically how to start the process. Now once I install the upgrade disk, what happens is that my computer will start to read the content of the upgrade disk and prepare for the upgrade itself. You’ll see it display something like the display you can see in front of you here. So the next thing that happens is that the upgrade asks me to see if we need to install any updates. You can say no thanks here and check for the updates later on. But I’m going to stick with the Go Online to Install Updates now. That will make sure I get the very latest version of Windows 8 on my machine. Note the checkbox at the bottom here. I want to help make the installation of Windows better and this gives you the


Learn Windows 8 ability to opt into one of Microsoft’s improvement programs for their installations. I’m going to leave that unchecked at this stage.

So click on Next, and then what happens is that the

installation process at this point is checking for an update to the Windows 8 upgrade installation that I’m doing. The updates have been installed and on this occasion Windows 8 is going to do a Restart. Then I am asked to enter my product key. I’m going to enter this now. I’m not going to show you my product key, of course. I’ll put that in and then when I’ve done that I’ll click Next. Now I need to accept the Microsoft Windows 8 Pro License Agreement Terms. Click on Accept. Now I choose what to keep. Do I want to keep my Windows Settings, personal files, and applications? I’m going to try to keep everything if I can. So for each of the applications I’ve got here, I’m going to try to keep it installed. Many of the applications I’ve already I’ve got I believe will work okay on Windows 8. Clearly you can check with the manufacturers of any other applications you’ve got whether they’ll run on Windows 8. If all I want to do is keep my personal files, then I could check that instead. If I didn’t want to keep anything and was just perfectly happy to start from scratch I could say “Nothing” here. Now I’m going to keep everything if I can, so click on Next. There’s a final check to make sure I’m ready to run the installation. So if it finds anything that needs my attention it will give me a message about that. So you have to add your Languages back in Windows 8. I’m actually upgrading from Windows 7 Ultimate on this machine and this machine has many foreign languages on it so I say okay I can confirm that, and it’s ready to go. Install Windows 8 Pro, keep my Windows Settings, my personal files, and the applications I’ve currently got installed. So I’m going to click on Install at this point and the installation will begin and I’ll have to stop recording at that point. In the next section, I’m going to start from the point where having installed Windows 8, I fire it up for pretty much the first time. And then I’ll talk about what you can see and the very earliest stages of working with Windows 8. So please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Getting Started Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at what happens when you first startup Windows 8 after installing it or after upgrading from a previous version of Windows. Now before we start I’d just like to say that if you’ve already tried to restart Windows 8 or to start Windows 8 for the first time, you may have got stuck on some Settings; you may have had a question to answer that you weren’t quite sure of the right answer for. If that’s the case, don’t worry too much because what I’m going to try to do from now on is to explain some of the things that might happen and what you may have done, what you should’ve done, what the options are, and so on. One of the things about the first time that you start Windows 8 is that exactly what happens depends on your own computer, to some extent, and also to things like whether your computer is connected to a network or not. Now I’m going to go through most of the things that might have happened and in the process of doing that I hope to explain quite a lot about Windows 8 and the interface, the way you control Windows 8 and the options you have for running your programs, looking at the information that’s available, etc. Now I’m currently looking at something called the Start Screen. It’s very easy to remember that that’s the Start Screen because it’s got the word Start up there. I’m also logged in as me. So there’s my name over there. I’ve logged into a PC that’s part of a Business Network, but I’ll come back to networks and being a member of a network or not a little bit later on. All of these icons, these various buttons here, we’re going to talk about later on. Now you may or may not yet be able to see the Start Screen on your copy of Windows 8. If you can’t, then what you may see instead is a thing called the Lock Screen. Now before we look at the Lock Screen, I need to talk to you about Charms. Now Charms appear in specific areas of the screen and some apps have their own Charms, but Windows 8 itself comes with a default set of Charms that we’re going to look at to begin with. Now to see the Charms, if you’re using a keyboard or mouse move the cursor towards the bottom right hand corner of the screen and five icons will fly out from the right hand side. You see those five little icons there? Bottom one’s like a cog. They don’t stay there forever. Let’s just do that again. bottom one’s like a cog, the top one’s like a magnifier. Now, if you are not using a keyboard or © Copyright 2008-2012 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Windows 8 mouse, if you’re using a touch sensitive device, what you need to do is to swipe with your finger or thumb from the middle of the right of the screen to the left inwards towards the middle of the screen, and then you’ll see those Charms, and then you can select one by touch in the usual way. If you’re using a keyboard or mouse as I am down into the corner, get the bottom one, Settings, and it’s Settings that we’re going to start with. Now there are many of these to look at and the one we’re going to start with first is Change PC Settings, and the top one of those is this one, Personalize. Now many of the settings associated with Windows 8 are controlled from this PC Settings Screen and within that we have a whole list of options down the left, many of which we’re going to look at. We’re starting with Personalize. For Personalize, there are three things that you can personalize; first of all, the Lock Screen, then the Start Screen, then the Account Picture. We’ll start with the Lock Screen. The Lock Screen appears when you start up your PC, Lock it, or when the PC resumes from Sleep, and it contains useful current information. Most noticeably there you can see the time and the date. But you can display other information as well. You can change the Background Style by choosing from the images beneath it. So whichever one you like, choose, that will be your Lock Screen Style, and the Browse button underneath that lets you choose a picture of your own. So you could go to pictures that you’ve got on your PC. You could even take a picture from the camera in your PC. You could go to Bing and get a suitable image from the internet. Now apart from the time and date, you can display various other pieces of information on the Lock Screen. There are some Lock Screen Apps. Defaults are setup here. For instance, Messaging, Mail, Calendar, Weather. You can add information from other apps. Which ones are available will depend on which apps you’ve got installed on your PC. But you can set these up, click, and choose from available apps. And for one of the apps, you can display detailed status. So I’ve currently got selected here Weather, but I could, for instance, display detailed calendar information and that would tell me things about what I’ve got on my calendar for today, for example. Apart from app style information, you’ll also usually see some System information, such as whether the PC is part of a network, whether it’s got Wi-Fi available and often, particularly if


Learn Windows 8 you’re using say a laptop or a battery powered device, it will show you whether you are on main power or the state of your battery. So the Lock Screen can contain a lot of useful information. Now having said that, not everybody likes a Lock Screen. It’s actually possible to disable the Lock Screen. I’m not going to go through that here but the information on how to do it is freely available on the internet. So, Customization primarily consists of choosing your Lock Screen Apps, choosing the style of Lock Screen. I think I’m going to stick with that style and perhaps when we put some more apps on later we can customize this a little bit further. But that’s one little job for you to do and to experiment with. Now the next important screen is the Start Screen, and we also personalize that from here. So having selected Start Screen, we have a number of choices in terms of background and coloring. Now these are the Background options. If you experiment with each of those, look at what affect they have on the Start Screen, and then in combination with those backgrounds, you can also choose from the 25 color options down here. So watch what happens now as I move this slider across the color options. Now, of course, there’s an extremely large number of combinations you could achieve here, and you choose something to suite you. One of the key elements of the Customization of the Start Screen is going to be things like working on the actual content of the screen rather than the background and coloring which we’re doing here. But we’re going to look at that aspect of Customization later on. For here what you control is basically the pattern and the coloring. So that’s what you do here, personalize Start Screen. And there’s just one other thing you can do here from Personalize, and that is Account Picture. If you want to put a picture of yourself on to this PC so that when you login you see a picture of yourself, then you can browse as usual to that. You can even create an Account Picture using a camera. So I hope by now that provided you’ve been able to access these Settings okay you will have made a few changes yourself and it’s now time to start to look at the affect of some of these changes. But I want to end this section now and I’m going to end this section by showing you one way of ending a session working on your computer, and that is to lock your computer. Now you’re not shutting it down, you’re not putting it to Sleep, you’re just stopping other people from


Learn Windows 8 using it for a moment. Now this may be a good opportunity for you to have a cup of coffee. So how do you lock it? Well, there are a couple of main options. There is a keyboard shortcut of Windows, the Windows key on your keyboard plus L which will lock your computer. Obviously, that’s not the best way if you’re using a touch screen. But you need to know how to get to the Start Screen anyway. So let me just cover that here. If you move the pointer to the bottom left hand corner, you’ll see a little Start icon open up down there with a sort of very small thumbnail of the Start Screen. Click on that and you get that Start Screen. Now the Start Screen is what we’re going to look at in quite a bit of detail in the next section. But for now go up to what’s called your User Tile in the top right hand corner, click or select that, and one of the options there is Lock. And when I click on Lock this PC will be locked and this section will be ended. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Starting and Ending a Session Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at starting and ending a session on a device using Windows 8. The first thing I’m going to do is to look at the Lock Screen. We looked at personalizing the Lock Screen earlier on. Now we’re going to look at using the Lock Screen to gain access to a device and start a session. Now once you’ve gone through the initial setup of your device, as I mentioned earlier, whenever you start it or resume it from Sleep, for example, you’ll see the Lock Screen. And to start the session, you need to basically get past the Lock Screen. Now also as I mentioned earlier, it’s possible to disable the Lock Screen but I’m not going to cover that here. So for the purposes of this course, I’m going to assume that every time you start up the device you see the Lock Screen. Now what you see on the Lock Screen will depend on a number of things. We talked about personalization earlier on. You may see different apps. You may see the status of those apps, such as the weather or possibly the number of outstanding e-mails in your e-mail inbox. You may also see settings such as whether your laptop is plugged into the main power supply, the state of your devices battery, and things like whether you have a network or a wireless access available. So exactly what’s on this screen will very much depend on your local situation. But the screen is there and what we need to do now is to deal with how to start a session. Now there could be a complication here and that is that you may see on your Lock Screen Control-Alt-Delete. If you’re not an experienced Windows Operating System User or you’ve only used home versions of Windows before this may be a bit of a mystery to you. It really harks back a long way really to much earlier versions of Windows, but it certainly continued through and into Windows 7, and this really was the original mechanism really for locking a screen. It meant that you put something up on the screen where you have to press this quite unnatural sequence of keystrokes, Control, Alt, and Delete all together and that would give you access to a Login Screen. Now depending on how your Windows 8 device got to where it is now and in particular if, for example, you’ve upgraded an installation of Windows 7 Professional say to Windows 8 Professional, you may also still have Control-Alt-Delete functionality as well as this Lock Screen. Now if you do it pretty much works the same way that it did in those earlier versions of Windows. You basically press Control-Alt-Delete and that gives you access to the


Learn Windows 8 Login Screen. You can then login as normal and get into Windows 8 and start your session. If you don’t want Control-Alt-Delete, there is a way of disabling that as well, and I’m going to come back to that quite a bit later in the course to show you how to disable that. If you want to disable it before I come back to it there are instructions on how to do it available on the internet, if you just search on Windows 8 Control-Alt-Delete, you’ll find them. The majority of you probably won’t see Control-Alt-Delete on the Lock Screen, probably have no idea what I’m talking about and the next set of instructions are for you. So you can see the Lock Screen and it doesn’t have Control-Alt-Delete written on it or more precisely press Control-Alt-Delete to logon. If you’re using a traditional desktop computer, then all you have to do is tap any key on the keyboard or click with the mouse anywhere on the screen and then you’ll get to the Logon Screen where you can type in your logon name and your password. If you’re using a traditional laptop computer pretty much the same apprise. If you’ve got a track pad, you can hold down the left track pad button, moving the cursor upwards or similar kind of movement or again tap any key on the keyboard, click with the mouse anywhere on the screen, and then you’ll get through to the Logon Screen. If you’ve got a touch compatible computer or tablet, just place your finger anywhere near the middle or bottom of the screen and flick upwards. Again, you’ll then be invited to enter your logon name and your password. Now I should point out when we talk about Logon Names and Passwords, there are a number of possibilities that we’re going to talk about later and it is possible that you can setup your device that you don’t need a logon name or password. I’m assuming here that in the majority of cases there will be something like that in place. Now once you get past the Lock Screen, there are a number of possibilities in terms of what you’re going to see on the next screen, which is this screen, the one you used to logon or unlock the device.

Whether you’re logging on, so you’ve just perhaps started the device up or

somebody else has been using the device and now you’re going to be using it, or whether you’re just unlocking it either it’s gone to Sleep because you left it for a while or you deliberately locked it while you went for a coffee, you’ve come back, you may have to enter your user name, you may have to enter a password. There is also a possibility here to switch to a different user. I’ll come back to most of those things later. But whichever situation you’re in, you enter the user name if necessary, the password if necessary, you click on this little button here and then


Learn Windows 8 provided you’ve entered all the information correctly, you’ll successfully get access to your device and start or continue your session. So once you’ve logged in or unlocked your device, you’re ready to start or to continue your session. This is where you’ll start using the Start Screen and we’re going to look at the Start Screen a little bit later on. But you will get to the point when you want to end the session or at least suspend it. So let’s have a quick look now at how you end a session. We’ve already seen one option and that is to lock the device. To lock, as we’ve already seen, using a keyboard combination, you can use Windows plus L, but also the User Tile that I showed you earlier gives us access to a Lock Command. And that’s a good thing to do if you just want to lock the device, say, whether you’re going for a cup of coffee or going for your lunch or something like that. If you’ve really finished with the session, you can sign out and that’s the next option down here. So when you sign out, you basically end your session and when you’ve done that you’re going to have to completely sign back in to start a new session. So when you sign out, apps will be closed, work you’re doing will be completed. Hopefully you’ll think to do all that before you sign out although Windows 8 will warn you if you have work in progress. But pretty much you’re saying I’ve ended this session and next time I use this device I’m going to start a completely new session. This is the option you should choose if you’re going to be away from the machine for quite a long time. Another possibility is that after a period of not working on a session the device itself puts itself to Sleep. There is a setting that we will look at later on that says after what period of time the device will go to Sleep. When it has gone to Sleep, and you have to start it up again you’ll have to go through the Lock Screen again and it’s equivalent really to locking the device deliberately. It’s sort of like the device deciding to lock itself rather than to leave what you’re working on open for prying eyes or for other people to perhaps accidentally make a mess of. The other option is to completely shut down the device. So you’ve finished working on it, nobody else is working on it, you’ve completely finished, it’s time to close the device down and stop using it altogether. So let’s have a look at how we do that. One way of shutting the machine down is to go to the Settings Charm, and then on the Settings Charm you have a Power button here. Click on Power. You can either say put the device to


Learn Windows 8 Sleep, Restart the device, or shut the device down. Don’t forget although Windows 8 will warn you about apps that are open, it’s really better practice to very deliberately and purposefully shut down all of the apps that you’re using, making sure that you save any work in progress before you shut the device down. I’m going to shut this device down now. When I do this section will be ended. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: The Start Screen Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. By now you should be successfully logging in to your device, resuming or starting a session working on it, and you should know how to end a session or lock your device. Now we’re going to take a look in some detail at the Start Screen. This is effectively the sort of Home for Windows 8 really and the most obvious thing when you first see the Start Screen is that it’s covered with these sort of icons. Now these are referred to as Tiles and the first thing I want to do is to tell you about these Tiles. Now if you’re familiar with earlier versions of Windows, you probably think that these are some kinds of desktop shortcuts and I suppose that to some extent they are. But these Tiles have a little bit more power and a little bit more flexibility than the conventional desktop shortcuts. In this simplest form, like an old desktop shortcut, these give you access to open an application. In the terminology of Windows 8, we generally refer to an application as an app. So if I wanted to open this app, the name is in the corner, it’s a Mail App. You can probably guess what that is. The icon reminds me what it is. And to open that app I click on it once. Now in the case of my Mail App, it will take me into a facility where I can login to my mail account, my Microsoft Mail Account. So let me try that again. I think I’ll come back to mail later, but you get the general idea. I can type in my e-mail address, my password, and then save and then I’ll be let into my mail account. So that’s if you like the simplest kind of Tile where it gives me access to an app, possibly by a login screen. Now when you’ve been working with an app like this, you don’t always necessarily have to or want to exit and close the app down. You can always go back to the Start Screen by moving the cursor to the bottom left corner. You’ll see the little Start thumbnail appear, click on that, and it gets you back to the Start Screen again. Now, that covers some of the apps that you can see here and some of the Tiles not only give you access to an app but also give you live and up to date information about something associated with that app. Now if you look at this one here, it’s got FTSE 100 on it, Victorious Obama faces fiscal cliff. This one if I hover over it says Finance and clearly this app is something to do with finance. But rather than just give me access to something to do with finance which might, for example, be a section of MSN, Yahoo, Google, or something, perhaps a link to a favorite finance


Learn Windows 8 related website, it also gives me summary information and up to date headline news on that subject. So as you’re watching this I’m getting Finance News in the Tile. Now if I were to click on the Tile, I would go into the app and get some idea of where the information is coming from and also I’d be able to configure that app as well. Now it’s actually Bing Finance Today and as I go into the app, I get more and more detailed information related to that particular app. Once again when I finish looking at the information back to the Start Screen. Now let’s look at another one of these apps. Let’s look at the Weather App. Notice as I look at the Summary information, 22-degrees Sydney, Mostly Cloudy, 27 max, 17 min; 4-degrees New York City, Partly Cloudy, and so on. Again, click on the app, the difference here is that although I get this more detailed information, it also says in the middle, “Do you want to turn on location services and allow weather to use your location?” Well, I’m going to allow that because I want that weather to be my weather. And what happens is that Windows 8 via Bing rather cleverly because it knows my location, it rather cleverly works out what it believes to the nearest center for weather information to me and it gives me weather for my location. Now if I go back to the Start Screen, what I now see on weather is the weather for my location. I’m actually quite a long way from Leeds, but Leeds is close enough to get a good idea of what my weather is going to be like. So there we are. That’s a couple of general ideas about these Tiles that give access to apps. One or two of these we’re going to be coming back to. We’re going to talk about the desktop in a little while, which is this one down here. We’re certainly going to talk about SkyDrive a little later on and we are also going to look at the App Store. Now the apps that you’ve seen there so far are only available from the app Store. General applications that you might have on a PC, although they may well appear as Tiles on your Start Screen they are not the same as these apps. Now the App Store takes you into the App Store, and from here you can access apps to download for free or to buy. There’s a selection shown here. I should point out that you might see a different list of options here, but you will generally see categories like Top 3 and New Releases. You may well not in your locale see BBC News as one of the main options on the App Store. You may or may not see Netflix, but you’ll probably see Skype. So you can access the available apps from here, download for free or purchase as I say, and set those up for use on your Windows 8 device.


Learn Windows 8 Let’s go back to the Start Screen and something I need to point out. If you’re using Windows RT, you can only run that sort of app.

You cannot install and run separately bought,

downloaded, installed applications that are not available from the App Store. The ones you get from the App Store have a particular kind of architecture and infrastructure to let them run on the reduced functionality of an RT compatible device. So that’s another reason first if you like drawing a distinction here between these apps and applications in general. Now you probably won’t be surprised to learn that it’s possible to customize the layout of the Tiles, and I’m going to talk about that a little bit more in a while. But just to get us started on this, if you hover over one of the Tiles and if you’re using a mouse right click with the mouse, you get a little Menu at the bottom, Unpin from Start, Uninstall, Smaller. Now if you Unpin from Start, what that actually happens is that the Tile will no longer appear on the Start Screen. You will still have the app installed, you’ll still be able to use the app and importantly you’ll still be able to put it back on the Start Screen if you want to. And I’ll show you that later on. But if you just want to get it out of the way because you want to put something else there, you want to make some space or perhaps you want the Start Screen to be a bit less crowded, you can unpin it. If you use this option, Uninstall, you will actually uninstall the app from your device. And if you use this option, Smaller, you’ll make the Tiles smaller. Now as we can see now and as we’ll see later, sometimes it’s about cramming quite a lot of Tiles on to your screen. So making the Tiles smaller has definite advantages. And, of course, you right click on it again, Larger, it’s back the way it was. So that’s a useful first look at how we can customize the Start Screen. If you’re using a touch sensitive device and you want to effectively do a right click, all you have to do is tap, hold, and drag down to display those options. Now, of course, what you see on your Start Screen may be quite a bit different from what I see. But I can certainly see here that there appears to be more to the right here that you can’t actually see at the moment. I can see the start of some other Tiles. And what I want to talk about next is how we access some of the rest of the Start Screen. Now there are several ways of doing this and to some extent the ways not only depend on your own setup, but they also depend on the type of device you’re using. I’m basically doing this on a conventional laptop PC with a keyboard and mouse. But I’m going to try and explain all the touch screen versions as we go along. The most obvious way to see the things off to the right


Learn Windows 8 here is to use the scroll bar that I’ve got at the bottom here. So if I grab hold of that and just scroll to the right I’ll see whatever else is available to me on my Start Screen. On a tablet, you’ll also see this scroll bar across the bottom when you flick left and right. You don’t actually need your finger on the scroll bar to use it though. So just flicking left and right should give you access left and right on the Start Screen. If you’ve got a laptop with a track pad, you generally hold down the left mouse button while you drag across the track pad. So that gives me access to more Tiles. I’ll be looking at one or two more of these Tiles later on as well. And also, as we’ll see, this gives me more space to add Tiles which give access to my general applications rather than the apps that I already have, but more of that later. Now we come to a particularly useful option. If you right click on an empty area of the Start Screen, if you’re using a mouse, or if you’re using a tablet, flick upwards from the bottom. You’ll see this little panel come up with All Apps on it, and if you click on All Apps what you see is a list of all of the apps. Now that gives you access to everything that’s available to you. And if I choose a particular app, say, I choose People and right click on that. Don’t forget to do that with a touch device all you really need to do is to use your finger, just tap, hold, and drag downwards on that small Tile. You’ll know you’ve done that correctly because you get that tick mark up here. Then from there you have the option, if you look at the panel at the bottom, of doing an Unpin or an Uninstall. Now if I had already unpinned that particular app from the Start, this would say Pin to Start and that is how you pin something back. Remember I mentioned that to you just a couple of minutes ago, that you can unpin things. Well, this is where you access them to pin them back again. And here’s a useful tip. On your keyboard, you almost certainly have a Windows key. If you’re using a Windows 8 compatible tablet, you should also have a Windows key. Pressing the Windows key is the quickest and easiest way to get back to that Start Screen. So let me press the Windows key on my keyboard now. There you are. I’m back at the Start Screen. Now let me tell you one or two other useful things about navigating your way around the Start Screen. If you’re using a mouse with a scroll wheel, then scrolling backwards and forwards will move you left and right through the apps. The other thing you may be used to doing on a tablet is using Pinch. So if you were to pinch the Start Screen, positioning two or more fingers apart from each other and pinching them inwards, you’ll make all the Tiles smaller so that you can see


Learn Windows 8 more of the Tiles on the screen. Now you can achieve the same effect without the Pinch technique. So if you’ve not got a touch screen, if you look down at the bottom right corner of the screen, right at the end of the scroll bar, you should see a little minus sign. If you click that minus sign, you achieve the same effect as you would if you pinched the screen. Now to return it if you’re using the mouse and keyboard method, just click with the mouse anywhere on the screen and you’ve basically returned it to its original size. So I’ve just got one more thing to show you about the Start Screen now and it follows on from something we looked at earlier on. Let’s take that Messaging Tile again, right click if you’re using a mouse. Don’t forget the technique to use if you’re using a touch sensitive device, all you need to do is tap, hold, and drag downwards. You’ll know that you’ve done that successfully because you get the little tick in the corner and you’ll see the options at the bottom. Click on Smaller. Now all I need to do to move one of the other Tiles is to make space for it. So let’s suppose I wanted to put Maps in that space. Click and hold or touch and hold, drag it into position, and there you are. I’ve rearranged the Tiles on the Start Screen. Now Windows 8 will help you a lot while you’re doing that and clearly you’ve only got a certain amount of space to work with. But it’s very free in terms of how you can move the Tiles around and you can certainly arrange them in a way that suits your requirements and the way that you work. So, that’s pretty much all of the basics on the Start Screen for now. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Live Tiles Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this short section, we’re going to have a look in more detail at Live Tiles and the particular one we’re going to look at as a good example is the Weather Tile. Now earlier on in the course, I set this to give me the weather in a city fairly close to where I live, but not really particularly close. But, in fact, the Weather Tile is one where there’s quite a lot you can do with it both in terms of how it appears on the Start Screen and in terms of the other information that’s available in the Weather App. So let’s take a closer look at the Weather App. So, first of all, we go to the Start Screen, click on Weather to open up the Weather App, and we can see pretty much how we left it showing Leeds, England Bing Weather. But let’s see what we can do about customizing this. The first thing to be aware of is that if we right click on the screen when using the mouse, we get some Charms appearing. Now we have some Charms down at the bottom and we have some Charms at the top. Now in order to see these if you’re using a touch sensitive device, you’d normally flick from the bottom of the screen upwards. Now, let’s start with a very simple one down which says Change to Fahrenheit, and then again right click again, change back to Celsius again. So that’s pretty straightforward. Similarly, if we want to get the latest click on Refresh and we get the latest Weather Forecast. Now it’s important to recognize with all of these Live Tiles that the live information will of course depend on an internet connection. So if you haven’t got an internet connection, you’re not going to get live information. So let me now click on Places, what the Places Charm up here, and what this is in effect is a list of my favorite places. At the moment, all I’ve got is Leeds, England, United Kingdom. Let’s suppose I want to add another favorite place. I can then Search for a city. So let’s suppose I’m interested in, for instance, Los Angeles and I also want to be able to see what the weather’s like in Los Angeles. So I select Los Angeles, click on Add, and Los Angeles is now showing up as one of my favorite places. Let me add one more. That’s the nearest town to where I live. Now it doesn’t know that town so let me try somewhere a little bit closer. York is the nearest major city to me. Click on Add. So now I’ve got York. So I’ve now got three favorite places setup.


Learn Windows 8 When I’ve setup my favorite places, I can use the back arrow here to take me back to what is in effect Home. Now having made that change, let’s look again at the Start Screen. We’ve still got the Weather Tile here with Leeds on it. Let’s go back into the Weather App. Let’s go to our list. Let’s click on Los Angeles. And if I now right click to see what Charms are available, I can see that I have additional ones here. One of them is set as default which will in effect set Los Angeles as my default location. Or I can say Pin to Start or I can say Remove. So let me try, first of all, saying Set as Default and now I’m going to go back to the Start Screen. Now I can see Los Angeles appearing. Los Angeles, Hazy Sunshine. And let me go back now into the Weather App again, go back to the list, go back to Leeds, bring up the Charms again, but now I’m going to Remove Leeds. So click on Remove down on the left there. Let’s go back to the Start Screen. I’m still showing Los Angeles and in that way you can both adjust what’s in the Favorites List and you can remove things from the Favorites List, set a Default, and so on. Now the reason for showing you these in relation to Weather is that many, in fact most of the apps that you can get and that come with Windows 8 have similar kinds of setup options. They may well have their own Charms, their own defaults, and so on. And one of the things that you can have quite a bit of fun experimenting with really is with each of those apps going through and seeing what you can set what defaults you can get, what other information is available. And having shown you the basics there of the Weather Appm I’d like to just go into the Weather App a little bit more and show you some of its other capabilities which are not immediately apparent from the Start Screen. So, just to demonstrate the sort of additional information that you can get in many apps, if I go back into Weather again and this time bring up the Charms again and go into World Weather. World Weather basically gives me a map of the world and highlights some of the key cities. Now, without me doing anything it switches between main cities – Los Angeles, Paris, New Delhi, Cape Town, and so on. I’m actually recording this on a non-wide screen display. If you’ve got a wide Screen display, you may well have the whole world in one view. If you haven’t or if you’re resolution of yours doesn’t allow it, there is a scroll bar at the bottom that allows you to move through the world. And if you click on a particular area, let’s suppose I were to click on South America. I’ll actually zoom into South America and it comes up with a list of many of the main Capitals in South America; so Bogota, Columbia, Lima, Peru, Asunción,


Learn Windows 8 Paraguay, and so on. Click on one of those I get Asunción, Paraguay and I get a weather forecast for Asunción in Paraguay. When I finish looking at the weather forecast for that particular capital city go back to there and then I can go back to my home location as well. So let me just one other thing there. Go back into Weather yet again. Go back to my Favorites List, Places, choose York, and again bring up the Charms, and I’m going to say for York Pin to Start and let’s see what happens. Pin to Start and then go back to the Start again and what I discover is that I’ve still got Los Angeles showing down here, 17-degrees, Hazy Sunshine, Weather. But if I move over to the right I now find that I have an additional Tile with the weather forecast for York, 10-degrees, Partly Cloudy. So by saying Pin to Start, that’s different from resetting the default is that I basically setup a second Weather Live Tile on my start page. I could make that smaller. I could drag it say into position there and now I can see the York weather there, the Los Angeles weather there. So that’s a pretty good example of how you can customize what’s on the Start Screen. I’d just like to point out one more time what exactly what you can do with each of these apps does depend on the individual apps. The Live ones generally give you a reasonable level of control over what you can see within the Tile, but virtually without exception there’s an awful lot more information inside the app and sometimes choosing what’s shown in the Live Tile is pretty useful in terms of keeping you up to date with something. But for any depth of information you’ll almost certainly have to open the app and go into it. So, that’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Charms Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to take a quick look at Charms. We’ve come across Charms a couple of times now and I think it’s time to tell you a little bit more about them. Now the first thing to point out is that Charms don’t always appear in the same place and be caused to appear by the same actions or events. This very much depends on the app you’re dealing with. Sometimes Charms appear based on the position of a mouse cursor on a screen. In the case of something like the Weather App that we’ve already seen, you cause Charms to appear by right clicking within the application or by flicking upwards with a touch sensitive device. Some apps have their Charms visible all the time or some of their Charms visible all the time and Windows 8 itself as we’ve already seen has five default Charms. Now we saw earlier on that to see the default Charms within Windows 8, you move the cursor down to the bottom right hand corner of the screen and those five Charms appear. Note that with a touch sensitive device, as I mentioned earlier on, you swipe with your finger or thumb from the middle of the right side of the screen to the left. So, that’s inwards to see those default Charms. There’s an alternative if you have a keyboard to bringing up the default Charms and that’s the key combination Windows plus C. So I’ll just press Windows plus C now. The Charms appear. You also see the time and dte there and a little bit of information about wireless connectivity and the state of the battery on this laptop PC. So what I’d like to do now is to talk about those five default Charms and what each of them is there for. I’d also like to point out that my preferred way of bringing up the default Charms is to use the keyboard sequence Windows plus C partly because it brings them up very easily, partly because I see the names and I get that helpful information time, date, and other information about the status of my device. Now starting at the top, the Search Charm let’s you search for pretty much anything on your device. We’re going to look at search in quite a bit of detail later on. The Share Charm let’s you share things that are relevant to your current activity and, in fact, the Share options will depend on what you’re current activity is. So for instance, if you were looking up photos and you clicked on Share, the Share options would relate to the sharing of photos. The third default Charm, the middle one, is Start which basically takes you back to the Start Screen. Now, of course, we’ve got three or four ways of doing that now. My preferred one is just to use the Windows key, but you’ve got that option there. And, of course, you’ve got the


Learn Windows 8 option of going into the bottom left corner. By the way the bottom left corner for the Start Screen and the bottom right corner for bringing up those Charms, they’re generally referred to as Hot Corners. The fourth default Charm, Devices, gives you access to devices that are available for use with the current app, the current screen, or the current window. So, for instance, if you have an app where you might want to use a second monitor that will be available with the default Devices Charm, and the Settings Charm gives you access to PC Settings, again, that are relevant to what you’re doing now. So let’s have a look at the Settings Charm and look into that in a little bit more detail. Now if I click on the Settings Charm, note that I have two sections really. I have a set of settings at the top and these very much depend on what I’m doing. If I’m just looking at the Start Screen, I see Start, Tiles, Help. I’ll come back to that in a moment. In the lower section, I see a very important set of settings related to the device that I’m using. Now we’ve already seen the Power options here. We can use that to Sleep, Shut Down, or Restart. But we then also have settings for Notifications, the Keyboard. We have settings related to connections to a network. We have settings related to the volume of the speakers at the moment, and we have settings related to brightness of the screen. So there’s a whole load of settings there and we can go into another option that we saw much earlier on, change PC Settings as well, and that gives us access to a whole load of settings including the personalization that we did earlier on. Now all of these settings we’re going to look at later on in the course. So now just to demonstrate one of those points quite clearly let me go into one of the other apps. Let me go into the Maps App, and the Maps App in theory at the moment is showing my location. I actually live quite a long way from there. But if I were to bring up the default Charm, so I’m going to use Windows plus C, and click on Settings, watch what happens. I still get those what I will loosely call the Device Settings at the bottom, but I get a different set of settings because I’m in the Maps app that not only says things like Terms of Use, which is clearly the terms of use for using the maps provided by Microsoft, but I get an opportunity to provide feedback and I get an opportunity to read the Privacy Statement. I can look at Privacy Setting for this app, allow this app to access your location, that’s on at the moment. So I allowed the app to work out where it thinks I am, and then I can also do Rate and Review. Now Rate and Review allows me to rate the particular application. I am not going to do right now but I can rate the


Learn Windows 8 review, give it a title, rate it, click on the Review Rating – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, star, submit it and it will be submitted as a rating and review for the Maps App to the App Store. Let me cancel for the moment. And I can see existing 124 ratings. It’s a free app. If I want to install it, install it here and so on. So that also gives you a good idea of how to get an app from the App Store. So in this section I talked about some of the general properties of Charms. We’ve looked at the five default Charms in more detail and you’ve also seen that with the default Charms what you can do with them depends on your current activity. In subsequent sections, we’re going to be looking at those Charms within the various apps, within the various activities in order to see what we can achieve with each of them. But that’s it for this section. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Search Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this short section, we’re going to look at the Search Charm and some of the facilities that it offers us. Now here’s a quick reminder to bring up the default Charms. There’s a great Windows shortcut of Windows-C, and then a touch screen interface; just put your finger on the right hand edge of the display and move it towards the center. Now the Search, I’m going to show you using the Search Charm is not necessarily the best way of doing a search, as I’ll show you a little bit later on. But for the moment let’s look on it as a good way of doing a Search because it does have a lot of good features and I think for certain things this Search option is really quite a good one. So click on Search on the top Charm, there and on the main left part of the screen there’s a list of the apps on my device. Just ignore that for one moment. Concentrate on the panel on the right. Now on the right, we have a box into which we can type a search term, and you see written above that box it’s currently got the word Apps. Now it’s got Apps because Apps is selected here. And if I do a Search on Apps, what it will do is to search for the term I enter within my apps. So, if I typed, for instance, an M-A-P, that narrows it down to Maps and Character Maps. So there are two apps with the word Map in them. There’s Maps and Character Map. So I know I want to run an app and it’s got the word map in it but maybe I can’t quite remember what the actual name of the app is, I can just type Map in the search box with App selected, it finds the app for me, and, of course, I can click on that app and start that app up. So that’s a pretty neat way of finding an app that I want. But, of course, I may not be looking for an app. I may, for instance, want to search in a map. So I have an option here for the App Maps.

If I click on Maps, it brings up the Mapping

Application; we saw that earlier on. And I could actually search for a location on the Map from here. Now I’m going to type in the name of the village that I live in, in the U.K. It’s called Welbury. I’ve typed in part of the name there. Now I’m going to click on the magnifier. It does a search and there we are. It’s found the village of Welbury. If I move the cursor over here just to put it in perspective. I can find it more accurately on the provided Maps. So I can also use that Search Charm as a way of finding a particular location on the Map and, of course, that will


Learn Windows 8 work for any Map anywhere in the world, down to whatever level of accuracy the maps have got. And the maps that come by default with Windows 8 do have quite a lot of detail on them. So I think you can get the general idea from that. Now let’s look at the other things that we could search. I could choose, for example, My Mail. Now as you’ll see I haven’t setup the Mail yet. I’m going to come back to mail a little bit later on. But clearly that’s one of the apps, one of the sources of information that I’ll definitely want to search in. And if I scroll down further down here, there are many others: Searching for People, Searching for Music, maybe searching all the music I’ve got on my device, searching amongst my Games for a particular game, Searching My Photos, Searching the App Store, Searching Video. So with each of these, the Search facility will enable me to find something within what each of those apps provides me with information about. So again if I wanted to search within Weather, quite straightforward, type in a Location. What about Cape Town? Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa; Cape Town, California, United States. That’s the one I want. And as you can see, the Search facility will work within the apps relevant to any of these things. Now I’m not going to go through all of those now. I think that’s a great area for you to experiment with and some of these we’re going to come back to later on when we do things like setup Mail Account, look at handling Music and Video and so on. Now I’d like to show you another way of doing a search, which many people prefer. Although I think which is the better method would largely depend on how you work and what in particular you’re searching for. But let’s suppose that I’ve done what everybody does from time to time, is that I’ve left a file on my device and I can’t remember where I’ve put it. Now I can’t quite remember the name of the file.

I know it’s got Dreamweaver in it.

It’s about Adobe

Dreamweaver and it’s some sort of reference document and I want to search for it. Now, using the Search Charm, I could type say Dreamweaver in here, select Files, and it would look through the files for any file with that name in it, and give me candidates for the file that I’m looking for. But I want to do it in a different way. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to the Start Page and I am just going to start typing the word Dreamweaver. So I’m going to type a D and an R. Now watch what happens on the right because against each of these categories – Apps, Settings, and Files – there’s a little number that appears. This says there is one app with DR in it. Final Drive Nero, that’s the DR. There are 25 Settings with DR in. There’s one File


Learn Windows 8 with DR in it. So what’s that one file with DR in it? It’s the Dreamweaver Reference. That’s the one I was looking for. Now, if when I start typing I’ve still got 25 I can type a little bit more until I get it down to one or a small number. If I clicked on the Category when I had three or four they’d be listed here and I could say, “Ah, that’s the one that I want.” And then as usual if I just want to open that document, I can click in that document and then it will open that document for me. It gives me a message there about new applications. But then that’s access to my document sorted out. So that’s a pretty neat way of doing a search. So they’ll be some more opportunities to do some searching later on. But as I said just now this is a great area to experiment with and in particular don’t forget that the Search extends into, for example, Internet Explorer. So it will actually if you have Internet Explorer selected, if you type in a search term, you’ll actually be doing a search as though it was a search in Internet Explorer. So it’s an extremely flexible way of searching. Please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: The Desktop Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the traditional desktop. Now so far if you’ve been following this course, been through all the sections so far, you might almost be surprised that the traditional desktop is still there. But it is and you will still use the traditional desktop quite a bit for certain things. Now one word of warning here, if you like the traditional desktop, you can probably largely avoid the Start Screen. In fact, you can effectively disable the Start Screen if you really want to. But I suggest you persevere with it because as I hope you’ve already seen there are many things that are actually pretty good to run from the Start Screen. So don’t just lapse back into using the desktop because you like that. Try some of these new features. There’s plenty more to show you yet as well, and I think the Start Screen can actually be a good basis for using your device. Maybe considering the desktop to be something you just use in special situations where it has advantages or in some situations where it’s really the only option.

So, first of all, let’s see how you access the

traditional desktop. Well your Start Screen should have a Desktop Tile on it. So you click on that Tile and it takes you into the traditional desktop. Now I’ve got File Explorer open at the moment. I’ll come back to File Explorer in just a moment. But to get back to the Start Screen, of course, you just press the Windows key and okay we’ve already seen getting to the desktop by clicking on the Desktop Tile. There’s also a shortcut key if you’re using a keyboard for the desktop and that’s WindowsD. So let me first look at this File Explorer Application. We’re going to look at File Explorer in a bit more detail in a while, but it just looks like a traditional Windows Application. There are some changes compared to Windows Explorer, including the fact that it now has a Ribbon Interface as I’ll show you soon. But one or two very important things about it, you still have Minimize, Maximize or Standard and then Close. So the way you can control Windows on the traditional desktop is exactly the same. So let me just minimize that for that moment. You can, of course, customize the background. You still have a taskbar at the bottom with various notifications. Some of the icons you’re used to seeing. Typically things like this one which says that I’m on full power, battery fully charged, and I’m on Mains at the moment. And on the left you have the usual icons. I’ve got an icon there for starting File Explorer. That was what was Windows Explorer. I’ve got another one here for going into Internet Explorer. One of the most


Learn Windows 8 notable things is though that there is no longer a Start button down here. So the way that you start applications is different. You don’t use the Start button from there anymore. Apart from that, there are still shortcuts on the desktop. I’ve got a shortcut here to the application WinZip and, of course, I’ve got my Recycle Bin as well. So mostly the traditional desktop hasn’t changed but for one or two quite significant things. Now as I mentioned earlier, many applications and these are the ones that I will generally refer to as Desktop Applications, still run from the desktop. Some of those applications may in time get App versions. So you may, for instance, be able to get a Windows 8 app version of WinZip at some stage. By the time you’ve watched this video, there may actually be such an app available. But where there isn’t, then that’s where you run the application from the desktop. Now there are applications for which there is already both a Desktop Application version and an App version. One example of this is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer, I can start here from the desktop as a Desktop Application or I can run from the Start Screen as an app. And in fact the innards of the Desktop Application and the app are the same. It’s the outer part, the part you can see, the part you interface with, what’s called the Skin that is different. There are some differences in functionality, but fundamentally the two are the same inside. Now the Icons on the Taskbar on the left here can have two main purposes. One main purpose is to give you a quick way of starting an application and another way is to show you that an application is running. Now the two on the right here relate to the applications that are recording what I’m doing on this device, and those just show me that those applications are running. The Internet Explorer icon on the left, however, is a shortcut way by I can actually start Internet Explorer. Now for any Desktop Application, if I want to put an icon on the taskbar so that I can quickly start it I would, if you take this WinZip one for example, right click and one of the options that comes up is Pin to Taskbar. If I click on Pin to Taskbar, that now appears. Note that it hasn’t got the sort of button shading round that these three have. That indicates to me that this is a way of starting the Desktop Application. Let me click on it to start it and once it has actually started then the icon changes so that it’s got a sort of frame which tells me that it’s a running Desktop Application, and I can just close it in the usual way. One of the other options you may have noticed when I right clicked here on this icon was Pin to Start. Let me do Pin to Start. Now let’s go back to the Start Screen, click on the Windows


Learn Windows 8 button, slide across there, and I now have a Tile to start WinZip on the Start Screen. Now note it’s come over here to the area for the Desktop Applications, and if I start WinZip, it won’t Run as an app because it isn’t an app, it’s a Desktop Application. If I start WinZip, it will actually run as a Desktop Application and it will take me into the desktop to run. Now one of the other uses for the icons on the taskbar for the running applications is to switch between them. So for instance I’m looking at the WinZip window here and I can see that it’s running, obviously. From the icon here or the framing around the icon, I know that File Explorer is running. So if I click on File Explorer that comes up ahead of WinZip. If I click on WinZip, WinZip comes up in front. So that’s a pretty straightforward way of switching between running Desktop Applications. Now I should point out that when you’re using the traditional desktop there are still many of the new features available. For instance, the Hot Corners are still Hot Corners. So if I move down into the bottom right hand corner here, I can still bring up the default Charms. If I move to the left bottom corner, I still have a link there to take me back to the Start Screen. Although like me I would think you’ll tend to use keyboard shortcuts if you have a keyboard. So, let’s now look a little bit more at the taskbar because if you right click on the taskbar or equivalent on a touch device, you have several options. One of them is to enable different toolbars. Now you can have the touch keyboard which gives you access to the touch keyboard if you are using a touch device but you actually want to use a keyboard while you’re doing something. That’s how you access it. Right click again to disable that. And then there are other toolbars available from there: Address, Links, that’s related to the brand of this laptop, HP Support Assistant, and then you can also define a new toolbar and if you know how to define toolbars, you can create and enable one of your own. Back to right clicking there. Another thing that you can do here is to bring up the Task Manager, and with the Task Manager, as you may know, that lets you look at running tasks. And if you’ve got a task that’s causing you a problem, say that one, you can actually end that task. And then finally right clicking down here on the Properties, we have things such as the ability to set the taskbar to Auto-hide. Select Auto-hide, click and Apply. Now I don’t actually see the taskbar but if I move the cursor down to the bottom, the taskbar will appear. If you can’t see the taskbar, this is probably why by the way. Right click, Properties again, and disable Auto-hide the taskbar if you don’t actually want that


Learn Windows 8 effect. You can change the taskbar location on the screen. You can choose various options on the Notification area, Taskbar buttons, and so on. And then there are various other tabs here: Jump Lists, Enabling Toolbars, the equivalent of what we just looked at just now and so on. So there are plenty of options there for customizing the taskbar and setting it up to suit what you need to do and the way that you work. Now I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but the Notification area, the little icons down here. You may or may not be familiar with. If you’ve used a Windows version earlier than Windows 8 before, you’ll probably be used to the idea of these. If you take the one of the right, for example, that’s got the time and the date on it. If you click on it, apart from giving you a bigger calendar and a conventional type of clock, you can also change the Date and Time Settings. So there’s a certain amount of configuration possible there; for instance, to change Time Zone, to actually change the Date and Time, and so on. So, there’s a number of options there and basically with all of these notification icons, there are settings. That one relates to Speaker Volume; that one relates to Wireless Network, etc. Now I’m not going to go into these here because of shortage of time, but there’s just one I will point out and that’s this one, the Action Center Flag. Now that hopefully will always say that there are no PC issues to resolve. But if there is an issue to resolve, if you click on that, it tells you that there is a particular problem on your device. Now the problem may be one that you’re quite happy to live with. It may be one that’s quite serious. Obviously it depends exactly what the Message is, whether it needs attending to. This one is telling me Disable Applications to help improve performance. It thinks I’m running too many things at once. I know that’s not the case so I’m pretty much going to ignore that message. Having said that, if I wanted to look into it more fully, I could click on the message and it would come up and give me some help or some options for dealing with that particular message. In this section, we’ve had a look at some of the ways in which we can use the traditional desktop and the taskbar. There are actually many other options for customization and one or two of them are probably pretty useful but very straightforward as well. For instance, if you look at all the icons down here that we talked about a little while ago. If you wanted to move the WinZip icon, you’d literally click and hold and you can change the position and order of those icons. You could do similar things over here in the Notification area, and you can actually put the taskbar


Learn Windows 8 elsewhere on the screen just by dragging it, provided you unlock it first. So there are many other customization options for the desktop in general and the taskbar in particular. We may well come back to one or two of those later, but it’s another area I think for you to give it a try and find something that suits you. That’s the end of this section. I’m looking forward to the next section and I hope you are too.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 2 – Applications and Settings Video: Multiple Apps and Windows Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. By now you should have a pretty good idea of how to run the apps from the Start Screen, how to go into the desktop, and how to run Desktop Applications, including how to set them up to run from the Start Screen. And we’re going to look at that a little bit more later on as well. But one of the issues that you’ll have either with apps or with Desktop Applications running from the desktop is switching between them when you have several running at once. Now there are a couple of ways of doing this and the newest way, the way that’s really associated with Windows 8 is to use a thing called the Switch List. Now there are a couple of ways of accessing the Switch List.

Let me start with the

straightforward mouse way. You’re going to need to look at the left hand edge of the display here. I’m going to put the mouse cursor up in the top left corner. Ignore the little thumbnail that comes up there. But if you look slightly further down you’ll see the edges of some little shapes just sticking out from the edge of the screen. If I go down beyond the first of those, what I see is the Switch List, and that basically lists the apps that are live, that are running at the moment. Now there’s a very important point to note here about the Switch List. If I move the mouse cursor away from the list it will disappear. So if I pull it off to the right watch what happens, it disappears. It’s not something that you open and it stays there. Let me just open it again using the same method I moved just now. What you use it for basically is to switch between the apps and applications that are running. So for instance, if I wanted to go into the Reader App which has currently got a document open, click on that, I’m in there. If I want to bring up, again, the Switch List, same procedure, perhaps switch to the Weather. Again, same procedure, switch to Maps. So that’s how I can successfully switch between the apps and applications using the Switch List. Now let’s look at an approach to this using just the keyboard. This is an interesting way of doing things. It takes a little bit of getting used to but it works very well. I’m not going to use the mouse to bring up the Switch List. What I’m going to do is I’m going to hold the Windows key down and just press the Tab key once. So, Windows key down, press Tab. It brings up the


Learn Windows 8 Switch List and I can see Desktop highlighted at the top. If I were to release the Windows key now, it would take me to the desktop. Now I’ve still got the Windows key held down. Now I press with the Tab key again, it goes to Weather. Still hold the Windows key down, press again, goes to Reader. Still not releasing the Windows key and what basically happens each time I press the Tab key is that I cycle through the items in the Switch List. If I stop at one, this one say Weather, and now release the Windows key it takes me into the Weather App. So that’s how you can use the keyboard to cycle through the open apps. Now I’d like to show you one or two other useful things you can do with the Switch List. If you right click with the mouse on one of the apps, say on the Maps App. One of the options is Close. So you can actually close that app. So I’m going to go down to the Reader App, right click, and close it. Now one of the other really good features of the Switch List, I’m not actually going to be able to show you because the resolution of the screen on which I’m recording this doesn’t support this feature. But if you have a resolution on your screen of at least 1366 by 768, so 1366 by 768 or higher, when you right click on one of these, apart from just seeing the close option, you’ll see an option to Snap Left or Snap Right. This gives you a way of seeing two apps open at once. Because if you snap one right and snap one left, you’ll see them both on the screen at once. Now unfortunately I can’t show you that with the screen resolution I’m using here. But if you’ve got a screen with a resolution with at least the number I gave you just now, that’s a good one for you to try and sometimes it is very useful to be able to see two apps open at once. Now, of course, generally speaking so far I’ve been talking about apps and when we’re talking about Desktop Applications to some extent using the more traditional approach of Windows, we can see several Desktop Applications at once. We can adjust the sizes of their windows using conventional techniques and we can fit them on to the screen in whatever way we want. We can minimize them. We can open them up again and so on. So we have all of the traditional flexibility when we’re working with Desktop Applications. But we can’t do the same thing with apps. With Windows 8, we’re dealing with a situation where our device is running both. So they represent somewhat strange bedfellows at some times in terms of coping with both at once. But some of the techniques we’ve seen plus some of the traditional techniques used together and one or two other things I need to show you now will help you to deal with multiple apps, multiple applications, multiple windows at once.


Learn Windows 8 Now as far as apps are concerned, you really only can see one at a time, except for the exceptional case that I described just now where you can snap two apps one on the left, one on the right of a screen. That’s also something you can do with Desktop Applications, as I’ll show you in a moment. But let’s look at Desktop Applications in general now. If you’re familiar with using an earlier version of Windows, you’ll know some of the things you can do. If you, for instance, needed to see a lot of information on this window, Win 8 Videos here, it is actually File Explorer running. I can maximize it to take up the whole screen. I can click this button, which is Restore Down which puts it back to the last size I re-sized it to so that it doesn’t take up the whole screen, and I can minimize it where I don’t see it at all but it’s sitting there and I know it’s running because it appears in the taskbar. I can also in a similar way to the way I described for apps, if I’ve got two windows and I’d like to see them both if I push one off to the left, it’ll snap to the left and the other push to the right, it will snap to the right. I can have two open side by side. Let me just re-open the File Explorer again. Another thing I can do with which you might not be familiar if I have three or four open and I really just want to have one and minimize the other, if you grab the title bar of a Window and shake it, the others are minimized down on to the taskbar. Now interestingly in older versions of Windows, there is an equivalent to the use of the Switch List. Some people called this Flipping and it works in much the same way that we use the Switch List to cycle through open apps. And the way you do this with a keyboard is to hold the Alt key down, keep it held down, and press the Tab key once and you see in front of you an iconic representation of each of the open apps and applications. Now you see the difference between the apps and applications as you go through. Each time you press the Tab key you highlight another one of the apps or applications. So there is an application. There’s another application. There’s an application. There’s an app. Now with each of those when you get to the one that you want, you release the Alt key and you’re in that, in this case in the Maps App. So let me just do that again. Alt key down, press Tab, Tab again, Tab again, Tab again, Tab, Tab, Internet Explorer, release the Alt key, and I’m now in Internet Explorer. That’s what many people call flipping through the open apps and applications. And note you are going through the apps and applications, so when you’ve got several things on the go at once, particularly given


Learn Windows 8 that Windows 8 has the potential to be running apps and applications at the same time, that flipping with the Alt and Tab keys is a very good way of doing things as well. Now, of course, I’ve talked about the mouse and the keyboard in this section. You may well be wondering about using a touch sensitive device. Well this is one of the areas where a touch sensitive device really wins out. Because in order to switch among the open apps, all you need to do with a touch sensitive device is a fast swipe from the left edge of the screen inwards, and so it’s a one finger motion. You just do swipe, swipe, swipe to get through the open apps, and that’s by far the simplest way of doing things if you have a touch sensitive device. So, that’s the end of this section and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Video: All Apps and Accessories Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, I’m going to take a look at how you can identify all of the apps on your device and we’re also going to look at some of the accessories that are available in Windows 8. Now you access all apps by right clicking on an empty part of the Start Screen. Just as a general point here, note that the equivalent of a right click when you’re using a touch sensitive device is generally to touch and hold. I won’t keep repeating this every time there’s a right click to do, but if you’re using a touch sensitive device that’s generally how you perform the equivalent of a right click with the mouse. So if I right click now on a part of the Start Screen up here, I can see access to all apps down there. Click on All Apps and I can see a list of apps. Now what you can see in the screen now is not all of the apps on my device. It’s a selection of them. And in fact the list of all of them is a much, much longer list. Now, first of all, I’m using a mouse here. Let me just slide along and show you the rest of the list. So there are the apps. Then I get into a Categorized List. So Communication and Chat is a category here, CyberLink, YouCam, and Skype. Let’s go a little bit further along. Microsoft Office is there. That includes things like Microsoft Project 2010; Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is there. So many of the applications you may not be familiar with but some of them I’m sure you will have heard on. Norton Internet Security, a number of apps associated with Norton Internet Security there. Now obviously the list on your machine will be different from mine, but this is a very useful way of being able to see not just all the apps that you’ve got on a machine, some of which may, of course, surprise you, but also to look at them categorized in this way. Now, of course, as we saw earlier on with these apps, let’s take one of these apps for example here, Photos. If I right click on photos I bring up these Charms at the bottom that let me unpin that app from the Start Page. If it wasn’t on the Start Page, then I would have the opportunity to pin it on to the Start Page and I also have the opportunity to uninstall it. If I now go along to one of the other apps, let’s take one of the Desktop Applications such as this one, Microsoft Project 2010, right click on that, then I have a much greater number of options. I could certainly pin it to the Start Page. I could pin it to the taskbar on the desktop. I could uninstall it, open it in a New Window. I also have the option of running as Administrator. Now we haven’t talked much yet


Learn Windows 8 about users and the things that people are allowed to do on a particular device, the permissions they have. But we’re going to talk about that a little bit later on and there are certain things that only an Administrator of a device can do. So we’ll come back to that a little bit later. The other thing we can do is here is to open the File Location where something is based. So depending on whether we’re dealing with a straightforward app or with a Desktop Application, we may have these and in some cases other options available to us from this screen. Now one of the things I’d like to do now is to look at some of the Accessories that come with Windows 8. If you’re an experienced Windows user, then you’ll be used to these Accessories or you certainly will have seen them, maybe used them in the past. But if you’re new to Windows this is a good opportunity to look at a few key Accessories. So if we go over to the section over here right over the far extreme end, we will find Windows Accessories. And within the Accessories Category, we have a Calculator, a Character Map, Maths Input Panel, etc. Now a small number of these you will use quite a bit. We’re going to come back and look at Windows Media Player later and one or two of them we won’t really look at, at all on this course. But there’s a couple of them that I think are really quite important and let’s start with the Calculator. Now the Calculator, you can open and use at any time. It is a Desktop Application so it doesn’t fill the space, and the Calculator is pretty straightforward to use. If I wanted to do something like multiply 4 by 2 I type the number four. I identify the multiplication symbol there, the star. I type two. Note that as I work what I’m doing shows at the top of the little display panel here. And if I then say equals, I get 4 by 2 equals 8. Now there are a few options with the Calculator. It’s a pretty simple Calculator but you can change the view from Standard to Scientific which gives you a lot of additional functions like mathematical functions like sign, cosign, tangent, and so on. You also have an option of a Programmable Calculator where you can not only work in hexadecimal, decimal, octal, binary, and so on but you can use many other programming related functions such as logic functions like Or and Exclusive Or.

You also have a Statistical

Calculator which lets you calculate various statistical functions. So although it’s a pretty simple calculator, in its various modes, it’s actually quite powerful. The other option you have here is that you can switch between basic functions, unit conversion functions, date calculations, and things like mortgage worksheet, vehicle lease worksheet, fuel economy, and so on. So actually when you open up all the options, you find you can do quite a lot with that Calculator. There is a


Learn Windows 8 Help facility with it which will help you to use it obviously. And then in the middle, you’ve got an Edit where particularly if you’re doing a complex piece of work where you can Copy and Paste numbers and so on. So, it’s actually quite a good calculator. It’s one of the many features of the Windows Accessories that is a little bit understated in a way because it’s actually quite a good calculator. And as it’s a Desktop Application, you don’t have to keep opening and closing it. You can also leave it partway through a calculation. All you need to do is minimize it an, of course, it appears down here on the taskbar as a running app. And if you use the Switching mode or the Flipping mode, you can easily go back into the Calculator at any time. Now there are a number of other Windows Accessories that are very useful. Two of them, Paint and Notepad, I’m going to look at in a reasonable amount of detail later on. Let’s just look at one other one now which is pretty useful and that’s Sticky Notes. A nice little feature; you can just put a little Sticky Note on your desktop. So if you want to just remind yourself “Call the garage later” you can do that. Click on the plus to leave another Note, say, I’ve got to sort out birthday present for somebody. And literally you can just leave these Sticky Notes on your desktop and then when you’ve called the garage, you can click on that, delete it, and it’s gone. So, some of those Accessories, even the very simple ones, can be very, very useful. It’s well worth trying them out. As I say I’ll return to Notepad and Paint later on. For both of those, we need to do a little bit more work before you’ll be in a position to use those successfully in Windows 8. But for the moment you now know where to see all of your apps, some idea of what accessory is available. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Control Panel and PC Settings Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to take our first look at the Control Panel and PC Settings. Now we have actually seen a little bit about PC Settings earlier on when we personalized the Lock Screen and did a little bit of work on the Start Screen. But this time we’re going to look at it in quite a bit more detail and the first thing I want to do is to look at Control Panel. Now Control Panel is a traditional component of Windows and if you’ve used Windows 7 or Vista or XP or an earlier version, you’ll be pretty familiar with the idea of what Control Panel is and does. It’s still there in Windows 8 and it still pretty much does the same things. It’s not quite as obvious as it was in earlier versions but it’s really just as important. PC Settings on the other hand is a bit of a new idea really where some of the settings on your device which you may be most likely to want to set or change or personalize are made a little bit easier to get to and a little bit easier to change. So there’s a good case for being familiar with both Control Panel and PC Settings and we’re going to look at both of them on this course. Now if you’ve been working along with me on the course, I don’t really need to tell you how to find Control Panel. If you don’t know exactly where to leap to it, for instance on the All Apps Page, what you can do is just start typing C-O and there we are, Control Panel. Click or touch Control Panel and it opens Control Panel. Now it looks pretty much identical to the one in Windows 7 and there are a number of ways that you can look at Control Panel. Now I’m going to come back to the detail of Control Panel in a little while because I also want to talk about PC Settings. But basically you have categories of settings in here. So you have System and Security Settings, Network and Internet Settings, Hardware and Sound Settings, etc. And with each of these within the category, you can look at the sort of sub-category item. So ease of access, let Windows suggest Settings, optimize visual display, and so on. Now virtually all of these we’re going to be looking at later on in the course. If you are used to even earlier versions of Windows, you may not like this Categorized Layout and the View by Category option here, click on that drop down and you can have either Large Icons or Small Icons which basically gives you a list of all of the things that you can set. So let’s go for Large Icons and we have a list, and let’s just maximize it, and we have a list of all of the settings that we can change using Control Panel.


Learn Windows 8 Now, of course, there are many of them. A modern device would typically have dozens of these settings. Some of them correspond exactly to the things that we see in PC Settings such as Personalization here. You’ll also see things like Internet options, Date and Time. Some of them are very specific to Control Panel and these give you a high level of customization and personalization of the settings on your system. So that’s Control Panel. Now let’s take another look at PC Settings. Now here to I hope you can remember how to bring up the PC Settings. Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-C to bring up the default Charms. The bottom Charm is Settings and that gives you access to PC Settings. Down at the bottom here the option Change PC Settings, click on that, and you come up with basically a screen with two parts. The left hand part lets you scroll through all of the settings that you can change in this way and then as you select one of them, you get access to the specifics related to that selection in the panel on the right. Now as I’ve already said, basically everything you can do here you can do in Control Panel. It may be presented in a different way, but largely speaking you’ll over time choose which way you prefer to change your settings once you’ve had a little bit of experience with both. People who perhaps have traditionally used older versions of Windows may prefer to go into Control Panel because it’s sort of familiar territory. But I find that some of the PC Settings settings are actually quite a good way of doing things, and what I want to do next in this section is to demonstrate one or two of the aspects of PC Settings. Now one of the things you may well notice early on when you’re trying to use PC Settings is that every now and then the scroll bar looks as though it’s disappeared between the two panes. But if you move your mouse over that area, you see it reappear. Let’s go back up to the top. The top option is Personalize that we’ve already looked at when we worked on the Lock Screen and the Start Screen earlier. And I talked about the Account Picture. But let’s look next at Users. Now the User’s PC Setting demonstrates some very useful things. One of them is that when you’re using Windows 8, you have an alternative where you can actually connect to Windows 8 using a Microsoft Account and that enables certain things that we’re going to talk about later on; some quite useful and important things. Now I’m using this system using what’s called a Domain Account, and my Domain Account is basically a pretty regular account in Windows terminology. I am a member of a Network Domain and when I login into this particular PC, I’m using an


Learn Windows 8 account that I can use on any of the PC’s in that domain. I could as an alternative log in to this PC using my Microsoft Account. I could pretty much do the same things, but the Microsoft Account also gives me some advantages. And I’m going to come back to Microsoft Accounts later.

One of the most obvious advantages is that if I use my Microsoft Account, I can

automatically have my Settings setup for me on any other Windows 8 machine that I log into using my Microsoft Account. Now I’m going to demonstrate this to you later on. It’s really quite important if you want to be able to work between different machines. My Domain Account on the other hand is very much geared up to Security and I wouldn’t want to be able to have any information related to my domain on any machine outside the Secure Network that I work on. And again, I’ll come back to that later on. Now, I have a couple of other things I can do here and there will be even more depending on the type of account I’ve got. So for instance, it tells me how to go about changing my password. To change your password, press Control-Alt-Delete. It lets me create a Picture Password. Again, I’ll come back to that later. And it also gives me a list of other users that can use this machine. It’s actually quite a long list. And a very important point here, under the Title Other Users, Sign in as an Administrator to add users to this PC. I mentioned earlier on the significance of an Administrator. If you’re an Administrator, and I’ll show you what that means later on, you can also add other users to the users of a PC. I am not an Administrator on this PC so I can’t do that. But I’ll login as an Administrator later and show you how to do that. Now I’d like to look at Notifications. This is another very useful set of settings and it controls notifications that you can receive in Windows 8. Now the top three settings relate to all apps and all notifications, and the lower section relates to specific Apps. Now in the top section, the first option you have, “Do you want to show app notifications at all?” So are you going to see notifications from apps about particular events that have happened, things that have failed, things that have arrived, messages, and so on? This is currently set to on. If I click it to off, then I’ll receive no notifications from any app and all of the other settings are grayed out. So I can’t now do anything with the other settings because I’ve said that there will be no app notifications. Let me switch that back on. The second option I have is, “Do you want to show app notifications on the Lock Screen?” Now, of course, you’ll see the Lock Screen when you’re not actually logged in, when the machines asleep and you’ve not woken it from Sleep yet, or when you’ve


Learn Windows 8 deliberately locked it. You can have the notifications appear on the Lock Screen or not. I’ve currently got them set to on. And thirdly, you can decide whether you want notifications to be accompanied by their sounds. So if you don’t particularly want to be disturbed by the sound when you get a notification, you’re quite happy to see it appear on the screen but you don’t want a sound, you can switch the Sounds Off. Now in the lower part of the Settings Screen here, you have a list of specific apps and you can for specific apps decide whether you want notifications on or off. Now when we look at these apps a little bit later on, I’ll show you a little bit of setting on and off of these notifications. But if you’re using these in the meantime and you’re a bit annoyed by either notifications or the sounds that they make, this is where you go to switch them on and off. So I hope you’ve got from this an idea of the PC Settings that are available. We’ve been through a couple of them and I’m now going to turn my attention in the next couple of sections to a couple of very important PC Settings and return to most of the others later on in the course. The two we’re particularly going to look at are, first of all, Windows Update and secondly, Ease of Access. So, join me for Windows Update in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Windows Update Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at Windows Update. If you’re an experienced Windows user, you’ll know about Windows Update and you should know how important it is to have Windows Update setup correctly on your device. So what is Windows Update? Well, Windows Update is a system whereby you are provided by Microsoft with updates to your Windows 8 software. Now there are a few reasons why you need these updates and probably the most important one is for security reasons. All of the time, there are people coming up with more and more clever ideas of how to compromise our computer systems.

Sometimes these ideas are targeted at stopping you using your computer, doing

something to it which makes it unusable which disables a particular feature. But increasingly people are writing what’s generally called Malware to install on your computer without you knowing about it and to capture personal information. So for instance, if you’re using your computer to do online banking, this Malware will try to capture user names, passwords, and so on related to your use of your bank account. Now unfortunately a lot of this software, this Malware, is actually quite successful and continually people are losing out to the sort of nefarious activities of people that write Malware. There’s a constant battle going on between those people and people like Microsoft with their Windows software to try to see who can come out top. Now I guess the simple answer is that nobody ever quite will. But Microsoft and other legitimate software manufacturers do have to update their own software whenever they discover a new attempt to break into it. Windows Update makes sure that you always have the latest protection against many aspects of Malware. Now Windows Update on its own is not enough and generally speaking you are recommended even by Microsoft to use one of the well-known anti-virus systems in addition. But that’s a topic we’ll come back to later on. Fundamentally the most basic thing you need to do to protect yourself against these sort of security risks is Windows Update. Now there are other aspects of Windows Update as well. From time to time, Microsoft discover bugs in the components of Windows 8. Bugs are generally errors, ways in which the software is not performing in the way that it should, and they’ll fix those Bugs and deliver the fixes to you as


Learn Windows 8 part of Windows Update. Sometimes they’ll even add new features as part of Windows Update, and Microsoft acts effectively as the agent for some of the driver software that comes with your device as well. So for instance, if you’re using a laptop like the one I’m using here made by Hewlett Packard, HP, HP will occasionally bring out updates to the software that makes the track pad work, that makes devices that I plug into it work, that make the video screen work, etc. Now HP can deliver that software to me directly, but also Microsoft will deliver some of that software on HP’s behalf. So as you can see there are many, many reasons for needing Windows Update and the best advice I can give you is don’t have any doubts about it, you need Windows Update. So here I am looking at PC Settings. Go right down to the bottom, Windows Update, and I will see here the settings I currently have for Windows Update. When you install Windows 8 by default, it is setup to automatically install updates. Effectively you don’t need to do anything by default because what Windows Update will do is to check for updates on a regular basis and then when it finds an update, it will install the update for you. Now throughout the time we’re talking about Windows Update, one of the very important things to bear in mind is that this does rely on you having a live internet connection. It will only be able to check for Windows Update when you actually have a connection to the internet because it goes to the Microsoft Site and looks for an update or checks for an update on the Microsoft Site. Now, Windows Update, you’re set to automatically install updates. There’s a message here that says “No important Updates are scheduled to be installed.” We last checked today. We’ll continue to check for newer updates daily. So by default, everyday it checks. If for some reason I have my machine off a lot of the time or perhaps my internet connection has been broken for a while, there’s a button here that says Check for Updates now, and I can click on Check for Updates now at any time and what will happen is it will go through the process of checking for updates for me. Now on this occasion I went through the check, it didn’t find any new updates so I’ve got the same message as before and, of course, my System is set to check on a daily basis. Now what you see here is how my System is setup. What we need to look at next is to how to change the way that it’s setup. And this is a very good example of the difference between PC Settings and Control Panel because whereas with PC Settings, we can quickly go in, look at this, check the current Settings, do a check for updates now. If you need to make any changes to how Windows


Learn Windows 8 Update is setup on your device, you’re going to need to go into Control Panel. So I’m going to hit the Windows key to go back to the Start Screen, start typing Control Panel, go into Control Panel. I’ve still got the setting whereby I’m looking at Large Icons; scroll down there, the very last thing here in the corner is Windows Update. So, click on Windows Update. Let’s have a look at the setup of Windows Update. One very important thing to recognize about Windows Update, particularly when it’s setup to automatically install updates is that it will only automatically install the most important updates. When you go into Control Panel and from there into Windows Update, you may well find the sort of situation we’ve got here where we have two optional updates are available. So these are udates that I may or may not choose to install. And if I click on that Link 2 optional updates are available, it tells me what those two are. Now the first one is an update to a database product called Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 3. That’s a very big Update that I will need on this device but I’m not going to do that at the moment. The second one is to do with an update to part of the hardware of this particular device. So I’ve got here it’s the Wi-Fi adapter and it’s an update to the driver for the Wi-Fi adapter. If I select that one, I can then install it by going down to the bottom; there’s an install button down here and clicking on Install. So basically I’ve looked at two optional Updates, I’ve decided to leave one for now and install the other; so just click on Install and it will go through the process of installing that update. Progress bar shows me how it’s going. I can stop the download at any time if I need to and I would then have the opportunity to start it again. So let’s let that installation take place and then resume where we’d left off. So when the update completes successfully, I’ve got a nice tick there on a green shield. The updates were installed and I’m given a Summary now; Succeeded one Update. I’ve still got important updates.

I’ve still got optional updates.

Let’s look at the important updates.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, that’s another big update to another piece of software that I run on this device. So I’m not going to bother with that one at the moment either. I’m going to update that later on. Now when you’re doing updates within Control Panel, you’re very often, in fact usually working in a browser style interface like this. So when I’ve gone to a particular screen, looked at what I want to, there’s usually a Back button here which takes me back to previous screen. So I’ve got


Learn Windows 8 two more updates there. I’m going to come back and do those later because it’s going to take a long time to download those. Now let’s look at the bottom left hand corner because in the bottom left hand corner we’ve got two more commands, Add features to Windows 8. I’m going to talk about that later, but we’ve also got Installed Updates. Now Installed Updates gives a list of all of the updates that have been installed on this device, and although this device hasn’t had Windows 8 on it for long, it’s had an awful lot of updates. Now with each of them, there is a link at the bottom which links me through to information from Microsoft about what that particular update was about. I also have the option on this particular screen of uninstalling an update. Now I’m not going to uninstall any of these and I think uninstalling an update is something that you would do very rarely. I have in my experience once or twice been in the situation that an update has been provided that later had to be uninstalled because it produced an unwanted side effect. It’s very unlikely that you would ever need to uninstall something that was installed as part of Windows Update. Now let’s go back to the Main Screen again and now let’s look at the top left hand corner. Now amongst the links here is perhaps the most important one, Change Settings, and this is where you can re-configure the whole of the Windows Update Settings on your device. When your PC is online, Windows can automatically check for important updates and install them using settings. When new updates are available, you can also choose to install them when you shut down your PC. Now, you have options here: Install updates automatically - Recommended, Download updates but let me choose whether to install them, Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them, Never check for updates. Now some people that I know have this last setting selected, Never check for updates says Not Recommended. One of the reasons some people use this is because they only have an infrequent internet connection. Some people that live in very rural areas sometimes just don’t have all the time internet connections and they want to carefully control what’s happening when they’re connected to check for updates and so on. And in that situation I can understand why they would choose this setting. If you can avoid being in that situation, if you can at least automate the notification of the updates, that’s a very important step. But if you can automate the installation of the whole process that I think is my preferred setting. Now the middle two settings, choosing whether to download and to install them and whether to install them half way houses understandable that some people would like to


Learn Windows 8 look at updates and decide whether to install them. I leave that to your own discretion. I, on all of the machines that I use, I always have Install updates automatically. You can say that updates will automatically during a Maintenance Window. You can define a Maintenance Window for your device. So let me click on that now and you can say Maintenance Task will run daily at say 3 in the morning. Now that won’t be a lot of use if your device is always switched off at 3 in the morning. Although with some devices, you can use this last option, Allow scheduled maintenance to wake up my computer at the scheduled time. So if you’re in a situation that the device you’re using can be woken up then that might work. But you don’t want to do this with a particular time when the computers always shut down. So I’m going to cancel that. Recommended Updates, give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates. So you can automate the recommended updates as well. Microsoft Update give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows. Microsoft Updates covers things like Microsoft Office. So if you also want it to check for updates to Office and to process those in the same way, you can click that and select that option as well. So you’ve actually got quit a fine level of control over Windows Updates. The most important thing there though and the one I would strongly recommend is to have that top option selected, Install updates automatically - Recommended. I would always go for that unless there was a good reason not to. The Maintenance Window can be useful if you have a machine that you can guarantee is going to on at a certain time or a machine that can be woken up to be on at a certain time. Recommended Updates the same way as receive important updates, that’s up to you. If you don’t do it in the same way, then you’ll be given the option manually of downloading and installing updates and Microsoft Update if you’ve say got Microsoft Office that can be a good option as well. So, when you’ve made your specific selections, click on OK and that’s now the way that you’ve got Windows Update configured. Now at this stage I’m not going to worry about Restore Hidden Updates, but I would like to take a quick look at View Update History. View Update History basically gives you in chronological order an update history.

That can sometimes be useful if something perhaps different is

happening on your machine, something’s changed; you’re trying to work out what happened at a


Learn Windows 8 particular time that made something behave differently. And, of course, it’s always useful to check that you’ve actually had a particular update. So if somebody says to you did you get this update, you can scroll through there. Although, of course, you could look at the Installed Updates List as well and just check whether you’ve had that update and, in this case, when it was installed. So that’s pretty much it on Windows Update. I’ve just got one other thing to show you. I’m back at the Start Screen. I start typing Windows Update, W-I-N, go into Settings; this is not an app or an application, this is a setting, and I have a couple of options there. I can go into Windows Update. I can even go to Check for Updates. And if I click on Check for Updates, it goes straight into checking for Windows Updates. So that’s it on Windows Update. Please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 3 – Ease of Access Video: Ease of Access – Part 1 Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Microsoft Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at Ease of Access. If you have some kind of impairment or disability or if you would just like to make things a little bit easier to read or a little bit easier to hear, there are many settings in Windows 8 that can really help you. Now there are a few quite straightforward settings that we’ll begin with and you access those from PC Settings. So as before, it’s Windows-C to bring up the default Charms, Settings, Change PC Settings, and here we have Ease of Access. Now the main Ease of Access Settings here are pretty straightforward to apply. They can be quite effective. They are certainly not the only ones. We’ve got some quite significant ones we’ll come to a little bit later on. But let’s go through these first. One of them is a High Contrast Setting. Now the way in which the High Contrast Setting works is that the background of your screen is changed to black and the text and dialog box outlines and so on become white. And if you’ve got a selected Menu, it turns to purple. Let me just demonstrate how this looks. You may or may not like this. For some people it works very well. If it doesn’t work for you, you maybe would not particularly like this Setting, but let me just click that on, give it a moment to apply, and now you have the High Contrast Settings. Let’s go back to the normal Start Screen, look at the Start Screen, and I’m not going to go through a lot of this now but I think just by looking at that and maybe trying a couple of things out yourself you could work out whether the High Contrast Setting works for you. For some people with a visual impairment, high contrast works very well. If it’s not for you, it may be a little bit sort of startlingly in a way. But all means give it a try. To unset it we just go back, bring up the default Charms, go back to Settings, of course, go back into Change PC Settings, and just click it off again, give it a moment to reset, and it’s unset. Now the next option under Ease of Access is not available on my device and, in fact, it may well not be available on your device. But it’s an option which makes everything on your screen bigger. Now this is not the same as the Magnifier. We’ll come back to the Magnifier a little bit later on. If you have this option and you can select it to on, then you should try that if you have trouble reading the screen and could benefit from it being bigger. It’s a good alternative to the


Learn Windows 8 Magnifier and basically as the name implies it makes everything on the screen bigger. Now if your screen like mine doesn’t support this, you’ll see a message like this, “Your display doesn’t support this setting.” In that case, you probably want to try the Magnifier that as I say we’re going to come back to later on. Now let’s look at the next one of the PC Settings for Ease of Access and that’s this one. Pressing Windows plus a Volume up will turn on and then you have a drop down list where you can select one of four items. This is in effect a way of setting up your own keyboard shortcut. You can either choose the first option, Nothing, in which case pressing Windows plus Volume up will do nothing or you can have it switch on the Magnifier or the Narrator or the On-Screen Keyboard. Now all three of those things Magnifier, Narrator, On-Screen Keyboard are things I’m going to come back to a little bit later on. So we’ll return to that setting then. But if you are going to use any of these Ease of Access tools at all, this is a good way of enabling one of them perhaps for a short period of time. But certainly if you share this machine with other people, it’s useful to be able to switch these things on quite easily. Now we’ve already seen a few notifications about things appearing on the screen and we even talked about notifications a little bit before. We’re going to look at them a little bit more later on. But if you find that having notifications on the screen of problems or confirmations that things have happened, just generally telling you what’s happening on your system, for five seconds is not long enough for some reason then you can change that duration using the next option on the PC Settings. Show notification for there’s a drop down. You can choose from five seconds right up to five minutes for a notification. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean to say that a notification has to stay on the screen for five minutes because generally speaking you can dismiss notifications, cancel them, follow up the consequences of them, whatever the appropriate action might be. So you can always follow up what you want to do within the time period anyway. But if you need the notifications on for longer, perhaps you have some sort of reading impairment or you need to use some other device to help you focus on what the notification is saying, then you can extend the period of the notification for anything from five seconds to five minutes. I’m going to leave it set at five seconds here. Now the last setting is one that some people find particularly useful and if you have a visual impairment the fact that the cursor can be very thin can cause you a problem. Now the cursor


Learn Windows 8 thickness by default is set to one. You can increase it. Let’s say if I increase it up to five, it makes it a much thicker cursor. Now, in fact, you can go right up to 20 with the cursor thickness, but let’s set it at five and see how that looks. So all I’ve done here is open the Notepad Program and I’m just going to do a bit of typing into there. And you can see what a difference having that nice thick cursor is and particularly if you’re moving round say in a drawing or a painting program using the internet, then having that cursor much thicker may well be a good visual aid to you as well. Obviously to set that back again go back into PC Settings and all we have to do is to choose one again. So there we have the basic Ease of Access Settings available from PC Settings. Let’s now go from the Start Screen, I’m just going to type Ease of Access, select Settings, and I have Ease of Access Startup there. That takes me into exactly the same place. So that’s another way of getting into the Ease of Access Settings. Now I’ve already mentioned some other Ease of Access facilities. Some of those are really very important and we’re going to spend some time looking at those. But, first of all, let’s find a route through to them. The PC Settings option that we’ve been looking at so far gives us a few of those basic ones that many people find very useful. Some of the others take a little bit more setting up and the best way to get to those is via Control Panel. So just enter Control Panel in the usual way, go to Control Panel, and one of the options in Control Panel is Ease of Access Center. Now I should warn you that one of the important features here is that very often the Narrator will already be enabled when you go into the Ease of Access Center. If you hear somebody starting to talk to you that’ll be because you’ve got the Narrator helping you straightaway. Now generally speaking when you go into the Ease of Access Center, the button that will be selected is the Start Narrator button. And for people who are blind or who have very, very poor sight, it’s likely they’re going to need the Narrator straightaway. Now one simple keystroke will get the Narrator started. I’m going to do that now and that’s just to press the space bar. Ease of Access Center Window. Focus on Start Narrator button. Shortcut Alt plus N. Narrator reads aloud text on this screen.


Learn Windows 8 So the standard keyboard shortcut for starting the narrator is Alt plus N and I’ll tell you about stopping the Narrator in just a moment. The Narrator won’t read absolutely everything on every screen and the Narrator is implemented better in some places than others. But certainly in terms of most of the main functions of Windows 8, the Narrator will help you quite a bit. And what I’m going to do now is to look at the Narrator Application, the Narrator Window. Now it’s already there. It’s actually down on the taskbar. It’s the right hand button down on the taskbar there. Now note that once the Narrator has started, I will get a lot of narration of tool tips and so on. What I’m going to do is I’m going to open the Narrator Settings Window just by clicking on the button on the taskbar, and then the Narrator will read some of the information at the top of the Narrator Window. That includes the keyboard shortcut for stopping the Narrator. Narrator Settings Window. Focus on press any key on the keyboard to hear the name of that key. Press Caps Lock plus F1 to review the full set of Narrator Commands. Press the Tab key to navigate through the options. Press Caps Lock plus Escape to exit Narrator. So the keyboard shortcut to exit the Narrator is Caps Lock plus Escape. If you can see the Narrator okay, of course, you can also see there’s a button down at the bottom, Exit Narrator. Exit Narrator Dialog. Focus on Yes Button. Alt plus Y. And you also get narrated the instructions to confirm that you want to exit the Narrator. So I could use Alt plus Y to confirm that. Alt exiting the Narrator. And the Narrator is now switched off. To switch the Narrator on again, it’s Alt plus N. Ease of Access Center Window. Focus on Start Narrator Button. Shortcut Alt plus N. Narrator reads aloud text on the screen. And to switch the Narrator off again, it’s Caps Lock and Escape. Caps exit Narrator dialog. Focus on Yes button. Alt plus Y. Alt exiting Narrator.


Learn Windows 8 So there we are. That’s how to turn On and Off the Narrator using the keyboard shortcuts. So we’re going to talk about the Narrator a little bit more later on, but there’s another way of starting it that is very important and that is if from the Start Screen you just type N-A, you’ll get the Narrator, then you can just press the Enter key. Starting Narrator. And of course you now know how to end the Narrator using a keyboard shortcut Caps Lock and Escape. Cap exit Narrator dialog. Focus on Yes button. Alt plus Y. And then you can either press the Enter key or Alt plus Y to confirm that you want to exit the Narrator. Exiting Narrator. So that’s a very straightforward way of starting and exiting the Narrator as well. In this section then we’ve looked at the Ease of Access Center. We’ve looked at Ease of Access via PC Settings and we’ve taken a look at the Narrator. In the second section on Ease of Access we’re going to look at the Magnifier, at the On-Screen Keyboard, and a little bit more about the Narrator. But we’re also going to look at how Windows 8 can help you to identify the Ease of Access Tools that will help you in your specific situation. So I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Ease of Access – Part 2 Toby: Hello again and welcome to the second section on Ease of Access in Windows 8. In the previous section, we looked at the Ease of Access Center and we spent a little bit of time looking at how to switch on and switch off the Narrator. I’m going to come back to the Narrator again in a short while, but the first thing I’d like to look at in this section is this one, Get Recommendations to make your computer easier to use. Now I think that compared to earlier versions of Windows, the Ease of Access facilities in Windows 8 are a considerable improvement and one of the improvements is in this sort of Wizard which will take you through a set of questions and answers and then on the basis of your answers Windows 8 will try to recommend the Ease of Access Settings that will help you. Now I’m going to go through this Wizard now and show you basically what the questions are. I’m going to put in answers that are basically fictitious, but show you then what happens at the end in terms of how I can use the Wizard’s recommendations. So, first of all, Get Recommendations to make your computer easier to use, click there, and I get the first page of the Wizard. Now each page gives me a question on a particular topic. The first page the question is about eyesight. Now if you’ve run the Wizard before it will generally remember your answers. So I did run this once before and I did select Lighting conditions make it difficult to see images on my screen. But the other options there, Images and text on to TV are difficult to see even when I’m wearing glasses, I am blind, I have another type of vision impairment. So I’m going to stick with the selection Lighting Conditions make it difficult to see images on my screen, go to the next question. This is to do with dexterity. Pens and pencils are difficult to use; A physical condition affects the use of my arms, wrists, hands, or fingers; I do not use a keyboard. I could of course select two of those if I wanted to. I’m not restricted to selecting one. But I’m just going to have I do not use a keyboard. Click on Next. Hearing. Conversations can be difficult to hear; Background noise makes the computer difficult to hear, I am hard of hearing, or I am deaf. I’m going to just say Background noise make the computer difficult to hear. Click on Next. Speech. Other people have difficulty understanding me in conversation but not because of an accent or I have a speech impairment. I’m going to not tick either of those, click on Next. Reasoning. I often find it difficult to concentrate, I often find it


Learn Windows 8 difficult to remember things, I have a learning disability such as dyslexia. I’m going to go with I often find it difficult to remember things. Now click on Done and we’ll see what happens. Now based on your answers to those questions, Windows 8 will make a number of recommendations about the things that you can do to make access to your computer easier for you. Now in my case because of the answers that I’ve put in there, there are quite a few recommendations. The first one is Turn on Narrator and, of course, we saw the Narrator in the last section. We’re going to look at it again in a little while. So you should have a good idea of what Narrator does. The Magnifier we’re going to look at shortly. Again, it recommends that I turn on the Magnifier. It also says Make the focus rectangle thicken up. Clearly these things are to do with my eyesight. So it’s dealing with the eyesight things first. Then it moves on to things that are associated with my answer to the question of I don’t use the keyboard and there are various keyboard related things.

I’m not going to go through all of those now.

And then there are further

recommendations to do with the other answers I gave to the other questions, such as turning on visual notifications for sounds. This is partly to do with the question I answered related to background noise. So these aren’t necessarily only associated with being hard of hearing. They can relate to answers where I’ve indicated that background noise is a problem. Now clearly you’re circumstances will not be the same as mine. You may have no of visual impairment. You may have no hearing impairment at all. But you may work in a situation, for example, where there’s a high level of background noise and some of these Ease of Actions options may be a good idea for you. If you have any related issue of this kind, I think it’s worth running this Wizard and seeing what Windows 8 recommends. But also given that in the balance of this section, we’re going to look at a couple of those specific Ease of Access options I think you may find the rest of this section useful as well. So you can go through, run the Wizard, check the options that you want to try. Bear in mind that you undo these things again afterwards if you find that the options don’t suit you. And then when you’ve decided which ones to try, you click on OK and you see how you get on. I’m going to cancel at this point and go back to the Ease of Access Center. Now you don’t have to use the Wizard to try to get some recommendations for ways in which you can make it easier for you to use Windows 8 on your device. The other options down here, Explore all Settings and Below, basically cover the items that the Wizard considers as ways of


Learn Windows 8 making Ease of Access better for you. So, if you look for instance here, Use the computer without a display, underlined. This is optimize for blindness, click on there, and it takes you to a page where it talks about the ways that you can use the computer without a display. So turn on the Narrator, turn on Audio Descriptions, setup Text to Speech, turn off unnecessary animations. So these options are the ones which the Wizard will consider but you can go straight into them and look at them and consider them yourself as well. This aspect of the Ease of Access Center is Browser based so you can just go back to the previous screen, make the computer easier to see, use the computer without a mouse or keyboard. And then a couple of options at the bottom that I just think worth mentioning, one of them is Make the keyboard easier to use. This one isn’t always considered in a lot of detail by people, but you can, for instance, control the mouse with the keyboard. You can setup the keyboard so that you can mouse movements using the arrow keys primarily on the keyboard. So if you have trouble using a mouse that’s a good option. You also have Sticky Keys. If you’ve come across the keyboard combination Control-Alt-Delete where you have to press three keys at once and you actually find it difficult to press that many keys at once, you can setup Sticky Keys which enables you to do them in sequence. Then you have other features, Toggle keys, Filter keys make it easier to use keyboard shortcuts. Now I’m not going to go through all of these now but there are plenty of options there for you to look into. Let’s go back then, finally look at this one down at the bottom here, Make touch and tablets easier to use, adjust settings for touch and tablets. The options you’ve got there, one of them we looked at much earlier on. Pressing the Windows button and Volume up Button together on your taablet can start an Accessibility Tool. So if you don’t want to use or can’t use a full keyboard, if you’ve got a tablet with a Window button and a Volume up button, you can use that as your way of switching on the Narrator, for example, or the Magnifier or the On-Screen Keyboard. So I think you can see that Windows 8 offers you a lot of options when it comes to Ease of Access, whether you’re dealing with a disability or whether you’re working in difficult circumstances or a difficult environment, a noisy environment, for example. Now, there are now a number of specific tools which I want to spend a little bit more time on. We looked at Narrator a little bit earlier on. I’m going to spend a little bit more time on that. But I’m also going to look in subsequent sections at the Magnifier, the On-Screen Keyboard, and Speech Recognition. So, please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Magnifier Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. We’ve been looking at some of the features of the Ease of Access Center and what I’d like to look at next is the Magnifier. I probably don’t need to describe to you what the Magnifier does, but one thing to point out is if you click on Start Magnifier you get a display that enables you to change some of its settings before you start to use it. But in reality you can change these settings during its use anyway. So let’s click on Start Magnifier and you can see the little panel under the cursor at the moment.

It’s got a default setting there of 200% which means it’s doubling the size of

everything. And if you click on the drop down next to Views, you have an option of Full Screen View which it’s on at the moment, which means that the whole screen is magnified. Lens or Docked. Now I’ll explain Docked in a moment. Let’s switch to Lens View for a moment. Now watch what happens as I move the cursor around in Lens View. What happens is that as you move over the screen, the area that you’re over is magnified, and many people prefer that option to the Full Screen View because it means you can just look at a part and keep it within context of the rest of the screen. Now you will notice that the quality of the View does deteriorate. The View pixelates, but you have to magnify it quite a lot before you would make it unusable. And generally speaking it’s still usable enough to do whatever you want to do. Of course, while you’re in this Magnify View, you can do everything else the same. So if you hover over a particular control it’s still a live link, you can still click on it, you can still do whatever you want to do. Now, of course, one very important thing to note is how to start and exit the Magnifier. You can certainly go to the Access Center as we’ve just seen. The keyboard shortcuts, well Windows and plus sign brings up the Magnifier. So let me just do Windows and plus sign. You can see the Magnifier now wherever I’ve got that. If at any time you want to go back into that Settings Panel, if you just go over that picture of the Magnifier there, click on that, the little panel comes up and then you can in the panel you can change the magnification, you can change the View, and there is even a link through to a Help option there. The other options you’ve got include turning on Color Inversion. You can change the size of the magnifier lens and both in height and width. So you can finely tune the magnifier lens to suit your specific requirements. Let me just cancel that. And then the shortcut to switch off the © Copyright 2008-2012 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Windows 8 Magnifier is Windows and Escape. When you’re using the Magnifier to zoom out or zoom in, you use Windows with the plus sign or Windows with the minus sign. So let me just do Windows with the plus sign here. I’ll put it say in the middle of the screen somewhere. Windows with the plus sign, it zooms in some more. Windows with the minus sign, it comes out. And then to switch it off, hit Windows and Escape and the Magnifier is gone. Now when you’re in Desktop View, there is a third setting for the Magnifier. We’ve already seen the Full Screen View and the Lens View. There’s Docked View. So let’s, first of all, bring up the Magnifier using Windows and the plus key. And you get an area at the top of the screen that is in effect the Magnified View. So, as I scroll around the main part of the screen, you can see the Window at the top is a Magnified View. Now I can change the size of that panel. Let me make it a little bit bigger, and then let me go down to the Magnifier itself and increase the Magnification. So at a 200% View watch what happens now as I move around on the desktop. You get that Magnified View in the Docked Panel at the top. To switch that off it’s exactly the same keyboard shortcuts; to switch it off, it’s Windows and Escape. And one last thing about the Magnifier, if you’re in the Start Screen, to start the Magnifier you can type M-A-G and you can get into the Magnifier that way and then it basically works the same once you’ve enabled it using the Start Screen approach. So that’s it on the Magnifier for now. In the next section, we’re going to take a look at the OnScreen Keyboard. So, I look forward to seeing you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: On-Screen Keyboard Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. We’ve been looking at Ease of Access and in this section we’re going to look at the On-Screen Keyboard. The first thing I need to point out about it is that it is not something that’s restricted to tablets or to touch sensitive devices. The On-Screen Keyboard should be available on any device running Windows 8. Now there are various ways of starting up the On-Screen Keyboard, including starting it via the Ease of Access Center. But I’m going to start it from the Start Screen just by typing K-E, OnScreen Keyboard there we are. Click on On-Screen Keyboard and the On-Screen Keyboard appears. Now before we actually use it, let’s look at some of the main features of the On-Screen Keyboard. First of all, although it may well appear like a Fixed-Size Keyboard, you can actually re-size it. So, I’m going to make this one a lot bigger and if you are, for instance, going to use a touch sensitive screen then you may want to make the keys themselves big enough to hit confidently perhaps from a little bit of a distance and particularly if your fingers are a bit on the big side like mine. On the other hand, you may need to keep this keyboard in a corner of the screen so you may want to shrink it down quite a bit. Obviously the size of the keys, they shrink down to fill the space available. The layout of the keys themselves will vary from device to device although some of the keys on there which have a very special meaning will always be there. Also bear in mind you may be looking at the keyboard here on my device, the keyboard will reflect your locale. So in the United Kingdom, our layout is Qwerty, Q-W-E-R-T-Y, the first six keys on the top row of the Alpha Characters. But we have things like the two has the double quotes over it and not the @ sign. And depending on the country you’re in, another European Country or North America, the layout may actually be different. But the principles that I’m going to look at in this section are consistent throughout. Now let me demonstrate using the keyboard with a mouse. In this case, it will also demonstrate at a very important point and that is that in general, the keyboard tries to stay on top of everything else. Clearly having a keyboard that gets hidden behind things isn’t really going to help you much. So if you are going to use the On-Screen Keyboard, then you’re really going to have to be careful about how you arrange things. I’m going to put the On-Screen Keyboard


Learn Windows 8 down here. I’m going to go back to the Start Screen and I’m going to run Notepad. So I’m going to get the Notepad Program going. We used that earlier. I’m going to put Notepad up there. I’m going to put the On-Screen Keyboard down there. Click within Notepad and now I’m going to do some typing. Now one thing you’ll notice is, of course, you cannot if you’re going to click one key at a time you don’t hold the Shift key down. I could, of course, click the Caps key to get a capital. But I’m going to just click Shift once. The Shift key holds itself down, click H for Hello. If you then notice the Shift key, highlighting has gone because that option, that Shift option, only keeps the Shift on for one character. Unlike Caps which is effectively a Caps Lock key. So I’m back now to regular case. I can type E-L-L-O, space. I’ll do the next without speaking. So there we are. That’s using the On-Screen Keyboard to do a bit of typing and as you can see it’s pretty straightforward. Now let’s look at some of the special keys on the On-Screen Keyboard because they’re not the sort of keys that you would normally see on a keyboard. The first one to note here is the Move Up, Move Up one. Because what this will do is to reposition the On-Screen Keyboard near the top of the screen. So if you just click on Move Up, it puts it up to the top of the screen. Click on Move Down, it puts it to the bottom of the screen. If you’re using the keyboard quite a bit and particularly if you’ve got a big screen and you can have other applications open at various times then this is a quick way of getting the keyboard to the top or bottom of the screen. If you’re using a tablet device and certain other types of device, you may also find that this Command down here; this Dock button is enabled and this lets you hide the screen, dock it somewhere else. On a standard, regular laptop or PC, you’ll normally find that, that is grayed out, but you might be able to use it on a tablet. Another good option that some people like is to make the keyboard semi-transparent. So you can click on Fade and you’ll see the keyboard is still there but you can pretty much see through it. Click on Fade again and it re-appears. There’s a Help button there. There is a Scroll Lock which is the equivalent to a Scroll Lock key that you would find on many keyboards. And then there is also an Options button. So let’s click on Options. Now with these options we can, for instance, enable the Click Sound. I’m going to enable Click Sound on the keyboard. And we’ve got options such as turning on the Numeric Keypad. And in terms of use of the On-Screen Keyboard, we can either click on keys, which is how I’ve got it setup at the moment or you can


Learn Windows 8 set it so that all you have to do is hover over the keys. So in this case, provided you hover over a key for longer than a duration that you can specify here, Windows 8 will count that as being a click on the key. You can also have Windows 8 scan through the available keys on the keyboard and then give you access to particular keys via keyboard shortcuts. Now I’m not going to go through these other options. I’m also not going to go through the bottom section here in that you can enable or disable Text Prediction. If you do texting on your mobile phone or cell phone, you’ll know about Text Prediction. Well, that’s an option with the On-Screen Keyboard as well. All I’ve changed here is the Click Sound. So I’ll click on OK and now let me do a bit more typing in my document, and there we are. That’s the use of the OnScreen Keyboard in a pretty straightforward document. Now the couple of other things to say about the On-Screen Keyboard, one of them is that if you plan to use it a lot and if you’ve got a touch device and you don’t use an external keyboard, you may use it quite a bit. You can go to the keyboard on the taskbar there, right click, and say Pin it to the taskbar. That means that it will pretty much be there all the time. So whenever you want to use it you can just click on the icon down there and bring up the keyboard. And you may recall from earlier on when we were looking at PC Settings and the Ease of Access Setting this is one of the options that can be enabled when you press Windows plus Volume Up. You can actually set Windows plus Volume Up to bring up the keyboard. And then one final thing, the options we looked at there which are obviously very important to customize the keyboard to your own use, Windows plus R brings up a run dialog. And if you type in there O-S-K for On-Screen Keyboard, click on OK, you bring up the keyboard. There are other equivalents of that for other things but that again is a little area for you to look at. So, that’s the On-Screen Keyboard. In the next section, we’re going to look at Speech Recognition. So I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Speech Recognition Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at Speech Recognition. This is another one of the Ease of Access facilities within Windows 8 and it gives you good facilities to command your device by voice. Now there’s been quite a bit of skepticism about this in the past, but nowadays these kind of Speech Recognition and Speech driven command facilities are really pretty effective with one important caveat. And that is that you really need to train your device to understand your voice in order to make them work properly. For this reason, on this part of the course I’m going to basically show you how Speech Recognition works. But to make it work well for you, you’re going to need to spend some time training your device to recognize your voice. So, let’s take a look at Speech Recognition. So, I’m going to go into the Control Panel on this occasion and from the Control Panel, I’m back to Categories. If I click on the Ease of Access Category, I then have sub-categories there and one of the sub-categories is not part of the Ease of Access Center. We have a separate category for Speech Recognition. Now most people find that the single most important factor in making Speech Recognition work is that you have a good microphone, that’s not necessarily an expensive microphone, but a good microphone. But also a microphone that is positioned well relative to you. This will not work if you’re sitting on a swivel chair and you’ve got a microphone on the back of a fixed desk or at the other side of the room. Ideally you’re microphone will be attached to your head, it will move with your head. I tend to use a headset which has got earpieces or at least one earpiece and an attached swivel microphone, a boom microphone that is positioned near to my mouth. Not too near to my mouth. I normally have it in line with my nose and basically at the side of my cheek. The position of the microphone is really more important than the price. Although if you can afford a reasonably good quality headset and you can position it in the way I’ve described you’re likely to get the best results. So the first thing we need to do is to setup our microphone. Now you won’t be surprised to hear that this is done via a Wizard. Click on Setup a microphone and the Wizard starts. And first of all, the Wizard tells you what it believes the microphone is that you’re trying to use. Now the microphone I’m using is not this one. It’s not Internal Mic IDT etc, it’s a different one. It’s a


Learn Windows 8 USB Headset that is separate from the one on the particular PC that I’m recording this on. So I’m going to cancel this and I need to change the default microphone for my device. So I go into Hardware and Sound, and within the Sound Category, there is Manage Audio devices. Within Manage Audio devices, there is Recording and one of my microphones will be denoted as the default device, the one with the tick on it there. Now that’s not the one that I’m using. In fact, if you look at the little levels on the right, you can see that two of them are moving. Now the Internal one, the one that Windows 8 thinks is my default device is picking up sound through the air anyway. But the one that I’m using, the USB device, is picking up more of it because it’s just next to my nose. So to make this my default, I select that and click on Set Default. That’s now my default device. Click on OK and now I’m going to use the Back button here on the Browser, go back to Speech Recognition and we’ll start that microphone setup again. So we click on Setup a microphone and that brings up the Microphone Setup Wizard. Note that Windows 8 has now got the correct microphone selected here and I choose the type. Obviously Windows 8 can’t know what type of microphone it is, but it’s a Headset microphone, which is the Default here. I click on Next. It then gives me a Note about proper placement. Position the microphone about an inch from your mouth off to one side. Do not breath directly into the microphone. Well I tend to put it nearer to my nose than my mouth to avoid the breathing into the microphone. Make sure the Mute button is not set to Mute. Most Headset microphones have a little button on the cable usually which has got a Mute option. Make sure you haven’t got it muted, click on Next. Now it says, Read the following sentences aloud in a natural speaking voice. Peter dictates to his computer. He prefers it to typing and particularly prefers it to pen and paper. Note, after reading this you can proceed to the next page. So we click on Next. The microphone is ready to use with this computer. Click Finish to complete the Wizard. Click Finish and my microphone is setup. So now we can actually go into Speech Recognition. I should point out to you that the sorts of things you can do with Speech Recognition in Windows 8 are really quite varied and to be fair you can do almost everything you might want to do using Speech Recognition. Having said that, something’s lend themselves more to Speech Recognition to others. You can certainly do things like start some applications, close applications, and you can do things like select from a Menu and perhaps foremost of the things that you can do is you can dictate text. Now depending on


Learn Windows 8 how well you train your device to recognize your speech and, in fact, depending on how consistently you can maintain Speech that can be recognized well, you may well save yourself a huge amount of time with Speech Recognition. But if you don’t train your device well and if you’re Speech does vary quite a bit, you might give yourself more trouble than it’s worth trying to Speech Recognition. Of course, for some people this may be an access issue anyway and you may really need to use Speech Recognition and then it really is worth you spending time making it as efficient and effective as possible. Now the first time you run Speech Recognition, it will demand that you do some training, and the amount of training is really up to you. I’m only going to show you how to get the process started here and then you’re really going to need to go away and do some training yourself to make it work well for you. So, we’re going to start Speech Recognition.

Welcome to Speech Recognition.

Recognition allows you to control your computer by voice.

Speech

It gives a little bit of useful

information there. Click on Next. The first thing that happens is it goes through, again, setting the levels on the microphone in a similar way to the way that we did it just now. So click on Next and Next. I won’t need to Reset this because it was all fine last time. When it’s got the levels from my voice the Next button becomes enabled and I can move on to the next screen. So now we move on to Improving Speech Recognition Accuracy. One of the things that Windows 8 can do is to use some of the documents in e-mails that you have created to train itself in recognizing your voice. So if you want it to do that, you click on Enable Document Review. Now the advantage of doing this is that if you tend to use in the documents and e-mails that it will find by searching your device, if the language you tend to use in those is the sort of language you generally use when you’re using your device it will be much more likely to be able to recognize your voice well if it’s using that sort of language and dealing with that sort of document. So there are certain advantages in making this choice. If you disable that then it won’t use those documents that it finds in your Search Index. So as the last sentence there says, If you choose this option the computer will learn words and phrases to better understand you when you speak. So I’m going to Enable Document Review because I think that generally gives better results. So click on Next.


Learn Windows 8 Now here’s another important choice to make and that is the Activation Mode. With this, as the text there says, you can choose what happens when you say the Stop Listening Command. Now generally speaking, to stop the device from recognizing your voice, you say Stop Listening. Now you also have an option of using Manual Activation. If you choose Manual Activation, Windows Speech Recognition turns off when you say Stop Listening, and to turn it on again you generally use the Control plus Windows key or click the Microphone button. If on the other hand you use Voice Activation Mode when you say Stop Listening, it stops listening but to start it listening again you say Start Listening. Now I’m going to stick with Manual Activation Mode on this occasion, which means I will generally start it in my case by pressing Control and Windows. Click Next again. Now, of course, there’s a well-defined list of commands that your device will be able to understand and this list is on the Speech Reference Card. From this screen, you can view that Reference Card or Reference Sheet as it’s referred to here via the Windows 8 Online Help. Now it’s probably a good idea if you plan to use Speech Recognition for you to print the card out and perhaps put it somewhere handy so you can just check which the available commands are. I’m not going to do this at that point and time. I’m going to click Next and continue. The next option is a relatively straightforward one, Do you want to run Speech Recognition every time you start your computer? Well, I certainly don’t want to run it every time I start my computer, but if you do; if you have a good reason to, you can start it up. You can still activate it and de-activate it as I described a little bit earlier on, but do you want it every time? I don’t so I uncheck that and click Next. So finally the last page of the Wizard says, You can now control this computer by voice. We strongly recommend that you take the Interactive Speech Recognition Tutorial. You will learn and practice the commands that will let you successfully control your computer by voice. Click Start Tutorial to begin taking the tutorial. So, I’m just going to start this. You’re really going to have to go through this yourself. Speech Recognition Tutorial. Welcome to the Windows Speech Recognition Tutorial. As you move through the tutorial, you can click the Next button or say Next.


Learn Windows 8 So the Tutorial not only covers the steps you need to take to improve the way that your device can recognize your voice, but it also goes through the basic commands for starting Speech Recognition, stopping Speech Recognition, and so on. You can, of course, go back into the settings that we established earlier in this section in terms of how to start and stop, whether to do it manually or whether to do it by voice. I’m going to assume from this point forward that you’ve been through the tutorial, you know how to operate Speech Recognition, and that your device is reasonably capable of understanding your voice. And what I’d like to do last in this section is to give you a quick demonstration of me commanding my device using my voice. Now you may have the Speech Recognition setup to start automatically when you start your device. We talked about that earlier on. And you’re aware or you should be aware of various ways of starting Speech Recognition. I’m going to start it just by typing in Speech Recognition on the Start Screen. So S-P and there we are, Windows Speech Recognition. And you see this little dialog at the top here. It’s got a set of controls in it, including a Close, a Minimize, and a little microphone I’m going to use that to manually start it.

This is the clicking on the

microphone of manually starting it. And the status of Speech Recognition is indicated in the panel there. It currently says that it’s off. So to start it manually, click there and it says that it’s listening. Now if you talk for a while now or I talk for a while now it’s possible to really confuse it because it can’t really understand anything that I’m saying.

It doesn’t recognize any

commands. So let me give it a proper command. Start Notepad. Hello World. Close Notepad. Don’t Save. Don’t Save. Stop Listening. And there you are. That is Speech Recognition in practice. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Narrator Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. This is the last section on Ease of Access and in this section we’re going to look at Narrator again. Now I showed you much earlier on how to basically switch Narrator on because some people following Ease of Access might well need Narrator to help them through it. But now we’re going to look at the options you’ve got for setting up the Narrator and a little bit more about what it can and cannot do. Now before I actually start Narrator, I’ll apologize in advance for the fact that sometimes the Narrator and I will talk at the same time. When that happens I’ll try to make a point of repeating what I’ve said. So to start Narrator, there’s a number of ways as you saw earlier on. Straightforwardly on the Start Screen, all you have to do is starting typing Narrator and then when it’s selected you can click with the mouse. Starting Narrator. And the Narrator has started. Now as we saw earlier there is a set of Narrator Options and this dialog down here if I just open that up. Narrator Settings Window. Focus on press any key on the keyboard to hear the name of that key. Press Caps Lock plus F1 to review the full set of Narrator Commands. Press the Tab key to navigate through the options. Press Caps Lock plus Escape to exit Narrator. So that should help you to remember certainly how to exit Narrator, so it’s Caps Lock plus Escape to exit. Now let’s look at some of these settings and we’ll start here with General. General. Lock the Narrator key so you don’t have to press them for each Command. Caps Lock, uncheck check box. Shortcut Alt plus L. General. Change how Narrator starts and other standard Settings. Disabled. Now you notice how the Narrator, when that dialog came up, read out to us basically the main points of what was on the screen, told us what dialog we were in and the control on the screen which is outlined in blue is the one that is currently selected and that’s the one that Narrator told


Learn Windows 8 us about. Now to a large extent the way that you use Narrator will depend on you and you probably need to experiment with it quite a bit to find out the best combination of settings. But I’d like to give you a couple of tips. Now I’m not myself blind or visually handicapped so unfortunately it’s very difficult for me to imagine just how difficult it is to work without being able to see the screen. As far as possible I’ve tried to do this part of this section basically with my eyes shut just to find out how to best give people instructions to use this tool. So I apologize if I haven’t really figured that out. But a couple of things that I have figured out are these. First of all, if you just choose say one of the checkboxes on this screen that’s ticked and uncheck it, you will not be told before you do that which control you are un-checking. As far as the Narrator’s concerned, the control you’re working on is the one with the blue outline. So the first thing I think I would recommend is that if you are perhaps unfamiliar with the set of settings or even if you’re familiar but there’s quite a complicated set on a page, the best bet seems to be to use the Tab key to step through the various controls and let Narrator tell you which one you’ve got on each occasion and then give you the opportunity to change the setting. So let me demonstrate that here. The currently selected control is the top one, Lock the Narrator key. The second one is Start Narrator Minimize. Now I want to change that one. I don’t want to Start Narrator Minimize. I want to start with Narrator Settings open each time. So I’m going to uncheck that box. So this is how I think it works best for me. Press the Tab key to take me to the next control. Start Narrator Minimized checked check box. Shortcut Alt plus M. Note that I’m told which control is now selected. I’m told that it’s checked and I’m given a keyboard shortcut. So if I uncheck it. Unchecked. I now know which control I had and I know what I’ve done to it. If I now tab through the others, I don’t have to wait until Narrators finished. So let’s suppose on this occasion that I want to Save these changes. So I’ve got to go quite a long way down. I don’t have to wait until Narrator has finished each announcement before I move on to the next control.


Learn Windows 8 Echo key, Readout, Enable, Play or de, Read hints, Lower the volume of other, Retain notif, Control, Save Changes to these Settings button. And when I’ve got to the correct one I can hit the Enter key. Press any key on the Keyboard to hear the name of that key. And I’ve Saved that Setting. Press Caps Lock plus F1 to review the full set of Narrator Commands. Press the Tab key to navigate through the options. So that gives you a general approach. Now I’m not going to go through all of these options. They all need looking at. But I’m just going to go down and look at one and then show you this second I think useful technique. If you go down to Voice which is the third option down; so I’ll just tab down and let the Narrator read the beginning of each of the titles of the pages of the settings. General. Navigation. Voice. Change the speed. Pick an. Voice speed 50%. Slider. Voice. Change the speed. Pitch or volume of the current voice or choose a new voice. Disabled. Now note that with the controls on this page we can select the speed of the voice, the volume of the voice, and the pitch of the voice, and we can even select a different voice. There’s basically a choice of two with Windows 8 at the moment. So I’m going to tab through again. I’m going to go to the choice of voice. So as I tab Narrator will read out what each option is. Voice volume. Voice pitch. Select a different voice for Narrator. Microsoft Hazel Desktop. Editable combo box. Shortcut Alt plus V. Collapsed. Now notice how the Narrator describes that as an editable combo box and that it is collapsed. If we want to see what the options are if you press on the right arrow.


Learn Windows 8 Select a different Voice for Narrator. Microsoft Zero Desktop. Editable combo box. Shortcut Alt plus V. And then I can press right again to tab to the next option. Right arrow. Now there isn’t another option so that’s the end of the list. If I wanted to stick with the alternative voice, Microsoft Zero Desktop, tab again to save changes. Tab twice actually to save changes. Find other, save changes to these settings. Press any key on the keyboard to hear the name of that key. Now when you’re using Narrator and particularly if you want to keep Narrator open for some time, one good option to minimize it. So, if I tab down to Minimize. General. Navigation. Voice. Minimize this Window and return to your App button. And then if I pres Enter. Enter. And I’m back to an app. Now if I need to find it again, one way of doing it is to use the flipping that we looked at much earlier on in the course. So that’s hold the Alt key down and press Tab. Alt. Tab. Running Programs. Weather 5 of 7, 13. Desktop 7 of 7. Recording. Narrator Settings 2 of 7. Narrator Settings Window. Focus on minimize this Window and return to your App button. So with that open at any time, I can cycle through using the Alt and Tab approach until I hear the Narrator say Narrator Settings and then I’m back into Narrator Settings again. I can, of course, go in and change the settings again or, of course, I can Exit from there; although, of course, you’ll know the keyboard shortcut for exiting the Narrator as well. So I think that gives you a reasonably straightforward way of moving between the other apps and Desktop Applications you have open and the Narrator.


Learn Windows 8 Now the last thing I’d like to look at in this section before we move on is just to look at how a couple of the Windows 8 apps react to the Narrator because the level of integration or use of the Narrator in the Windows 8 apps does vary quite a bit. Now if you’re using the Start Screen and you want to startup one or two of the apps with help from the Narrator, so let’s assume you’re not actually able to see the screen. If you use the arrow keys to move around, let’s go down one. People. And again. Launch Messaging. Launch Messaging. Non-selected, dragable, Collapsed. Column 1, Row 3. And you can see the Narrator tells you a little bit about the status of Messaging at the moment, the location on the Start Screen, and so on. If we were to go to Maps for example. Maps. Launch Maps. Non-selected, dragable. Column 2, Row 3. If I go into Maps. Enter. Map View. The problem I have with trying to use the Narrator is that the Narrator is not able to describe to me the Map that I’m looking at. The Narrator won’t even tell me which part of the world I’m in and will certainly be a very limited help in terms of providing me with a description of where I am. If I bring up one or two of the related Charms, the Narrator might. Tool Tip. Zoom In. Control plus plus. The Narrator can give me ideas of what tools are available by reading out tool tips and so on, but without being able to see what’s on the Map. Obviously that’s a very limited help. Whereas if we go to another application, let’s try the Weather for example. So I’m going to press the Windows key.


Learn Windows 8 Windows. Start Menu Pane. Focus on Mail. People. Desktop. Weather. 17-degrees. Los Angeles. Clear. 27-degrees/13 degree. 3-1 the Image. Launch Weather. Nonselected, dragable, Expanded. Column 3, Row 4. And you can see in this case that it’s actually quite useful in that Narrator tells me what’s on this Live Tile. And in fact if I go into the Weather App. Enter. Weather Window. Weather Window. Focus on Weather App. Explorable text. Windows Opened. Weather. And in fact, if I move around I can get much of the information that’s available in the Weather App from the Narrator. Weather Pane.

Wednesday 14.

High 26-degree.

Low 13-degree.

Partly Cloudy.

Precipitation 0%. So as you can see, some of the apps are suitable for the Narrator to help with and some of them are not. The level at which narration is being integrated into applications is actually quite good. The use of narration is progressing. But fundamentally apps like Mapping Applications do suffer from some considerable problems if a visual image of a map is not available. So in this section we’ve covered pretty much the basics of the Narrator and I hope you find that useful. If the Narrator is a tool that you think will be a benefit to you. That’s the end of this section and the end of these sections on ease of use in general. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 4 – User Accounts and Action Center Video: Types of Accounts Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at User Accounts which are particularly important to understand if you have more than one person using your device, using your PC, or if you want to use different devices running Windows 8 and you’d like to synchronize the settings on those devices. So, User Accounts. Now, first of all, let’s go to the PC Settings and select Users and you’ll find that on this particular machine that I’m using I’ve got quite a few accounts setup. I’ve got the account I’m using now and I’ve got various other users. And I’m going to come back to those other users a little bit later on. The first thing to point out is that there are basically three types of account you can have on a Windows 8 device. There is what we’ll call a Local User Account, there’s a Domain Account, and then there’s a Global, a Microsoft Account. Now the three different accounts have three different uses. And I’m going to deal with the Domain Account first, although it’s the one that you’re probably least likely to need to setup. Now the Domain Account, in this case, is this one, it’s BC and then a backslash symbol and then TobyA. Now the significance of the BC is that this computer belongs to a Network Domain, it’s connect to a proper Business Network. And the Domain Name of the business is BC. Any machine, any user that’s part of that network will normally be referred to with the BC prefix. And what this means is that this gives me rights to access information on that Business Domain. So there may be other computers, there may be Storage devices, all sorts of things which are basically secret as far as the outside world’s concerned, but because my account is part of the BC Domain, because my User Accounts is part of it, and because this computer is part of it as well, I can access that information and other people on the Domain can access certain information from this computer that I give them the rights to access. So it’s a sort of secret club, if you like, of the domain. We can keep this information to ourselves. Nobody else can see it and it’s the way that the vast majority of businesses operate that use Microsoft Windows-base domains.


Learn Windows 8 Now, unless you are a business user and I’m pretty sure that some of you will be, the Domain Account is probably of limited interest to you. And in fact if it is of interest to you, then I’m sure you’ll get the information you need about setting up a Domain Account elsewhere later on. But for the moment I’m effectively going to set that one to one side. I’m pretty much going to ignore this Domain Account although it’s the one that I’m using to do a lot of this work. And I’m going to concentrate on the Non-Domain Accounts. So let’s go a little bit further down this screen and look at this long list of people here. All of these people have what are called Local Accounts. Now a Local Account is basically an account that allows them to use this device. They’ll have a Login Name. So Carol Hardy will have a login name and Carol Hardy will normally have a password as well. If Carol wants to use this PC, she’ll login using the method that we looked at right near the beginning of the course with her user name and her password, and using her account she will use the PC for whatever purpose she wants to use it. Now, one of the important things to recognize is that if somebody has a Local Account, that doesn’t mean they can do anything they like. They may well be very restricted in terms of what I will allow them to do on this PC. So the fact that you can login doesn’t necessarily mean that you can run a particular application, for example. I may only allow certain people to run certain applications. I probably also wouldn’t allow somebody with a Local Account to change some fundamental settings on the PC. For instance, if it’s setup to be an English U.K. PC for dates, times, etc is being displayed in English U.K. format I may not want a regular Local User to be able to go in and mess around with all those settings and convert it to German or French or something like that. So a Local Account doesn’t mean that a user can do anything they like. What they can do can normally be very finely controlled by a person called the Administrator, and I’ll talk about the Administrator a little bit later on. So if somebody with a Local Account can use the machine the Local Account only applies to this current PC. It’s not an Account they can log in to on another device. It’s just the account they have on this machine. It lets them login, do certain things, log out again, and that’s it. So now let me talk about the third type of account, and the third type of account is a Microsoft Account. Now a Microsoft Account is sort of like a very special type of Domain Account. But the domain in this case is not a private business network as such. It’s the Hotmail, Windows Live set of accounts that people use to access Microsoft Mail and other Microsoft Services. So if


Learn Windows 8 you have a Microsoft Account and many people do, you can use that Microsoft Account to access this device. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean that you can do anything you like on this device and you’ll still need to get the Administrator of this device to give you an account in the first place. But you can connect your account on this device to your Microsoft Account and that gives you some very specific and very useful advantages. One of the advantages is that let’s suppose you have three or four machines that you use.

Let’s suppose you’ve got tablet

computer, a laptop PC, perhaps you have access to a machine at work, and what you’d really like to do is to synchronize the settings on those devices to the extent that they can be synchronized. If you have an account on each of the devices that is linked to your Microsoft Account, you can sync the settings on those machines by logging in using your Microsoft Account.

Now I’ll

demonstrate this to you a little bit later on, but basically if I access this machine using my Microsoft Account, if I log into another machine using the same Microsoft Account, I can pretty much transfer my Settings between the two machines. So I can have them setup in the same way. Now there’s a very important thing to warn you about in this. If I’ve got a particular application on this PC that I use when I’m logged in using my Microsoft Account, this doesn’t mean that that application will automatically be installed on another device that I use. This doesn’t extend to making sure that an application installed on one machine is or isn’t installed on another one. It’s really synchronizing the settings, not the apps or applications that you’re able to run. The apps and applications that are installed on those Windows 8 devices are local to those devices. We’re only talking about synchronizing the settings. So the third type of account, the Microsoft Account is a way of synchronizing settings on the devices that you use that run Windows 8. So I’ve talked about the three main types of account. Within those types, particularly within the Local Account type there are a couple of other things that I need to tell you about, but I’ll come back to that later. What I want to do now is to talk about the Administrator Account because it’s a very important one to be aware of. If you have installed Windows 8 by upgrading from an earlier version of Windows, you’re probably aware of what an Administrator Account is and you should already have one setup. If you’ve installed Windows 8 from scratch, you may even not be aware of what an Administrator Account is. Well when you did the installation and initial setup you will have been asked to create an initial account. You may only have that one account on your device. That account by default is an Administrator Account. There is always an


Learn Windows 8 Administrator Account and that one will be the account that can do anything you want to on your device. Now if you’re the only person that’s ever going to use that device, you’ve set it up with Windows 8, you’ve setup an account which you now have been told is an Administrator Account. You really can just carry on using the Administrator Account if you want to and provided you don’t do any damage to your device in terms of deleting or unsetting things you don’t want to you don’t really need to setup another account. If it were me, I probably would setup another account just for me because I like to keep the Administrator Account for doing dramatic things and to avoid being able to do dramatic things accidentally. But if you’ve got other member of the family or friends or maybe you are setting this up for work and you need two or three people to share a device, it is not a good idea to let people login with an Administrator Account who are not intended to be able to do dramatic/drastic things to the device. Keep the Administrator Account available only to people who know what they’re doing, which may only be you. So you’re going to want to setup New Accounts for other people and they probably won’t be Administrator Accounts.

They’ll probably be regular Local User

Accounts. So what I’m going to do now is to login on this device as the Administrator and just bear in mind what you can see here on PC Settings: Your Account, Connect your Microsoft Account, Sign-in options, Create a picture password, Other Users, and so on.

I’m going to login as the

Administrator now and you’ll see that the Administrator appears to be able to do a few other important things as well. So I’m going to login now as the Administrator. So I click on User Tile on the Start Screen. One of the options I’m given there is to Switch Account. I could sign out of this Account if I wanted to and then unlock the PC and log back in as the Administrator. But I’m going to do Switch Account. When I click Switch Account, you won’t be able to see the contents of my screen anymore until I’ve logged in.

I know the Administrator Account on this machine.

Obviously, I know the password. It won’t be the same as the Administrator Account and password on your machine. You should know what that is. If you’ve got a new installation it will be the Default Account that you setup when you installed. Accounts, log back in, and then go back into PC Settings, Users.


So I’m going to Switch

Learn Windows 8 Now I mentioned just now that when I login as the Administrator and I am now logged in as an Administrator, I can do things that I can’t do as a regular Local User, and the main things that I can do are to maintain the other users. So for instance, I can add a New User and if I go down to the bottom here, I can manage the existing users. Now this particular PC is part of a business network as I mentioned, so the users are actually Domain Users, although most of these people are setup with Local Accounts. I’ll go into this quickly now and show you basically what happens. Then I’m going to carry on in the next section by looking at this same issue on a machine that isn’t part of a domain and which will show you how the management of users looks probably after you’ve newly installed Windows 8 on a machine that isn’t part of a Business Domain. So, first of all, then let’s just go into Manage Domain Users. That takes us into this list of User Accounts. The user names corresponding to the names that you’ve seen. If you hover over a name, you get a tool tip which is effectively Carol H. there says Full Name Carol Hardy, Comment, Marketing Department Manager. If I select a user and click on Remove, I can remove the user’s access from this machine. Select another user. Not only could I remove that user but I can also reset that user’s password. Similarly I can add users. Now adding users and going through some of the setup for users is what we’re going to cover in the next section. And as I said I’m going to run this on a different device to show you something that’s probably a little bit more like what you’ll see if you’ve got a new installation of Windows 8. So please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Adding Users, Changing Password, and Creating a Picture Password and a Pin Toby: So now I’m logged into a different PC running Windows 8 and on this one the TobyA Account is the only account on the machine. And if you’ve just installed Windows 8, this is probably much more like what you can see in front of you. Now TobyA is a Local Account but because it’s the only account, it must be the Administrator. Note that TobyA can be switched to a Microsoft Account. I’ll come back to that in a little while. And TobyA also has a number of options, Change Password, Create a picture password, Create a pin, and because TobyA is the Administrator, TobyA can set certain options in terms of people waking up the PC. So for instance here, any user who has a password must enter it when waking this PC. Toby also has the option to add users. So, let’s look at what happens in this situation where we only have a single user, TobyA. So let’s start by adding a user. Click on Add User. By default, the assumption in Windows 8 is that you want to add a user using their Microsoft Live ID, their Microsoft Live Account which would include say Hotmail Account. I’m not going to add that sort of user at the moment. I’m going to talk about Microsoft Accounts in a little while but at this point I’m going to add a regular Local User. So the option right at the bottom of the screen here, Sign-in without a Microsoft Account. And Add a User; there are two options for signing in. It explains the differences between Microsoft Account and Local Account, and to be honest there is quite an effort here to persuade you in the direction of using a Microsoft Account. But I will persevere. I’ll say Local Account, and then I have some details to enter. Now I’m going to enter my name again. This is going to be my Non-Administrator Account. So I’m going to use me as the user but I’m going to just call myself on this occasion TobyA2. The last thing I put is a password hint, which is what my machine will display to remind me what my password is. Now you won’t understand what that hint means but it means something to me. So when I’ve filled in those details, I click on Next and then the following user will be able to sign in to this PC. It’s TobyA2. It’s a Local Account. Is this a child’s account? Turn on Family Safety. I’m going to talk about Family Safety later on. So I’m going to leave that unchecked for now and click on Finish. Now that means that I now have a second account at the bottom, a Local Account, TobyA2. So I’ve successfully added that account.


Learn Windows 8 Now I’ve set that Account up for my own personal use, so I put in a password that means something to me and a password hint that means something to me. If you were setting up an account for somebody else, you would probably put in a temporary password and maybe of the hint you might say something like Please change your password because when that person then gets into that account they can login and change their own password. We’ll look at changing passwords in a moment or two. Having got that second account setup, what I’d like to do now is to login as that user and show a couple of the things that I can do as TobyA2. So now I’ve signed in as TobyA2 and it’s a Local Account. I’m now looking at PC Settings. Notice that when I’m logged in as TobyA2 which is a regular Local Account I don’t have the option to add users and I wouldn’t be able to remove users either. I can, however, on my own behalf change my password, create a picture password, or create a pin. And I can also switch to a Microsoft Account which I’m going to do in a little while. First of all, let me look at changing my password. This is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Click on change your password, type in the current password, click Next, New Password, and finally a Password Hint. Click on Next. As the Message says there, “Next time you sign in use your new password.” Now I should point out there are a couple of alternatives to using a password to log in to your account in Windows 8. One of them is to create a picture password and one of them is to create a pin. Now let’s start with create a picture password. It’s pretty straightforward. Click on create a picture password. You’ll be asked to enter your current password. That’s just, in case, you leave the PC unattended for a time, somebody comes along with perhaps with a little bit of a mischievous streak and decides to setup a new password for you while you’re perhaps just at the coffee machine. The idea of this is you have to consciously confirm your current password before making a change like this. Click on OK. Then you’re given the option to choose the picture you want to use. Now I’ve only got one picture setup here at the moment on this machine, it’s this picture of a pelican. So I’m going to use that. Which picture you use is entirely up to you. Then you say Open and the picture then opens on the screen. Now this particular picture is a big, wide picture. So, in fact, I can actually scroll it from side to side and use a different part of the picture if I want to. But I’m going to stick with the pelican. Having decided I like this picture I say, Use this picture, and then the way this works is that you draw


Learn Windows 8 three gestures on the picture. You can use any combination of circles, straight lines, and taps. So I could draw three circles, draw three straight lines, tap three times, any combination. I’m just going to click three times. I’m going to do once on the tip of its bill, once on the back of its head, once at the end of its tail. Then it says, I want you to confirm that, one, two, three. So I go one, two, three. Congratulations you’ve successfully created your picture password. Click on Finish and I now have my picture password to login. Now I suggest you have a go at that yourself and try that yourself. You’ll find that it works. That means that the password you need to log in to your account on this device you won’t have to type anything. You’ll just have to click on that picture in those three places. I’ll leave you to experiment with that one yourself. The other alternative that I can use to a password is to create a pin. So pretty much like the pin you use in an ATM machine to get cash. Create a pin. Again, need to type in my current password. Then type in a pin. A pin is a quick, convenient way to sign into this PC by using a four digit code. And Finish and I’ve got a pin setup as well. Again, I suggest you experiment with that, see how you get on with it. Now once you’ve setup a picture password and/or a pin, when you come to login you’ll actually be given sign-in options. You have a little message underneath the sign-in area that says Sign-in options and you can choose which of the three methods you want to use to sign-in on any particular occasion. So if you like quickly clicking a picture without typing go for the picture password. If you don’t have a picture password say but you’ve got a pin setup, use the pin; so plenty of options there. And as I said, well worth experimenting with for the sake of convenience. Now the last thing I’m going to do here is to switch this account to a Microsoft Account. Microsoft Accounts, as I mentioned earlier, are basically the name of the type of account that has superseded the Windows Live ID. There are several advantages in using a Microsoft Account for Windows 8 access; one of them being that you can synchronize settings across devices. There are additional advantages, particularly if you’ve used the App Store to download or purchase some apps. Now to switch to a Microsoft Account, you need a Microsoft Account first. I’ve already got one setup for this purpose. So I click on switch to a Microsoft Account. Now it’s important to remember when you’re trying to setup a Microsoft Account or Switch to a Microsoft Account, you need a Live Internet Connection to do this because as you do it,


Learn Windows 8 Windows 8 will check that your Microsoft Account is a valid one and also the password you will use to login when this becomes Microsoft Account is your Microsoft Account Password. So it needs to know that as well. It needs to be able to check that as well. So I’ve got a current Local Account. So I type in my password for that, click on Next. Now Sign-in with a Microsoft Account. Use your favorite e-mail address to sign-in to Windows. If you’re all ready, use an email address to sign into PC’s running Windows enter it here. So, let me put, that’s it. When you sign-in to Windows with a Microsoft Account, you can download apps from Windows Store, get your online content in Microsoft Applications automatically and sync settings online to make PC’s look and feel the same. Click on Next. It will now verify my Microsoft Account. If I’ve already got another device setup using that account, which I haven’t actually, then as soon as I Login to this it will synchronize the settings between them. So it seems to have found me. Let me now make sure I can remember what the password is, click Next. I think it probably likes that password, and then what it’s going to do is to ask me for some additional information. Now note I’ve left the phone number blank. You’ve almost finished changing your account. Next time you sign-in to Windows, use your Microsoft Account and password, click on Finish, and now you can see that my account is now a Microsoft Account. It says here your account. You can switch to a Local Account. I still have my picture password and my pin and other than that the other information remains the same. Now it’s important to recognize one other thing here. Your saved passwords for applications, websites, and networks won’t synchronize until you trust this PC. Now there’s a link here, Trust this PC. Then in order to go through a trusting procedure we say, Use your existing security info to help us make sure this is you. How can we contact you? Now the Name of this particular device is Aguila, which is Spanish for eagle, more or less. This e-mail address is the one that is responsible for this particular device. I click on Next. Check your e-mail for a message from the Microsoft Account Team. Follow the instructions in the e-mail to confirm that Aguila is a trusted device. So I’m going to do that. So I follow the instructions in the e-mail message I got from the Microsoft Account Team and this should mean that Microsoft now will be able give me access to this machine using security information I’ve provided if I forget my access details. So follow the instructions. Let’s click on OK. This will then check that it’s happy with what I did. Because you’re accessing sensitive info, you need to verify your password. So let me just type the password in yet again and there we are. It summarizes the information. I could add a phone


Learn Windows 8 number now. I will do that later, alternative e-mail address later as well and I already put in my mother’s birth place as a security question. So, click on OK and for other devices I go through a similar procedure to build up a list of the devices that I can access using that account. So if you’re going to use more than one device with Windows 8, I suggest you consider that as a seriously good idea using your Microsoft Account to access those devices. You will need to go through the trusting procedure on each of them, but it’s just a security measure and it has the added advantage that if you do get stuck, you lose some of your sign on information, then Microsoft will help you to get access to your device or devices. I’m now going to return to the question of what the Administrator can do and we’re going to look at that in the next section. So please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: User Management Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In the previous couple of sections, we looked at some of the general principles of User Accounts and in the second section on User Accounts, we logged in as a regular Local User, did things like change password, create picture password, create a pin, and then finally changed the Local Account to a Microsoft Account. In this section, we’re going to look at the sort of things that an Administrator can do, and if you’re the Administrator for a Windows 8 PC, you need to make sure that you can understand how to set other users up in a way that makes sure not only that the PC itself if protected from people accidentally changing or breaking things that they shouldn’t but also to make sure that people can access the things that they are allowed to access. So, first of all, let’s look at the whole question of User Management. Now an easy way into the management of User Accounts is via Control Panel. So let’s go to Control Panel and one of the options on Control Panel down here is User Accounts. Select User Accounts and I get Make Changes to your user account. Note my details on the right here: TobyA, Local Account, Administrator, Password Protected. I can change my Account Name, I can change my Account Type, or as I am the Administrator, I can manage another account. So let’s say I click on manage another account and I can see the other accounts that exist on this machine. There’s me the Administrator, there is Toby Arnott, toby.a, this is the account that I setup as a Microsoft Account earlier on in the course, and I also have a Guest Account. Now I’m going to talk about the Guest Account in a couple of minutes time and we’ve already done. Add a New User down here. Add a New User in PC Settings, that’s where we did it from. We’re going to look at Family Safety later. Let’s, first of all, look at this Guest Account. Now the Guest Account in Windows 8 is a special type of limited User Account, and the key thing about it really is that it doesn’t require and cannot have a password. Now, of course, the user can’t install software, can’t install hardware, it can’t change the type of the account, and really it is something that you can literally provide to a guest perhaps who wants to just say use some software on the device without installing anything or perhaps play a game, use browser to access the internet, that kind of thing. But it’s not intended for somebody who is going to save their work on the machine. If they do create and save files, they effectively can’t protect them


Learn Windows 8 because they cannot put a password on the account that they’re using. So if you want to give somebody access to the machine on a temporary basis or on a basis that they can’t keep anything private, then the Guest Account is actually quite a good option. Now you can see on this machine at the moment that the Guest Account is off. If I select that, Do you want to turn on the Guest Account? If you turn on the Guest Account, people who do not have an account can use the Guest Account to logon to the computer. Password protected files, folders or settings are not accessible to Guest Users. So if I wanted to provide a Guest User Account, click on Turn On and the Guest Account is now available. If you try to logon as guest, you are not asked for a password. You just logon, you are a guest. You won’t be able to make anything that you do secure or private from other people. So that’s a Guest Account. Now let’s look at the Standard Local User that we’ve got here, Toby Arnott. As Administrator, I can make changes to Toby Arnott’s account. I can setup Family Safety, which I’m going to look at later. I can change the Account Type and I can delete the account. So, if I want to change the account type, let’s select that. And the main option I have there is to change from Standard to Administrator.

If I wanted to make Toby into an

Administrator, then this is where I would do it, and administrators have complete control over the PC. They can change any settings and access all of the files and programs stored on the PC. Some people recommend having two administrators. Setup an administrator initially, hide the password to that account, make sure that you can always go back to that account if you need to, and you use a sort of working administrator, perhaps an account that other people might hear the name of but you’ve always got a backup account just in case. I think probably with Windows 8 that’s probably overkill.

But you always will have at least one administrator and that

administrator can do all of these things to all of the other accounts. I’m not going to change this Standard Account into an Administrator one on this occasion. I’m going to cancel that. The other thing I can, of course, do is delete the account. If I say delete the account, I will be, of course, asked to Confirm. So let’s go back now to the list and what I’m going to do is I am going to add another user. And I’m going to add a user who will be a junior member of the family, perhaps one of the children. That takes me back into PC Settings, Add a User. I’m going to make this user a user that signs in without a Microsoft Account. Again, it tries to persuade me to use a Microsoft Account but


Learn Windows 8 I’m going for Local Account. Jane is going to be the user. I’m going to make her password, password for the moment. Password Hint. So the password hint I’ve used there is one that when a user comes in, tries to login, and they say it says Please change from Standard. What is Standard? And I can tell them what the Standard Password is and they can change it. Click on Next. Jane has a Local Account. This is going to be a child’s account and I’ll use this account later when we talk about Family Safety. So Finish, it takes me back there, let me just go back into Manage Accounts. So let me just go back into the Manage Accounts Home Page again. Manage another account. If I click on that now, I’ll see that Jane has appeared as a password protected Local Account, and basically they’re the main changes that you can make to individual accounts. Now there is one other setting here that I’d like to draw your attention to at the moment and that’s this one, Change User Account Control Settings. This is for actually a very important setting. It doesn’t relate to individual users, it’s the way a User Account Control works overall, and I’m going to look at that later on in the course when we look at Safety and Security later. But it is a very important one and it’s one for you to watch out for, for a later part of the course. Now there’s just one other thing to look at now while I’m logged in as the Administrator. Remember that the Administrator is another user and as another user looking right back to what we looked at very early on in the course, we can actually use an Account Picture on the login screen and at certain other places in Windows 8. So I’m back into PC Settings, I’m on the Personalize option, click on Account Picture. I can Browse for a picture. That’s the only one I’ve got. Choose Image, and that is now the image that appears for the Administrator when logging in and as I say at certain other points when using Windows 8. So that’s it on User Accounts for now. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Action Center Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this short section, we’re going to look at the Action Center. If you’re an experienced Windows user, you’re probably familiar with the Windows Security Center that was introduced in Windows XP and then later improved through the lives of Vista and Windows 7. Now the Action Center is the equivalent feature in Windows 8, but has been considerably improved and I think you’ll find that it’s a valuable tool in making sure that your Windows 8 system stays secure and healthy. So what is the Action Center? Well it’s a system that reviews the state of your Windows 8 system, consistently monitoring condition or various components of it and it can help with solutions where you do come across Security or Maintenance issues. Now the sort of things that it will monitor and give advice on are Security related items, things like Virus Protection, Firewall. It will also look at the state of Windows Update. It will look at things like backups, whether your disk drives are working okay and whether you’ve got any issues with the need for additional drivers for perhaps new hardware devices and so on. It can also look at some of the topics we’ve not really looked at yet, things like File History, and whether your storage space setup is working well. They’re the sort of things that it can look for. Now let’s take a look at Action Center itself to see how we can configure it and how it notifies us of any issues. So to access Action Center, it’s this little flag which is always shown down here in the Notification area. If there are issues, current issues, you’ll see a warning attached to the Action Center notifying you that there are issues that need dealing with. So I’m going to click on Action Center to open it up. No current issues detected. You can use Action Center to review recent messages about your computer status and find solutions to problems; so, from here open Action Center. It opens up and here we can control it and we can look at any issues, also the History of issues as well. So starting around the middle here, we have the main two categories of Security and Maintenance. Let’s look at Security first. Now we have the Network Firewall is on, Windows Update is on, Virus Protection is on, Spyware and unwanted software protection is on, Internet Security Settings are OK, User Account Control is on. Now I mentioned User Account Control earlier on. We’re going to come back to that later in the course. And then we have a whole


Learn Windows 8 sequence of things that are either on and working fine or off.

So there are no specific

outstanding issues in relation to Security. In relation to Maintenance, Check for solutions to problem reports is on but there’s nothing outstanding. Automatic Maintenance, no action is needed. We’ll talk about Homegroup later. We’ll talk about File History, which is currently off, later. Drive Status, all drives are working properly. Device Software, no action is needed. So this system in terms of Maintenance is in a good condition. So we’ve just looked at these two categories of Security and Maintenance. If we want to change the Action Center Settings, there’s an option over here, Change Action Center Settings, and that tells us which aspects of Security and which aspects of Maintenance we want Action Center to keep an eye on. Now they’re all checked here. One or two things haven’t been switched on yet, so any messages at the moment aren’t really going to happen because particular feature is not enabled.

But when it is enabled virtually everything under Security, everything under

Maintenance Action Center will keep an eye on. Now let me take as a particular example, I mentioned much earlier on in the course that some people do not have Windows Update enabled because of problems getting a continuous internet connection and when they do get an Internet Connection they need to manage it carefully. If you disable Automatic Windows Update, you will constantly get messages from Action Center telling you, you need to enable Windows Update, you need to enable Automatic Windows Update. If you switch that off here, you will suppress those messages. I’m never quite sure you’ll suppress all of them, but you’ll certainly suppress most of them. Now this is a quite a valid situation where you do not want Action Center to watch that particular aspect of your system because you’ve taken a sensible, informed decision to switch Off Automatic Windows Update for good reasons that are really related to your rather difficult circumstances in terms of getting Windows Update. So you can control what you get warnings about, however, one word of warning. Don’t disable these messages just because they’re a bit of a nuisance or perhaps just because you haven’t had time to sort something out yet. If you haven’t got virus protection, you need those warnings. You cannot run a system which is online at any time without good virus protection. Now we’re going to come back and talk about that later, but don’t use this as a lazy way of avoiding being reminded


Learn Windows 8 about things you need to do. It’s very important that you do get these messages when things aren’t setup correctly and you really do need to take action to put a particular issue aright. Now the other area I want to look at quickly here is Troubleshooting, right in the middle there. Troubleshooting gives you access to some parts of Control Panel that relate to particular types of problem. Now some of these we’re going to look into later on anyway. So for instance, Programs, run Programs made for previous versions of Windows.

Some of the Desktop

Applications you may have, you may install them on a Windows 8 machine and find that they don’t run correctly, there’s some particular problem. Now in some cases, it’s possible to run those programs in a what’s called a type of Compatibility Mode where in effect, Windows 8 sort of pretends that it’s an older version of Windows and sometimes you can make those older programs run using that approach. Now, to do that, to get the Settings to get the help, etc to set that up, you click on there. Hardware and Sound Problems, Configuring Devices, using a Printer, Troubleshooting Audio Recording, Troubleshooting Audio Playback; these are links to parts of the Windows 8 system that will help you to overcome some of these problems. You also have a link here to an area to help you to connect to the internet or to access Shared Files and Folders on other computers. And then you have System and Security Settings, Fix problems with a Windows Update, Run Maintenance Task, Improve Power usage. So these are really links through to ways to help you with regular kinds of problem that you might get on your Windows 8 device. Now some of the other links in the Action Center relate to things that we haven’t looked at yet, which we’ll be looking at later in the course. These include Recovery, File History, and User Account Control Settings. There are one or two things that we won’t be looking at in great detail, such as the Windows Program Compatibility Troubleshooter. But there’s one other thing I’d like to quickly look at because this is really quite new, but you might find it at least interesting, possibly useful. And that’s to look at the Performance of your Windows 8 System; so View Performance Information. Now any of us who have had Windows PC’s over a long period of time know that one of the things that happens is that no matter how you try to look after it, it always seems to slow down. A lot of people put this down to the number of Windows Updates they get. People put this down to the fact that software as it gets


Learn Windows 8 more complex is slowing down. But you can using this Rating System in Windows 8 actually rate your computer and then you can check it over a period of time to see how it’s progressing. And then there are a number of things you can do, possibly, to either improve the performance or at least to restore some of its former performance. Now I’m not going to go into this in a lot of detail now, but the first thing you can do is to rate your computer and there’s a button here, Rate this computer. It takes a little while to run and it will rate the key system components on a scale of 1 to 9.9. Now the PC that I’m doing this recording on is not a high-powered machine. It’s a machine that’s designed to give the sort of balance whereby I can record a course like this. I’ve got plenty of disk space, video recording works okay, sound recording works okay, but it’s not say a high-performance gaming machine. So, rating this computer would not give particularly high ratings, but let’s see how it goes. So I’ll click on rate this computer and then we’ll leave it to run for a while until it’s finished. So there we are. As expected, it’s scores pretty much in the middle on most things. It’s quite low on Desktop Graphics Performance. It’s not primarily meant to be a graphics machine. It is a touch screen device and in fact this particular device I’ve been using a couple of different devices on the course so far, this particular one is touch screen and that’s one of the factors I think that can affect Desktop Graphics performance. I’ll be using some of the touch screen aspects a little bit later on in the course. You might like to run a similar exercise. You note here, View and Print detailed Performance and System Information. That’s also useful information where you can at least look at the sort of scores that you’re getting and then there are some things you can do that can help to improve that. I’m not going to go into that now. There’s some Help over here, some ideas on the left of things that you can do, including some options that we will be looking at later on. So, that’s it on the Action Center in this section and I look forward to seeing you in the next section. Bye for now.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 5 – File Explorer and File History Video: Computer: Hard Disk Drives, DVD Drive, Files and Folders Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the File Explorer. Now if you are familiar with earlier versions of Windows, you’re probably familiar with Windows Explorer and this is an application that lets you look at the folders and files on your device and lets you do a few other things as well. That has been replaced by File Explorer which largely does the same things, but it also has a dramatically changed Interface. It now uses the Ribbon Interface that you’ll probably be familiar with if you’ve used a recent version of Microsoft Office. If you haven’t used Windows Explorer before, maybe you don’t even know about the files and folders on your device. Then I’m going to do some basic explanation about files and folders, and then I’ll take File Explorer pretty much from the beginning. So whichever situation you’re in, you’ll probably find most of the content of this section useful because File Explorer as we move further through the course becomes an increasingly important tool. So, let’s take a look at the File Explorer. So what you can see in front of you at the moment is the File Explorer. It is open. You see on the header there it says Libraries. Let me close it down again. In the bottom left hand corner of the desktop, you will see a Link that lets you open File Explorer. You can see the tip over it at the moment. Click on File Explorer and it opens up. Let me just close it again. To start it from the Start Screen, let me just press the Windows key, bring up the Start Screen, start typing F, well File Explorer is the first thing it finds and, of course, that’s the other way of opening it. So pretty straightforward to start. The first thing I want to do is to explain to you this panel on the left. Now you should bear in mind that exactly what you see in File Explorer will depend on your device. So you may see things that are a little different from the ones that I see. In principle things should be the same, but you will notice some differences. Now the first thing I want to look at is Computer because you’ll certainly have Computer. So click on Computer and I can see there that my Computer has two hard disk drives. Each hard disk drive has a name and normally what’s called a Drive Letter. Now it’s almost certain that one of yours will be called Local Disk or a similar name and a Drive Letter of C:. If you’re using a PC in particular, it’s


Learn Windows 8 almost impossible that you won’t have a C: Drive. And you may or may not have other drives. You may only have a C: Drive. Now my computer has got two Hard Disk Drives. It’s got one called Local Disk C: and one called, I’ve given it the Name Aguila E:, that’s Eagle E:. This is the Drive Letter for the second drive. So I’ve got a second drive. Now, just to be completely accurate about this I haven’t actually got a second drive at all. I have only one physical disk drive inside this computer, but I’ve divided it into two parts and I’ll talk about why I’ve done that a little bit later on. It’s called partitioning. This drive has two partitions on it and I’ve got a C: partition and an E: partition. And as I say I’ll come back to that a little bit later on. For the purposes of this description for this section, just think of it as two disk drives and the disk drives are where I store all my programs and data. You may have one disk drive, you may have two, you may have three, you may have four. In fact, I’ve got more than two, but you can only see those two. And again, I’ll come back to that later on as well. Now you may say well, that’s one called C:, that one’s called E:. Why are they called that? Isn’t there a D:? Well, there is a D:. It’s my DVD Drive. DVD Read/Write Drive D:. So I’ve actually got two what are called Fixed Drives and one Removable Drive. Now each of these three drives can hold data and programs. And if you look to the left of the word Computer, there’s a little wedge that just points to the right. If I click on that once and open up, I will see that there is effectively a sort of tree structure here. Computer, and then it’s got two drives, Local Disk C:, Aguila E:. No sign of D: strangely enough. But it’s got the two drives in this sort of tree structure on the left. So where is D:? Well, what I’ve done is I’ve got a DVD and I’m just loading it into that drive and I’m now shutting the drive door. Now watch what happens to File Explorer. Now it opens up a new copy of File Explorer and in the new copy it specifically shows the DVD drive and in fact, it shows me what’s on the drive, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. I don’t actually need two copies. So let me just close that one down, go back to the original, and you’ll see that in the original, I can now see the third drive, the DVD drive. Now depending on the DVD or CD that’s inserted there, I’ll also be able to see the name. Now I talked about this panel on the left, there’s a sort of panel on the right. There’s a dividing line. If I hover over the dividing line, I get that double-headed arrow. If I click with the mouse and pull that to one side, as you’ll see, I can now see the title of the DVD that I put in. Now, of course, a DVD you put in will definitely


Learn Windows 8 not have that title. I can pretty much guarantee it, but it may be a music DVD, a data DVD, all sorts of things. That doesn’t really matter at the moment. The important thing is that you’ll normally only see a removable device listed here if it’s actually working and got whatever the removable medium is in it that it needs. So, I can now see all three of my drives. Now we come to one of the aspects of File Explorer that sometimes confuses people. It’s actually pretty straightforward but easy to be confused. If you look at what’s on the left, I’ve got Computer selected. You can see it’s just about highlighted there. If I hover over it, the highlighting is more obvious. But if I move away you can still see that what’s selected on the left is Computer. And whatever is selected on the left, the contents of that are what you see on the right. Now on Computer, there are three drives as we’ve already seen. If I select one of the drives, say this one, Local Disk C:, I will see what is on C:. So let me just click C: and what I have on C: is a number of folders and a number of files. The folders I can tell by the little folder symbols, it’s just like a little yellow folder, a golden yellow colored folder, just opened out a little, and the files have different icons. Now I’m going to talk about these file icons in a bit more detail later on, but for that moment the main thing is tell the difference between a folder and a file. Now a file is an entity which can be one of many different things. It can, for instance, be a piece of music. It could be a track from an album. It could be a document, a letter to my bank. It could be a copy of an e-mail. It could be an executable program. File Explorer itself, the program that does all this is ultimately a single file, what’s called an EXE File. So there are many, many different types of file. One file contains one sort of information and it has a name. This file is called RHDSetup.log. Now the dot bit, the .log or whatever that bit is will usually tell you what sort of file it is. So if it’s .exe, E-X-E, it’s what’s called an Executable File and most programs are called .exe. They’re file names have a .exe at the end and the first part, in this case the RHDSetup part normally gives you some idea of what it is or does. So you’d probably expect something like FileExplorer.exe to be the name. Now unfortunately, that isn’t quite the name but it’s pretty close to that. So for the purposes of this exercise, let’s say we would expect File Explorer to be called FileExplorer.exe. Whereas my letter to the bank might be called something like LetterToTheBank.doc or LettersToTheBank.docx, depending on which version of Microsoft Word I’ve written it in. So these are the files.


Learn Windows 8 The folders on the other hand are part of the tree structure on my Drive C:. So on my Drive C:, I’ve got two files and I’ve got some folders. Now let’s look at what a folder is and does. So let’s just recap. We go to the top. If I select Computer, Computer is like the top of the tree, it’s the very tip of the Christmas tree if you like. Below that, you need to imagine a tree lying on its side by the way, the next level you have the three devices: Drive C:, Drive D:, and Drive E:. If I click on Drive C:, I see what’s on Drive C:. It’s got half a dozen folder and a couple of files. If I now expand C:, I click on that little wedge to the left of Local Disk C:, what I will see is the next level in the tree. And the next level in the tree is that list of folders. So below the three drives, below one of them I’ve got seven folders. Now each of these folders is a container and each of them can contain other files and folders. So, let’s take the first one. On Drive C:, I’ve got a folder called Intel. Let me select Intel on the left, and what Intel has got is two more folders inside it. Let’s expand Intel. So click on the little wedge there next to Intel and notice that one of those folders, Extreme Graphics has also got a little wedge. So let’s choose Extreme Graphics. It’s got a wedge. There is actually only one folder but let’s do the wedge anyway. Let’s select that and hey we’ve got another folder, expand, select that, and eventually we get a message saying, This folder is empty. Now that may not be quite as silly as it seems. I’ll come back to that point a little bit later on as well. But the important point here is that you have this tree structure, this sort of cascade starting at the top Computer, on the Computer I’ve got a C: Drive, in the C: Drive, I’ve got an Intel folder, in the Intel folder I’ve got an Extreme Graphics folder, in that I’ve got CUI folder, in that I’ve got a Resource folder, and the Resource folder is Empty. Now each of these other folders on the C: Drive also continues the tree structure. Now Program Files, if I click on that, has many, many folder inside it, and some of the folders include things like Windows Media Player, Microsoft Office, Windows Photo Viewer.

You can

probably guess what these folders are to do with and the files in Windows Photo Viewer, you have a number of files related to Photo Viewer. So, you can see the basic idea of this sort of tree structure. Now anytime you’ve got that tree structure expanded say on Drive C:, if you want to contract, compress, collapse part of it. So if I want to collapse, I just click on the wedges again. I can progressively collapse and, in fact, if I want to collapse the whole of Drive C:, I just click on the wedge next to Drive C: and Drive C: is completely collapsed again.


Learn Windows 8 So finally in this section, I’d like to look at the thing that causes people quite a bit of confusion and it’s important that you understand this aspect of File Explorer before we move on. I’ve collapsed Drive C: here and if you look at the right hand panel here of File Explorer, you can see three files. If you look without too much care at the left hand panel you might think, oh look it’s Drive C:, it’s got three files on it because C: seems to be selected because it’s highlighted and there’s three files on the right. But it’s not as straightforward as that. You have to be very careful when you look at this View because to see where those three files are you’d need to expand again C:. So let me just click on the wedge again to expand it and then if I go down the list, I can see which folder within C: is highlighted because that’s the one that’s got these three files in it. So the fact that C: is highlighted doesn’t necessarily mean that that is exactly where these three files are because these three files are in a folder which is further down the tree structure to the Drive C: itself. If I selected C: itself by clicking on C:, then I would see what’s actually in C:. And as we saw earlier what’s actually on C: is seven folders and two files. And in fact, if I go down those folders again, again, again, I’d eventually find the one that had the three files in that we looked at just now. So this is the area where people easily get confused with File Explorer. What people don’t realize is that what you’ve got selected on the left is important because that tells you where what you’re looking at on the right is. But sometimes what appears to be the selection on the left can be confusing. What’s actually selected is something further down the tree. So you need to be careful of that one because from now on File Explorer is going to be an important part of our tool kit for working with Windows 8. So if you’ve not used Windows before or you’ve not looked at this kind of aspect of Windows before, I hope that that basic look at the File Explorer has helped to explain files and folders to you. We’ve got quite a lot more to cover yet, including some more about File Types and Folders and Libraries, which are something else altogether. But in the next section, I want to look at the left hand panel, what are these other things in the left hand panel and also a little bit more about File Explorer itself. So, please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Network, Libraries, and Favorites Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. This is the second section on the File Explorer, a very important tool from now on in terms of managing the files, folders, etc on our devices. Before we move on to look at the rest of this left panel, let’s have a little bit of revision and see if you can remember how to do this. I showed you how to start the File Explorer from the desktop in the last section. Can you remember how to add a tile for the File Explorer to the Start Screen? Well, one way of doing it is to go to All Apps, find File Explorer, and from there pin it to the Start Screen. To get to All Apps very quickly there is a keyboard shortcut that you may remember, that’s Windows-Q. It brings up apps. You can either do a Search or you can start typing. So if I type F, there’s File Explorer. If I were to click that now, I would open File Explorer. But if I right click it, brings up the Charms at the bottom. One of them is pin to start. And if I were to look at Start now, I would see File Explorer on it. So click on the Windows key, to the Start Screen, go across from the Start Screen, and the last item there right over here on the right is File Explorer. And as we saw before I can rearrange the tiles if I want to. So now I want to talk about the other items in this left hand panel and I’m going to begin with Network. Network covers quite a few situations nowadays and you may be part of a network without even realizing it. Earlier on in the course one of the devices that I used was a Business PC connected to a Business Network. That really was part of a conventional type of Windows Server-based Network. But nowadays, you can become part of a network at home merely by sharing a connection to the internet. So if you and other people in the family perhaps are using different PCs, laptops, tablets, etc to connect to the internet via a router of some device, then you may already be part of a network. Now as you should have worked out by now this little wedge on the left is important. To expand the network that this device is connected to, I click on that and Windows 8 sometimes takes a moment or two to figure this out if it’s got quite a big area to cover. But there are in fact currently four devices connected to the network that I’m on. Now the network that I’m on is actually only there because we are sharing a connection to the internet. But it’s still a network and there are still certain things that I can do with and on that network. Now I’m going to return to the question of networks a bit later on in the course we’re going to talk quite a bit about networks, how to set them up, how to use them, and so on. When you click


Learn Windows 8 on Network in File Explorer, of course, you should expect to see something different from me and, in fact, if you see nothing at all don’t be surprised, particularly if you’re looking at this at home and you’d only have one device you’d probably be a little bit concerned if you clicked on that and found another device part of your network. It might well mean that one of your neighbors is using your connection to the internet, which is probably not what you intended. Now going back to what I said earlier on about selection on the left, one last thing to look at here. When I expanded the network to see these four other devices, what I didn’t do was to actually click on Network. Let me click on Network now. And what you will see is the four devices, four other computers, or four computers in total, media devices – I’ll come back to those later on, which are related to the current machine, and then my device for connection to the internet. It’s called a BT, British Telecom that is, BT Home Hub. So, they are the devices that are on my network and with each of those I could go into it and look at it in more detail. But as I say, we’ll come back to networking later on. There is a very special kind of network. In fact, it’s a little bit more than a network in a way and that is I think called a Homegroup. A Homegroup is very often a good way of setting things up either at home or perhaps in a small office environment. We’re going to look at Homegroup later on in quite a bit of detail. Let’s just click on Homegroup now. Homegroup is something you really have to setup in Windows 8. It tells you a bit on the right here about what you can do. It enables you to share files and printers, and I suppose the most obvious use for this in a Home context is to share a printer. In my house we have one main printer of which actually sits under the stairs and all of the computers in the house connect to it and print on that one printer. They can also use it as a scanner and so on. But apart from sharing printers, you can also share files. So if you all say want to access the same music files or you want to save letters to and from members of the family in the same place, you can share files using a Homegroup as well. So, I’ll come back to Homegroup later on as well. Now the next item I want to look at here is Libraries and Libraries are pretty important and very often important in a Home context, although in a business context they can be very useful as well. Libraries are sort of special folders, but they’re a little bit more than that. Let’s suppose that you like to share music with members of the family at home but you also have some music that nobody else likes and you perhaps wouldn’t want them to listen to anyway. You can keep


Learn Windows 8 some music in a private place and you can keep some music in a public place. But on your computer, the music can all appear together under Music. Now in Windows 8, there are four Libraries setup: Document Library, Music Library, Picture Library, Video Library. And if I click on the wedge next to Music to expand Music, you’ll see it actually has two folders in it, My Music and Public Music. Now the Public Music as the name implies is music that is shared with other people. You can still restrict access to it in a way that we’ll see later, but it’s Public. It’s in a folder, physically in a folder that can be shared with other people. My Music is my private personal music that I wouldn’t normally share with other people. Now from the point of view of being able to listen to the music, I can think of the music here as being my Music Library. It’s a library that contains both private music and public music. Now the same goes for Pictures. The same goes for Videos. The same goes for Documents. So these Documents Library, Music Library, Pictures Library, Videos Library are a special case where we can basically see content from different physical folders in one place and it gives us a very flexible way of setting up these things on Windows 8. Now the other thing I’d like to point out and we’re going to come back to this a little bit later on as well, is that when you select certain things, so for instance I’ve got this Music Folder selected here. You get additional commands at the top of File Explorer. The Music Library when you have it selected brings up commands that are called the Library Tools and other commands that are called the Music Tools. And we’re going to look at those in a later section as well. So they are the four libraries that you’re setup with in Windows 8 by default. Now the last item I’d like to look at is Favorites. Let’s just expand Favorites. Favorites is selected so we can see on the right there are three entries: Desktop, Downloads, and Recent Places. Now notice that with each of these items on the right under the name, so for instance Desktop, it says Shortcut. This is a shortcut to the Desktop. If I click on this, I get Shortcut Tools, I’ll come back to those later. If I double click, it basically takes me to the Desktop. Now the Desktop here is really a term for a collection of various folders. So for instance it has a link here to the Recycle Bin. Visible on the Desktop behind here, of course, is the Recycle Bin, but this will take me into the Recycle Bin to look at items that I have deleted but have not permanently been deleted from the system yet. I then have links to the network. I can get through to Control Panel. I can get to my Homegroup, my Libraries, and so on. So that’s really


Learn Windows 8 a set of links through to key aspects of my Windows 8 system. The second item under Favorites is Downloads and this is really the default location for downloaded items, things that I download from the internet that I want to use; Software Updates, perhaps particular Pictures, and I can store those in the download area. When you do Downloads, generally speaking, you can store them in a selected location. You don’t have to use this one. But this is the default and sometimes it’s best to download them to this default location and then move them to where you want later on. The third item here is Recent Places. This can be very useful because it gives you shortcuts to places you’ve recently visited. Now by this it will mean, for instance, a folder where you’ve got a document that you’ve been editing recently. Now that means that if you know you were working in a particular folder and it was way down in the tree structure under your Computer somewhere and you just want to quickly go to the place where that document, that folder was, it’ll be on this shortcut list here. So that’s Favorites. So in this section and the previous one, we’ve concentrated on looking at the information that we can get in File Explorer. There’s quite a lot more information that we can get. But it’s time really now to start to do some things with it and the first thing I want to do is to point out a couple of particular things to be wary of when you’re working with File Explorer. One of them is that there are many, many things you can do in many situations and Contextual Menus play a big part in the use of File Explorer. Let me give you an example. Let’s go back to Computer. Let’s expand the C: Drive again and right click on one of the folders. Now a Contextual Menu pops up. This will vary a little depending on your installation, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. But there are various things that you can do. For instance, you could pin this folder to the Start Menu. So if you had a particular folder on your computer, maybe one holding a particular set of photos, maybe one with some documents you’re working on for to prepare a presentation perhaps for school or for work, then if you pin that to the Start Menu from here, that will give you single click or single tap access to that folder. You also have the option here of sharing this folder. Now we’re going to look at Sharing and the Homegroup later on. You can see things like Stop Sharing, Share with Jane, and so on. You also have the option of including the folder in a library, including the option to create a New Library. In my case, I have Norton Internet Security installed on this device and I can scan this folder for viruses. Now depending on what you’ve got selected the right click, the Contextual Menu, may


Learn Windows 8 enable you to do many different things and we are going to be using some of those in the rest of the course. But that’s something to be very aware of. And finally while we’re talking of things to be very aware of, looking at Computer again I did mention to you earlier on that I physically got just one disk but it’s split in two. Now the way it’s split in two is using one of the tools that comes with Windows 8.

It’s called Disk

Management, and you can use it to split a large disk, and most modern computers have very large disks, into two or more parts. Now if I go back to talking about the C: Drive, when you get a new machine with lots of programs including Windows 8 itself installed, it’ll all normally be installed on a C: Drive. If you accidentally delete anything on that drive, if you go into the Folder Program Files or this one Program Files X86 or even worse into the folder that’s called Windows, delete something, rename something, accidentally move something somewhere else, the chances are you will either make your whole system stop working or you will at least make a particular program stop working or a particular feature of the system stop working. You may give yourself a lot of aggravation and we’re going to look at recovering from that sort of problem later in the course. But ideally you don’t want that to happen. Now one way of potentially reducing the chance of that happening is to never store your data on the C: Drive; to put your data somewhere else. So the area that you generally work with is not the C: Drive. Now if you’re an experienced Windows User, you’ll know that well actually that’s probably not quite true because your private folders, the ones that are part of your use of Windows and that may well be hidden from you. You may not even be aware of them. They are on the C: Drive, they’re hidden in a little part of the C: Drive that most people or certainly most other people won’t have access to. But in terms of the bulk of the work that you do, let’s suppose you do a lot of letter writing or that you handle a lot of photos, videos, you do video editing, photo editing, and so on, it’s much safer to put all of that data on to another drive. In my case my E: Drive. So I’ve created a drive on this PC which I only use for data and really on a day to day basis whenever I use this particular computer it’s the E: Drive that I put all the data on. I avoid the C: Drive completely. It’s sitting there. All the programs are on it. Windows is running on it. It’s very busy, but subject to the caveat just now about private Folders on the C: Drive that many users aren’t aware of, I avoid putting any data on the C: Drive. Now I must admit I do use the Download folder and that is on the C: Drive, but that’s more or less it really.


Learn Windows 8 Other than that everything is on the E: Drive. Now on this course I’m not going far enough to show you how to partition your drive, but you can get the instructions off the internet, perhaps you’ve got a knowledgeable friend who can do it for you. In many cases nowadays, new machines come with drives partitioned anyway or you could have a second drive, a completely physically separate drive. But I do recommend that you avoid working on the C: Drive, which is normally the drive that has your Windows system and your apps, application programs on it. So, in this section we’ve covered a lot of the other aspects of File Explorer and indeed the system that you’re using. In the next section, we’re going to start to use File Explorer and we’re going to look at the new Ribbon Interface. So please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: The Ribbon Interface – Part 1 Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the things we can actually do with the File Explorer. These are very important because you’re going to be using these tools and techniques throughout the rest of the course and I want to start now by talking about the Ribbon Interface. Now the first thing I’m going to do is if you see this little chevron here under the red X in the corner, then that points downwards and the tip on it says Expand the Ribbon. Click on Expand the Ribbon and I see the Ribbon. Now the Ribbon is what’s called a highly Contextual Interface item. The current selection, the word View you see there is highlighted. This is called the View. You’re looking at the View tab, and what’s on the View tab is effectively a set of commands and options that affect the current view. Now when I clicked that chevron, the down pointing chevron, it made the Ribbon maximized, it made it visible all of the time. And if I click say on the word Share here, I see the Share tabs contents. Again, a number of commands; a number of options. And then I also have Home. Again, Commands and Options. Now with the Ribbon maximized it’s always in view. I can always see the Ribbon. I can always see what’s available. If I minimize the Ribbon, so again watch the tip there, minimize the Ribbon, the Ribbon is not always available. Now you may think well how are you going to use the commands if it’s not visible. The simple answer to that is that if you click on one of the tabs, it brings the Ribbon up and if you then execute one of the commands, so let’s say that I did something like Details Pane, the Ribbon disappears again. It only stays visible for basically the duration of one command, executing one command, and then it disappears again. Now for the purposes of what we’re going to do here, I am going to keep the Ribbon maximized so that you can see what’s going on at any time. But in normal use, I normally have the Ribbon minimized. You’ll find it a lot easier to work with the Ribbon minimized when you’re used to using it. So, let me just maximize it again. I clicked Details Pane just now. This made this third panel over here visible. You can see it’s highlighted now. Let me click it again and it’ll hide that panel. So that’s what the Ribbon basically looks like. Now I said just now that I was going to work with the Ribbon maximized all the time so I will. And I also said that the Ribbon is highly Contextual. Now currently, I have the Favorites item © Copyright 2008-2012 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Windows 8 selected here in File Explorer. Let me go down to Libraries and select Music. What happens is that two more tabs appear. There is a Library Tools tab and a Music Tools tab. Now, if I click on the Library Tools Tab Manage it gives me some tools, some commands and options to let me manage my Music Library as a library. It also gives me Music Tools Play tab and that gives me the play controls for my music. Now this is really what it amounts to when you’re talking about it being contextual. The approach that the Ribbon gives you is that the commands that are available to you are the ones that you can use dependent on the particular item that you have selected in, in this case, File Explorer. Now there’s a second aspect of that which is also very important. If you notice, there’s a Play Control, a Play All Control, a Play To, and Add to Playlist. They are all actually grayed out. I couldn’t press any of them. Why could I not press any of them? Well, because although I’m in the Music Library, I’ve not actually got a piece of music selected. If I’d gone into the My Music folder and found a song, once I’d highlighted that song I would’ve been able to play it. So, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to put a piece of music into that folder and then you’ll see that those controls are no longer grayed out. Now once I get an item in that folder and it’s actually a music item, there are various ways you can tell something is a music file. The file extension usually gives it away. This is a particular music file with an extension of M4A, but you will see others and we’ll talk about those later. Once I’ve got what looks like a piece of music in, then the Play Control and the Play All Controls become highlighted and if I click on Play, that piece of music should Play. (Music playing – Autumn People) So that really explains what contextual means. The other thing that’s worth noticing is that when I selected the piece of music although I kept the Music Tools, the Play tab, I lost the Library Tools tab because I was no longer pointing at a library, I was pointing at a particular item in that library. So, the tabs will vary depending on the selection and what is enabled and what is grayed out on each of the tabs will also vary depending on the selection and on the particular situation I’m in at the time.


Learn Windows 8 Now the system of using the Ribbon and the Context Sensitive tabs has completely replaced the old Menu system. So there’s no longer a Menu system. You can see what looks like a File tab at the left, but the File actually this has a rather special purpose here in that if you click on File, you’ll see that there are some other options there, Command options. We’ll look at one or two of those later. One or two of them are obvious like Help. One or two of them are not so obvious like Open Windows PowerShell. You may or may not be familiar with Windows PowerShell. We probably won’t cover that at all on this course. And there is, of course, a Close Button. But the other thing up in the top left hand corner here is the other part, normally where the Ribbon has been implemented by Microsoft, they’ve also implemented what’s called a Quick Access Toolbar, which is a simple system whereby some of the things that you do most often are on this little toolbar in the top left corner here. Now if I click on the little drop down arrow, you will see that there are lists of about half a dozen commands: Undo, Redo, Delete, Properties, New Folder, Rename, and only two of those are checked at the moment; Properties which is that one and New Folder which is that one. If I wanted to make the command to delete a file or a folder visible on what’s called the Quick Access Toolbar in the top corner, there I can check it now and it now appears. So if I go to piece of music selected and I quickly wanted to delete it, I’ve got the Delete Command on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now I should point out that that doesn’t determine whether I can delete that file or not. It only determines whether it’s on the Quick Access Toolbar. If I went to the Home tab, there’s a Delete button there I could use and in fact on the Contextual Menu that flies out from the right here, there’s a Delete option there as well. So I’m not making it possible to delete that file and I couldn’t delete it before. I’m just putting a simple command on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now apart from enabling and disabling the commands that are here, I can decide whether to put the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon instead of above it and, in fact, I can customize the Quick Access Toolbar. I’m not going to do that on this course, but it’s certainly something you could experiment with yourself if you wanted to have a different set of commands along this little top left hand corner of the File Explorer Window. So let’s take a look at one or two of the things we can actually do using the commands on the tabs. We’re going to be using several of these in the rest of the course, so I’m only going to show you a couple here just to give you an idea. Let’s suppose I wanted to make a copy of this


Learn Windows 8 song. If the song is selected, one of the commands that’s available on the Home tab is copy. If I click on Copy, look at the tip there, copy the selected items to the clipboard, and it gives me a copy. So press that and I’ve made a copy. Nothing visible happens but it’s copied to the Windows Clipboard. If you’re not familiar with the Windows Clipboard, it’s a part of the system that you can’t normally see, but you can keep copies of things there. If I now click Paste, that takes whatever’s on the clipboard and puts it in the current location. So let me do paste. Now when I do a paste, Windows will not just give me another file with the same name as that one because you can’t have two files with the same name in the same place. So it makes a copy of the song Autumn People, Autumn People-Copy is a new copy. It’s exactly the same song. If I played that it would play exactly the same as the other one. If having made the copy I decide, “Oh hang on a minute, I didn’t want that.” That’s a mistake. One of the other commands up here on the Home tab is Delete, and if I delete, it moves the selected item to the Recycle Bin. So I’m going to click on delete and that item has now disappeared. Now we’ll look at the Recycle Bin later and you’ll see that if you accidentally delete something, you can usually recover it. But most of the time hopefully when you Delete things you actually intend to delete them and that’s how you do it with one of the commands on the Home tab. Now let me select that song again and one of the other things I might want to do with it instead of making a copy of it is to move it somewhere else. Now there are a couple of ways of doing this. The way I’m going to do it is probably the most traditional way with Windows and that is I am going to cut it. So having selected it, I click Cut and this moves the item to the clipboard. It’s a bit like Copy; the difference is that it’s moved to the clipboard. I can, in fact, still see it here, but when I Paste it somewhere else, it will be gone from here. Now this is currently in the My Music folder, the Private Music folder. I’m now going to select the Public Music folder and do a paste, and you won’t be surprised to see that Autumn People has appeared in the Public Music Folder. If I go back to My Music, I’ll see that it’s gone. So that’s doing that using the Cut and Paste approach. Let’s go back to Public Music, select Autumn People again, and look at another way of doing it which is Move To, move the selected items to the location of your choice. Click on the down arrow Moves To, it gives me a whole load of options. These are basically other locations,


Learn Windows 8 locations I’ve used recently and so on. If I just want to choose a location, I click on Choose Location, and it lets me go down through the structure, the tree structure on my computer, and move it elsewhere. Or alternatively if I’ve got another device somewhere else on the Network, I can move it to there. So I’m not going to move this at the moment, but Move To and Copy To are good alternatives to doing a Cut and Paste and doing a Copy and Paste. Now there are many other things we can do using the commands on the Home tab. We also have some commands on the Share tab, the View tab, and we’ve already seen the quite short Play tab when we’ve got Music selected, and we’ll be coming back to many of these later on. But I’d quickly like to look at one other thing here and that is that if you go to the Recycle Bin, I can see the Recycle Bin in the top left hand corner there. Let me just double click on that to open the Recycle Bin. It opens the Recycle Bin. Now the Recycle Bin is pretty much a special case of the File Explorer and the Recycle Bin Tools includes one tab, a Manage tab. Now amongst the things you can do in the Manage tab are to empty the Recycle Bin. The Recycle Bin is basically there for things you’ve deleted. I think of it rather like the bin outside my house. I put things in the bBin and I suppose that in theory I could go out and get them back in again if I wanted to. But every Wednesday the garbage men come, the rubbish disposal men come with a big truck, empty the bin and take it away. Now once that’s gone there’s not really any chance of ever getting something back. So when I put something in the Recycle Bin, it’s a bit like putting it in the bin outside my house. I’ve got perhaps a few days then to just say, well, do I really want to get that back? Now in the case of this song, Autumn People-Copy, it’s in the bin outside but the garbage men haven’t been since I put it there. So if I select that item, I can actually restore it. So if I right click it and click on Restore, it disappears from the Recycle Bin. Let me close the Recycle Bin, and if I go back into My Music, as if by magic it’s back in My Music again. So that’s what you can do with the Recycle Bin. Just to follow up on that point, let me select that same song again. I’m going to click the Delete button here, go into Recycle Bin, there is the song back in the Recycle Bin. If I right click there and say Delete, this is the equivalent of the trash bin emptying people coming. Once I delete from here, it’s gone forever, there is no way of getting it back. So click Delete, that has really gone once I confirm. Click on Yes and that’s gone forever. I can’t get it back. Close the Recycle Bin. I’m back at File Explorer. The folder here is empty.


Learn Windows 8 Now I just have one or two more things to talk about in File Explorer. So we’ve got one more section. It’ll be quite a short section and that’s the next one. So I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: The Ribbon Interface – Part 2 Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. This is the fourth section on the File Explorer in Windows 8. We’ve spent quite a bit of time on it because it’s so important and in fact even when we’ve got to the end of this section there will still be two or three areas of it that we won’t have looked at. But I’m going to cover those in subsequent sections, particularly when we’re looking at the Photos App and the Video App later on in the course. But there are a couple of other things I particularly want to cover now and one of these is to talk to you about the View tab. So let’s click the View tab. Now let’s look at the sort of things that we can control with the View tab. First of all, if you look at the first section of the Ribbon which says Panes, we can choose whether we show a Preview Pane. A Preview Pane appears on the right and relates to the selected item. If I wanted to listen to that song, I could double click on this and I would get a Preview. It would basically play the song for me. Depending on what the item is here that will determine what’s shown in the Preview Pane. The Details Pane gives me details about the file itself. So it tells me technical information about the file, but it also allows me to rate the file, find the size of the file, and then I can have information about things like version numbers and so on; a little bit more on that later on. If I go back to showing the Preview Pane, and then switch the Preview Pane off, I’m back to just this standard display.

Now in this standard display, I can display any of the pieces of

information I have about this file. Now this file is a song, but there are many other types of file I may have. I may have a letter or a spreadsheet or an executable file, a program, all sorts of things. But I’ll have several pieces of information, potentially, about any file, and I can choose which pieces of information I display in this pane here. Now, let me just right click where it says Contributing Artist and you’ll see a list of the pieces of information that I might have or I might use on this particular file. Now the fact that I choose to show something doesn’t necessarily mean that it has a value in there. In this case, clearly, the album that this song has come from is not shown. I’ll be looking at that later on. But at present it’s not setup correctly on this device. There are many other fields such as the date this file was


Learn Windows 8 modified, the name of the album artist, the genre, the year, and then under More, there’s an even longer list of pieces of information I might have about a file. So if I want to change what’s shown, for instance, supposing I don’t want to show Contributing Artist, all I need to do is to uncheck the box, it’s no longer shown, and now because that’s been taken away some of the other things have slid into view. There is more information shown. If I use the scroll bar down there, I can scroll over to see other fields that are shown. And, of course, I can add fields, take them away, and so on. So in that way I can control the information that I see in File Explorer about each of the files. In addition to that I can do things like given that the information is in columns, I can change the width of the columns. So if I want a bit less space for the titles, I hover the mouse over the right hand edge of the header on the title column where the drop down is and you see the change, say put the cursor change to a vertical bar, and then a horizontal bar with arrows either end, black cross really with arrows to the left and right. And with that and the mouse button held down, I can change the width. And also if I wanted to put say date created immediately after name, I can click on the Date Created heading with the mouse, hold it down, and move it over here and put it before Album. So you can really greatly customize what’s shown in that pane. Now these sections on the Ribbon are generally called Groups. So that’s the Panes Group. This is the Layout Group, and the Layout Group is also very useful because you can change the layout of this pane. If I chose, for example, Extra Large Icons I would see Autumn People.m4a appear as a very large icon and, of course, the headphone icon there tells me that it’s a piece of music. Notice that if I want to see what a particular display is going to look like, so if I want to experiment with the options in the Layout Group, if I just hover over one, I’ll get a preview of what it would be like without actually clicking on it. So let’s try Large Icons. Let’s try medium size icons. Let’s try Small Icons. Let’s try List. Let’s try Details. Well, Details is what we started with. Let’s go for medium size icons. Now, when you’re dealing with Music, that may well be a very good way of looking for the things that you want to play. You’ve got title there, .m4a, and so on. If you went into a different part of the system, let’s say try the C: Drive. Let’s go into Program Files and let’s try Windows Mail. Now watch what happens if I do the same thing here. Note that the details that are shown about these files are different to the ones that we had where we had the music. We’ve got the Name, Date Modified, Type, Size. I could, in fact,


Learn Windows 8 of course put Contributing Artist here, but these are not Music files and all of those would definitely be empty. But let’s try hovering over some of those Layout options. Small Icons, Medium size Icons, Extra Large Icons, Large Icons, and as you can see the folders and the files take on a very different appearance depending on the layout option that you choose. Now as we go through the rest of the course, you’ll see these used in different situations and ultimately which of these you use is completely your choice. Now I’d like to briefly look at the other couple of groups here because they’re quite useful at times. The Sort By Button in the Current View Group, let’s you determine how to sort the items in the current folder. At the moment, with this particular folder they’re sorted by name in ascending order. That’s a very common sorter and basically what it means is that you’ll see the folders first and then for the files they’ll be in alphabetical order. So you can see M-S, M-S, OE, W-A, and so on. So, that’s pretty much the default setting for Sort Order. But if I wanted to sort these files by the date they were last modified, by the file type, or by size so I put the biggest or smallest ones first, I can control that by the Sort By Button in the Current View Group. Now just one or two other small items here about what we see in File Explorer. For certain types of file and .exe as I mentioned earlier, an executable as a program, somebody looking at this list of files who’s used to using Windows will know given this little icon here that that’s the icon that goes with an .exe file. There are different types of .exe file icons but you can recognize what’s an .exe file. If you don’t want to see the file extensions for the file types that Windows 8 recognizes, you can switch those off by un-checking the box up here in the Show/Hide Group of file name extensions. Switch them back on again just by checking it again. And you may notice when I hover over these, I get like a little check box appearing at the left and I can use those check boxes to indicate that I’ve selected something. So if I wanted to check those three files, that’s how I’d do it. Now I don’t actually need those check boxes and I could keep the three files selected just by selecting them like this: click one, hold the Control key down, click the next one, hold the Control key down, click the next one. They’re still selected, you just don’t see any check boxes. Now the other thing to remember here and finally in this section is that you have many situations where you may want to make a multiple selection of files in File Explorer. I chose three in succession there. If I wanted to select the bottom three instead, if I select one which would


Learn Windows 8 deselect the ones I’ve already selected, hold the Shift key down, and select another one, those two and all the files between them will be selected. Another approach, I’m going to select that first one now, it’ll deselect the others, hold the Control key down, select that one, keep the Control key held down, select that one. I can make a multiple selection where the files are not right next to each other. So these are two useful techniques for making multiple selections and particularly when you’re not using the item check boxes. If you use the item check boxes, you’d go tick that one, tick that one, tick that one. Effect is the same, the approach is somewhat different. I don’t usually use item check boxes so I’m going to switch those off. So that’s it on File Explorer for now. We spent a long time on File Explorer because it is very important and in fact there are still quite a few very important things I haven’t looked at, but I’m going to cover these over the next few sections with particular practical examples of using File Explorer to do very important things. So, please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: File History Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. Now many of the sections from now on are going to be concerned with Safety and Security. Some of them related to making sure that you don’t suffer from viruses, that you don’t suffer from somebody trying to deny you the use of your computer. But in others we’re looking at catering for situations where things go horribly wrong, your computer get stolen perhaps, you pour some orange juice all over it, or it just breaks down. And in these cases, one of the worse things that can happen is that you lose a load of data. Now earlier in the course we talked about Libraries. We’ve also looked in File Explorer about things like the Desktop, Favorites, and so on. And many of the types of data that you keep are included in this new feature of Windows 8 which is called File History. Now with File History, you can setup to automatically backup specific Libraries, etc on your Windows 8 device pretty much without thinking about it once you’ve got it setup. I don’t want you to think that you can become complacent about it, but one of the things about backups is that if they are a lot of time and trouble and you have to remember to do them and all this sort of thing, you’re less likely to do them. So what File History tries to do is to say once you’ve set this system up it’s a pretty straightforward of automating the backup as much as you can. So in this section, we’re going to look at File History. So you can get to File History via Control Panel, but let’s just type in History at the Start Screen. It’s a Setting. A little bit more, T, there we are, File History. Click on File History and it opens up, and the first thing you notice right in the middle there, File History is off. By default, File History is off when you install Windows 8. Now, when you want to use File History it basically summarizes the default situation right in the middle here. Copy files from libraries, the Desktop, Contacts, and Favorites, and the copy the files to. And what it looks for is a removable device that it can use. Now in order to demonstrate this I’ve inserted a small memory stick. It’s just a 2 GB memory stick which wouldn’t really get very far once you’ve got quite a lot of photos. But it’s perfectly good enough to demonstrate the principle here. For my main backups, I use external hard drives which typically have 500 GB or 1 TB in size. So an awful lot bigger than this. And then some of my backups are done over my internal network. But to demonstrate the principle, we’ll just use this memory stick for now.


Learn Windows 8 A little bit further up the page there it says, Keep a history of your files. File History saves copies of your files so you can get them back if they’re lost or damaged. One of the reasons that Windows 8 looks for and chooses a removable drive is that to a large extent, if you were to do this to a drive that isn’t removable, so if you did it to an internal space, perhaps you’ve got a second drive and put it on there, if you’re computers stolen or damaged or gets crushed under a truck, it’s not really going to be a lot of use to you having a backup on the computer itself. You need to put it somewhere else. So, if you don’t have an external device like a big enough memory stick or an external hard drive, I suggest you get one. At the time of recording this in the U.S.A., you could get a good external hard drive for $50-100; similar sort of price in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. So it’s not a great expense, but the amount of trouble it could save you is absolutely immense. So you need some way of storing data externally. I know some people who connect two laptops together and keep each other’s backups on their laptops. I suppose that’s okay, but external storage space nowadays is so inexpensive that it really is a fools economy to take a chance on not having good external storage. Having said that and given you a little extra on that, I’m assuming you’ve got something in place, you’ve plugged it in, and when you go into this File History option which is as I say you can also reach via Control Panel, you’re looking at pretty much the same sort of thing I’m looking at, you’ve just got a different device named in there. Now once this device is available, in theory, I could just turn On File History now and it would straightaway start keeping my File History for me. But I’m going to wait awhile because I want to look at some of the options and how we set this up for our own particular circumstances first. So first of all, I want to look at Select Drive over here on the left. In the case of the machine, I’m using here there is just one available removable drive at the moment. But if I had more than one and maybe if I had a Network Location, then I would see the drive here. If I wanted to use a Network Location, I could use this button here to add a Network Location and then when I come to do File History, I could choose which of the drives or Network Locations to use. Now I’m going to stick with the default, but obviously you have to set that to your requirements. So let me cancel that. The next thing I want to look at on the left here is Exclude Folders. With Exclude Folders, if there is a particular folder we don’t want in File History or a particular library we don’t want, we


Learn Windows 8 can use that as well. So let me just do that. Let’s suppose I’m going to exclude the Video Library because I know I haven’t got much space on that removable device, I don’t want to start backing up videos to it. So click on Add, go into my Libraries, select Videos, and now Videos are excluded from my File History. If I want to exclude something else, I can click on Add there as well, click on Save Changes. Now the next thing I’m going to look at is Advance Settings; so over to Advance Settings. Now the Advance Settings, Choose how often you want to save copies of your files and how long to keep saved versions. Now, first of all, when you’re working, say you’re working away editing some photos, doing some documents, then File History can take copies of your files pretty much as frequently as you like. By default, it does it every hour. But there’s a drop down on the right here and you can say I want it done every 10 minutes, anywhere right up to just once a day. Now obviously what you set this to will very much depend on your own working circumstances. If you’re not doing anything particular urgent or important and it’s easy for you to reproduce things, you may be just happy with doing this once a day. If you are working perhaps a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon, maybe doing quite a bit of work but not particularly quickly, you might want one of these shorter time scales. But basically at that period, it will try to do a File History. It will try basically to backup what’s in the files and folders that I mentioned before, minus any exclusions of course. I tend to have this set at quite a high figure, possibly daily most of the time. But if I was working say on a lot of photo editing over a short period of time I might be inclined to reduce that frequency for a while. The next one of the options is the amount of disk space on the target device that File History can take up. Now it defaults to just 5% of the space. You can specify anything from 2% to 20%. So if you’re using that same device for other kinds of backups, you can limit how much space is used. And also what File History does, which is very important, is that it will keep various versions of a file. So if you’ve been working on a file over a period of time it won’t just keep the latest one, it can keep older ones as well. Now on this drop down, you specify what you mean by older ones. Do you keep them forever? Do you keep just versions for the last two years, one month, nine months, right down one month? Or this setting: Until space is needed. So if you start to run out of space on the target drive, you might start deleting some of the older versions. Forever is the default. Clearly the situation here, the choice here is yours. If you’ve got a huge


Learn Windows 8 amount of backup space, you probably don’t mind keeping them forever just in case. If you’re a bit tight on space, you generate a lot of material, and this would certainly be the case if you were dealing say with a lot of videos and music, you may need to restrict how long those old versions are kept for. There is also an option here, Clean up versions. I won’t go into that now but that basically gives you an option to clean up older versions to make more space if you find a particular point in time that you need more space. Now there are two other options here, one of them is Homegroup. If this PC is part of a Homegroup, you can recommend this drive to other Homegroup members.

Now this is

particularly relevant if you’re using a Network Drive, say, and it’s useful to other people in your Homegroup to be able to use the same drive for their File History.

You might want to

recommend it. Now obviously having a memory stick plugged into this PC is not generally going to be a lot of use to other people, so I wouldn’t recommend this. But if you’re using something like a Network Drive, then that’s probably a good option. And then finally the Events Log option here, open File History Event Logs to view recent events or errors. So there’s an Event Log kept each time File History runs and you can check back through that just to make sure everything’s been going okay. Now I haven’t made any changes here at all so I can cancel from this. So, in theory then when I switch on File History in just a moment, we’ll take a backup of those defined libraries and folders. I should warn you about a couple of things though. First of all, this File History is only setup for the current user. If you’ve got more than one user on the machine, it needs to be setup for each user. Each user may want to choose whether to use it themselves or you may go round login as each of them and set it up for them. The second thing to point out is fairly obvious but it’s probably the single thing that causes people the most trouble. It will only work if the device you’ve specified is actually physically connected to the PC at the time. So, let’s turn on and let’s see what happens. Do you want to recommend this drive to other members of your Homegroup? No. Now I get a little circulating cursor there and File History is in progress. File History is saving copies of your files for the first time. I have an option here of stopping it. But let’s just let it run through, and when it’s finished I get a little message here, “Files last copied on the date and time that has just


Learn Windows 8 expired.” At any time I can click on Run Now. If I’ve done a load of work on one of those libraries, one of the file in one of those libraries I can do a Run Now at any time. But, of course, I don’t need to because it will automatically re-run on the schedule that I’ve specified. So let’s look at what it actually does with that backup that it’s made. So I’ve just switched to File Explorer. I’m going to use that F: Drive, the one that it’s used for the backup, and I’ll see on the F: Drive that there is a single folder called File History. If I open up, look in that File History, I’ll find my user name and, of course, if I was sharing this device with other people, doing their File History their user name would appear alongside mine here. I go into there. There’s the name of the device itself. Within that configuration information is kept there. Data is in here. And it says from the C: Drive, from the users folder, Public, Music, and look there’s that Music file that we looked at a little while ago and a copy of that has been made. The copy is dated and timed and that’s the basis on which Windows 8 and File History can remember several copies of a file over a period of time. Now, of course, the other key thing you need to know about File History is the whole purpose of it is to give you a backup copy. So let’s suppose we did this and I accidentally deleted that file, that single file from my laptop or perhaps the whole of the folder that it’s in, how would I get it back again from the backup device? Well, click on Restore Personal Files and that basically gives me access to my backup files on File History. So if I, for instance, go into Music, there it is. All I’ve got to do is click on that and one of the options is Restore. I can also restore it to a location other than the one from which it was originally backed up. So I can either restore it exactly to where it was before or to an alternative location. And similarly if I had a whole folder of music or a whole folder of video, I can choose the folder and restore the whole folder. So there we are. That is File History. That’s the end of this section and I’ll see in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 6 – Internet, Safety, and Security Video: User Account Control Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at User Account Control, UAC or U-AC. This has in recent times been a very unpopular feature of versions of Windows. It was introduced in Vista, improved in the view of some people in Windows 7, and again has been further improved in Windows 8. There is a good reason for User Account Control and I’ll explain that in a moment. I think most people’s problem with it has been in the way that implemented and the fact that it can be rather an annoying feature of Windows. However, it is what it is in Windows 8 and depending on your circumstances you can probably minimize or remove the annoyance altogether just by a bit of careful thought about how you setup User Account Control and how you setup the User Accounts on your Windows 8 device. So, first of all, let’s look at what User Account Control is. Now when you install a piece of software on a computer, usually you rather hope that the software will do what it’s intended to do and you hope that it won’t stop your computer working. If you share your computer with other people, you don’t really want somebody else to install a piece of software that is going to stop the computer working and stop you using it. So with most computers nowadays there is an element of protecting the computer from software that’s installed on it. Now sometimes if people are using a computer, they may download something from the internet, they may have a DVD with some software on it. They may not even know that when they’re running something or downloading it, it is actually or potentially going to do harm to your computer. One of the features of Windows 8 and a couple of earlier versions is that when you run things, the Operating System, Windows 8 in this case, will detect that a change is being made to the computer by doing the installation, which you may or may not know is an installation. But it’s a change which is potentially going to harm the computer. So the Operating System, Windows 8, says, Hang on a minute. I don’t like the look of this. There’s something about to be done here, and it can effectively ask for you permission to do the installation. It gives you an opportunity to look at what’s happening and say, Oh actually this is a piece of software I bought for Microsoft. This is fine, go ahead and do the installation. Whereas if you’d opened an e-mail and the e-mail you were a little bit suspicious of anyway, but then Windows 8


Learn Windows 8 says to you, Hang on a minute. There’s something being installed here. You may very well in that case say, No, no. I don’t want you to install that. I don’t know what that is. Now that is the basis on which User Account Control has been designed. It’s a system whereby Windows 8 will warn you of potentially harmful installations on your system, changes to your system caused by activity by you or other people on your Windows 8 System. Now I’m currently logged in as the Administrator on this system and I’m going to look at the current User Account Control Settings. So, if I start typing Control Panel, there we are, go to Control Panel. Now down to User Accounts and then down to Change User Account Control Settings. Now there are four options here and I’ve currently got this at the second option level. Now what this says, the description of this level is on the right, notify me only when applications try to make changes to my computer. Don’t notify me when I make changes to Windows Settings. So what this Setting means is that if I go into a Windows Setting and try to change it, it will just let me make that change. It will not give me a warning before I try to make that change. If however an application I’m running is trying to make a change to the computer, so if something about it effectively makes a change to a setting on my computer, it will warn me about that. Now one of the things that I’m going to do now is to try to make a change to this setting itself, the User Account Control Setting. I’m going to change it to the next level up, click OK, and see what happens. Now what happens is I get that warning from User Account Control that says, Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer? The program in this case is one of the programs that runs from Control Panel, User Account Control Settings Program, verified Publisher Microsoft Windows. Do I want to let it make that change? Now, if I don’t I can say No. If I say Yes, I will allow it to make that change. And while it’s making that change, that program will be given what’s called Elevated Permissions. It will be elevated to having Administrator Permissions and will be allowed to make that change to my system. So I’m going to say No on this occasion and that means the change that I’m trying to make will not go ahead. The situations in which you will get a warning like that are determined by which of these four available settings you have made. The top setting is the strictest one. Always notify me in either


Learn Windows 8 of these situations: Applications try to install software or make changes to my computer or I make changes to Windows Settings. If you have this setting, you will get a lot of warnings, but you will be relatively safer because of it, because pretty much anything that’s going to make a setting change to your computer, something that might cause it some sort of damage, if it’s not done correctly, you will be warned about beforehand and given the option of saying I do not give permission for that to happen. This setting is recommended if you routinely install new software and visit unfamiliar websites. So this is the one to use if there’s a lot of changes happening and perhaps quite a lot of risk. You want the maximum safety where you’ve got the highest risk. This setting, Notify me only when applications try to make changes to my computer, this is the default setting by the way. This is recommended if you use familiar applications and visit familiar websites. So if generally speaking you install the software, you’re going to use, you rarely install anything else, and you very rarely go to unfamiliar websites, so you go to the regular websites where you get the information, perhaps you go to your bank, do a bit of banking, order theater tickets, that sort of thing. Then this, the recommended setting, is the one for you. The second setting here, Notify me only when applications try to make changes to my computer. Don’t notify me when I make changes to Windows Settings. This is not one of the recommended settings. Neither is the lower setting here. This is the one that will never notify you of a potential change either by an application or by a manual change to a Windows Setting. I would only use this one or that one if you’re absolutely confident that you will never do or allow to be done anything that is going to harm your computer. You will get a notification, in this case, if an application tries to make a change. So this is probably the most likely thing if you’re trying to run a piece of software and you didn’t even know it was going to try to make a change to your computer. Then probably with this one you increase the safety a little bit, but you’ve really got to know what you’re doing to have that setting. Now that’s the one that my computer was set on when we started to do this. I’m going to try to elevate now to the higher level. So I’ve selected the default setting, the third level up. I’m going to click on OK. I get the warning “Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?” I say Yes and now the changes have been made. Now in going through that with you, I’ve also shown you how to basically disable all of those warnings. And if you run software on your machine, perhaps on a regular basis and when you


Learn Windows 8 start up your machine in the morning, some of the pieces of software may give you warnings. On one of the machines that I use to run my own accounts on I get various warnings whenever I start the machine up because part of the software runs all of the time and requires me to confirm that it’s allowed to run every time I start the machine up. I live with that level of annoyance because if I switched off back to one of those lower settings, then something else that I wasn’t aware of running would have carte blanche basically to run and do all sorts of damage. So, I put up with the annoyance of having some of those warnings on a regular basis. Some people don’t, they send that slider right down to the bottom and presumably accept the consequential risks. I’d rather live with a little bit of annoyance and a lot less risk. But the choice there is yours. You do know now how to change the U-AC Settings. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Windows Firewall Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at a very important aspect of the Safety and Security of your Windows 8 device and that is the use of the Windows Firewall. So what is a Firewall? It’s a piece of software, a software device that can restrict communication into, that’s inbound communication, and out of, that’s outbound communication, your computer. Now imagine your computer’s surrounded with a huge dome, a protective dome, and in that there are a lot of doors, and let’s imagine, first of all, that all of the doors are shut. Now, you cannot communicate out of your computer. You can’t send an e-mail. You can’t find a website. You can’t even send somebody an Instant Message. But also you can’t receive any inbound communication. So you can’t receive an e-mail. You can’t receive a download from a website. Now it’s extremely important, essential, that you have a firewall if you need to communicate with the outside world. Now if you never connect to the internet, if you never need to send or receive e-mails, if you never want somebody to be able to see your computer or for you to be able to see any other computer from it, any other device, then you don’t need a Firewall. But really it’s pretty unlikely nowadays that you never need inbound or outbound communication. And if you need any form of inbound or outbound communication you need an effective Firewall. So, when you enable a Firewall effectively what happens is that you’re putting that dome around your computer, that protective dome, stopping inbound and outbound communication. But, of course, the effect of that is to stop inbound and outbound communication. So what it’s necessary to do is to open certain of the doors just to allow certain types of inbound and outbound communication to take place. When you install Windows 8, by default the Firewall is switched On, so the protective dome is there, and also by default some of the doors, some of the ports through the Firewall are left open. Now this is all basically done for you automatically by Windows 8. And under normal circumstances when you install Windows 8, the Firewall will have all of the doors opened that it needs to have opened. There are some situations where you might need to change those settings and I’ll talk to you about those in a couple of minutes time.


Learn Windows 8 But, first of all, let’s have a look at the setup of the Windows Firewall on the machine that I’m using here. I can access the Windows Firewall directly or via the Control Panel. Let me go via the Control Panel on this occasion. So go into Control Panel, System and Security, and there’s Windows Firewall. Now there are two sub-categories here. There’s Check Firewall Status and Allow an app through Windows Firewall. I’ll come back to that one in a moment. Let’s Check Firewall Status. Now the Firewall Status, it’s basically switched on at the moment and it can be switched on or off for a number of types of network. Now I’m going to talk about Network types later on, but I can explain what you need to know here. Currently I am on what’s called a Private Network. I’m connected to a router, a router device which in turn connected to the internet. And as I showed in an earlier section, there are other computers in the building that are connected to the same router. So, what we have is a Private Network. Now the Windows Firewall State is On and for incoming connections it says, Block all connections to applications that are not on the list of allowed applications. So in terms of things coming into this machine, only applications that are on the list of allowed applications, that I’ll show you in a moment, are allowed to create incoming communication with this machine. Now the Active Private Network is the one that is based on my internet router, the BTHub. Again, that I showed you earlier on. And Notification State, Notify me when Windows Firewall blocks a new app. So if any application that isn’t on my allowed list tries to communicate with this computer then Windows Firewall will notify me that there has been an attempt to come into the computer. Now if I’m a guest or Public Network, I may have a different situation and a different setup. I’m not actually connected to a Public Network at the moment, but this is networks in public places such as airports or cafés. In that situation, if I were to say connect to a network in a airport lounge or in a café, the Windows Firewall State is still set to on, incoming connections same as before. There are no active Public Networks. Notification State is the same as before. So basically the Firewall is switched on for both of these situations, but at the moment I’m only connected to what is considered to be a Private Network.


Learn Windows 8 So, that’s the current state and my PC is currently protected by the Firewall. Now we need to look at what we’ll call third party Firewall Products. Now over the next couple of sections, I’m going to be talking about other aspects of Security, Firewall, Anti-virus, and so on, and it’s possible, in fact it’s probably quite likely for some of you, that you will install a third party internet security package such as a McAfee product or a Symantec Norton product. If you do that, then that product will almost certainly include its own Firewall and almost certainly that product will effectively take over Windows Firewall. You will not be able to do the things I’m doing here to show you how to setup Windows Firewall if you’ve installed one of those products. Now I’m not saying that that’s a problem as such because the Firewall component of those products is also very good and the main reason they do that is that you don’t want two Firewalls. You don’t want Windows Firewall and the Norton Firewall or the McAfee Firewall on your computer at the same time because they’ll conflict with each other and to be honest, you don’t need two Firewall; you need one Firewall setup properly. Now in order to show you this I have removed one of those Security products from this device altogether so that I could show you all the features I’m showing you of Windows Firewall. In fact, if you’re looking at this very closely you may have noticed that my Action Center has currently got Solve PC Issues – 2 important Messages. Those two important messages relate to the fact that I have removed the anti-virus product. Let me just click on that. Two important messages: Turn on Spyware protection. Turn on Virus protection. I’ve got them got disabled at the moment so that I can show you the Firewall. If I wanted to look into more detail as we saw earlier, I could open Action Center and look at them. So, if you are using a third party product, the chances are it will not allow you to separately and independently control Windows Firewall. That’s not a problem as such; you just need to be aware of it. Now I’d just like to show you another couple of important things that start from this screen. One of them Change Notification Settings on the left there, Customize settings for each type of Network. For Private Networks, you can have the settings, we’ve talked about these already and Public Network Settings has its own settings. So you can set these differently if you want to. Normally you would not turn the Firewall off unless it is being replaced by a third party product. But there may be specific situations where you need to. And you may want to setup the Firewall


Learn Windows 8 for the Private and Public Network separately, again for very specific reasons. But by default they’re setup the same. Let me go back to the previous screen. There’s a link here to turn Windows Firewall on or off. There’s another one that will restore defaults. And let me just quickly look at this one which is Advance Settings. With Windows Firewall, you can setup a really complex set of rules and exceptions that enable you to look at all sorts of inbound and outbound communication. Now this is not within the scope of this course. This is probably a course all on its own setting up Windows Firewall. Generally speaking you only need to be aware that this exists and unless you really are looking into the very deep details of Security or have some very specific requirements, you don’t ever really need to go into Advance Security Settings for Windows Firewall. So just be aware that this is here and that if necessary you’re machine could be setup with very sophisticated Firewall Settings. And then the last thing to very quickly show you in relation to Firewall, I’m back here at the earlier Control Panel Screen. Allow an app through Windows Firewall. So click on that option and we can see a list of the apps that are allowed. You see the ones with the checkmarks. Generally speaking these are the apps that are installed on this machine. So for instance, Maps is allowed through the Firewall. The ability to see the Online Maps obviously depends on us being able to get through the Firewall. Similarly, things like Microsoft Office Outlook. You can’t really get your e-mail unless you have access through the Firewall. The News, obviously. So the apps that are installed are generally in this list and most of them have ticks. Some of them have ticks in a private situation but not in a public situation. So these sort of one’s say, This will go through the Firewall if I’m on a Private Network, so say I’m just working at home or at work. But if I’m on a Public Network, in an airport, café, or something then I don’t have a root through the Firewall. Now again I’m not going to go into how to add an app to this, why exactly the settings are the way they are for the apps in the list. It’s one of those things to be aware of and if you need to change the settings this is where to go. So that’s it on Windows Firewall. We’re now going to move on to the next important aspect of securing your system which is Windows Defender. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Windows Defender Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. We’ve already looked at the Windows Firewall and seen that we can use the Firewall to control what sort of communications are allowed in and out of our computer systems. But the fact that we allow any communication in at all so we can, for instance, get material from the internet, we can receive e-mails, and so on, means that sometimes attached to those communications or as part of those communications, there’s a chance that we will allow in what I’ll generally refer to as Malware. This includes things like viruses which can upset the computer system, can stop it working altogether or cause some sort of software damage to it. Or that can be some form of Spyware whereby somebody’s put something on our computer system which will try to get information from us. Very often ID type information, things like bank account numbers, passwords, and the like. So the Firewall on its own is not enough to protect us and the other part of your protection regime will need to include something which deals with Malware. Now Windows 8 comes complete with a free product that can deal with this and it’s called Windows Defender and that’s what we’re going to look at in this section. Now as with many of the other components of Windows 8, Windows Defender has actually developed over a period of time. It originally only dealt with Spyware and then Microsoft introduced a product called a Microsoft Security Essentials which dealt with anti-virus. And what’s actually happened now in Windows 8 is that in effect these have been merged into a new version of Windows Defender which is really an anti-Malware product now. It deals with a number of different risks. Now I should point out before we go too much farther that there are other free products available, although to be fair nowadays I think Windows Defender is one of the best free products. If you go for a commercial solution, something like a Norton Internet Security type solution or the McAfee equivalent, then you are dealing with a commercial solution and they tend to have many more features and be much more efficient. And generally speaking, if you’re going to spend money on internet security, anti-virus, and so on, the paid for products still offer a lot more than the free products. So if you choose to use Windows Defender you’ll probably find it’s a good product. You’ll be pretty safe and so on and particularly if you control what you do on the internet and you’re pretty careful then it’s a good solution. Many people, including myself, go for the commercial solutions which offer as I say more efficiency,


Learn Windows 8 more features, and so on. And in fact, it was one of the commercial solutions that I switched off in order to show you the material in this part of the course. And when I finish recording this part of the course, I will be putting that commercial solution back on again. Just for information I use the Norton solutions, but I have also used the McAfee solutions in the past as well. So let’s take a look at Windows Defender. I’m on the Start Screen. I type D-E-F, there we are, Windows Defender. Windows Defender has been turned off and isn’t monitoring your computer. If you’re using another App to check for malicious or unwanted software, use Action Center to check that App status. Now one of the things that I can do here is to just look at Action Center because very often to solve a problem like this and clearly my computer knows I’ve got a problem in that I haven’t got virus protection, Malware protection. If I go down to Action Center where I’ve still got the cross on the red background, open up Action Center, and I can see the two big red marks there. No Spyware, No Virus protection. Windows Defender is turned off. Let me turn it on. Now it takes a little while to start up but in turning that on it will resolve both of those issues. Now Windows Defender is controlled by these four tabs: Home, Update, History, Settings. I’ll quickly go through all of these. But let me explain a couple of things first. By default Windows Defender is switched on. So if I hadn’t had my own commercial solution to Malware, this would have come switched on and if you’ve got a new installation of Windows 8, then it should all ready be switched on. The other point about it is that if you look at, for instance, the bottom here, Last Scan. No scheduled scan performed. Virus and Spyware definitions, created 150 days ago. Because I’ve not been using Windows Defender on this machine, several aspects of it are out of date and you would normally want to make sure that you keep those things up to do. So for instance, you should run a regular scan. We’ll talk about that in just a moment. And you should keep the virus and spyware definitions up to date. Virus and spyware definitions that are 150 days old, that’s getting on for a half a year. That’s four or five months old. They’re far too old because you need to keep on top of virus definitions and I would certainly make sure that your virus definitions are updated regularly. So this is a copy of Windows Defender that hasn’t been used probably ever and one of the things we need to do is to make sure that it’s setup correctly.


Learn Windows 8 So let’s start with Update. Virus and Spyware definitions created 150 days ago. Your virus and spyware definitions haven’t been updated lately. You should update them now to help protect your PC. So we’re going to click on update and away it will go and get the updates from Microsoft. I’ll come back in just a moment. So that update has completed and now I can see the message, “Virus and spyware definitions up to date.” So that’s good. Now let’s look at History. Now because this machine has only just had Windows Defender started, there is no History to look at as such. We can choose between three options here. When Windows Defender finds an item, something perhaps an attachment to an e-mail or something that’s downloaded which it believes to be Malware to contain a virus or whatever, it will treat that as a detected item and say to us, okay I detected this item. What do you want me to do about it? Now one of the options that will be given to you is to allow that item. Maybe you’ve downloaded something, you know it’s safe, Windows Defender’s a bit suspicious of it but you know it’s safe. You can say, Allow that item. Alternatively if you say, No I don’t want you to do anything with that, the item will be quarantined and you can subsequently look at quarantined items and if you want to remove them from your PC. Now, this set of choices here, these three options here, if you want to look at the details of all detected items select this option and say View Details. Now, of course, there are none at the moment. If you wanted to show Allowed items, this would show the items where you’ve said to Windows Defender, Yes that’s okay. You can carry on and deal with that, and then quarantined items will be the ones where you haven’t been prepared to let them execute and you’ve asked Windows Defender to quarantine them for you. Now because I’ve only switched this on, I’ve got no examples of these here. But hopefully that explanation will be enough that you can periodically perhaps go into here, check the History, and see what Windows Defender has been doing. So the last tab to look at is the Settings tab. Now in the interest of time, I’m not going to go through all of these settings in detail, just the key settings. The last one is important, this is the one that you use to turn on or turn off Windows Defender. If you find that you have Files, Locations, Types, something that Windows Defender thinks is a piece of Malware but in fact it isn’t. So perhaps you’ve got an unusual type of file in a particular location on your PC. You can exclude Files, Locations, File Types, even particular processes on your PC that you know seem


Learn Windows 8 to cause Windows Defender problems. You can exclude those and tell Windows Defender not to worry about those. Maps is Microsoft’s active protection service whereby you can send information about what Windows Defender has discovered to Microsoft to help them to further develop protection via Windows Defender and other means. It’s your choice whether you want to join Maps or not. And finally on the Advance tab, there are a couple of important options here. One of them is that when you run a scan, you can also include removable drives such as USB Flash Drives and also you can set a period after which Windows Defender will automatically remove Quarantined Files. Defaults to three months but you can do it more often than that. So they’re the settings. I just want to finally go back to the Home Page. Now much of what we talked about in relation to Windows Defender has talked about Windows Defender finding things happening, the Real-time protection where it senses something happening and says, Hang on, this process is trying to do something bad. But you may already have something stored on your PC that is Malware. There may be a virus sitting there waiting to hit you at some later point, and to deal with this you should regularly run a scan of your System. Now notice the message here on the Home tab. You haven’t run a scan on your PC for a while. This could put your PC at risk. In fact, no scan has ever been performed on this PC. So I’m going to do a scan now. I can do it on the Home Page here. I have a choice of a Quick Scan which checks the areas that malicious software, including viruses, spyware, etc usually occupies. Full Scan, the second option, checks everything, the whole of the hard disk and depending on the setting of the option we looked at just now it will also look at removable disks as well. So that will check everything including running programs. I’m just going to do a Quick Scan at the moment. So I’m going to do Scan Now. It’ll take a little while. I’ll let it run. Now on this PC that took about five minutes or so to run. If I had run a Full Scan even without any attached removable drives, it’d probably of the order of about an hour. Custom Scan of course will let you just scan specified areas. So it found nothing. I now get a nice tick on a green background to say that my PC status is protected. Windows 8 is happy now and the note there, Windows Defender is monitoring your PC and helping to protect it. With the setting here at the top, Real-time protection, this will basically follow whatever I’m doing, browsing through


Learn Windows 8 files, running programs, and so on. Windows Defender will keep an eye on everything and alert me to anything that it believes could be Malware. So that is Windows Defender. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Connecting to the Internet Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to do a little bit more work on networking and in particular we’re going to look at connecting to the internet. Now many of the aspects of networking that we haven’t covered yet we will cover a little bit later on, on the course. So I’m really going to concentrate this time on just establishing an internet connection. You may have noticed that so far on the course, we’ve done very little in terms of accessing the internet and that’s about to change. From now on we’re going to be using it quite a bit. But one of the things that I’ve been careful to do is to put in place the kind of protection that you need before you move around the internet a little bit more. So far the things that I’ve done have been things like download virus definitions, do Windows Updates from Microsoft; pretty safe kinds of internet activity. But once you start going to different sites, you need to have protection in place. So you should have your Firewall setup.

You should have anti-virus, possibly Windows

Defender setup. Now when we make an internet connection, we should be pretty safe to roam a little bit more widely around what’s available on the internet. Now I’m going to go to Control Panel and within Control Panel I’m going to select Network and Internet. Now that gives me three big sections: Network and Sharing Center, Homegroup, and Internet Options. Now I’m going to go to Internet Options a little bit later on because we’re going to setup an internet browser and start using an internet browser later. And I’m also going to come back and look at Homegroup more later on. This time we’re going to concentrate on Network and Sharing Center. Now before I do that I’d like to talk a little bit about a couple of bits of Network terminology that are going to be important. In your device, you should have what’s called an NIC, a Network Interface Card. There will be some device which you will use to connect to the internet. Now if you’re using a laptop or a tablet, you almost certainly have a wireless device in it that you can use to connect to the internet. If you’re using a laptop, a modern laptop, one made in the last few years, you probably have two devices. You’ll have a wireless device which you might think of as a Wi-Fi connecting device. You may also have a socket in the side that you can plug a Network Cable into. If that’s the case you have two devices. If you have one device, you can


Learn Windows 8 connect to one network. If you have a second device, in theory, you can at one time connect to two different networks. Now most people with a laptop can connect to two networks but probably only ever to connect to one. If you’ve only got one device, you can only connect to one. Now for the purposes of this section, I’m going to assume that we’re going to connect to the internet using either a wireless or a wired adaptor. I’m actually going to use the wireless adaptor on the device I’m using now. And I’m also going to assume that I could use that same adaptor, that same NIC, Wireless NIC to connect to other networks that are available to me. So, first of all, let’s look at what Wireless Networks are available. So under Network and Sharing Center, one of the options there is Connect to a Network. Select that and what appears on the right is a list of the available Wireless Networks. From where I am, there are actually four networks available. Now I do know what each of those networks is. One of them is my own Private connection to the internet which is a BTHub connection, it’s that one. You probably noticed me being connected to that earlier on. I then have another network which is called Inside. That is a Private Network, although it’s wireless it only operates inside my house. Somebody outside could see it but they certainly couldn’t log into it because it’s very well protected. The other two are both effectively public ones provided by BT which is a U.K. Telecoms Company, probably the leading U.K. Telecoms Company. So somebody with a user name and password who’s a subscriber to their Wi-Fi Service could connect to either of these. Now at the moment I’m not connected to any of them. If you look at the top one, I’m just hovering over it at the moment, look at the tool tip on the right. This is an Unsecured Network because it’s effectively a Public Network it’s unsecured. The type that appears, 802.11N denotes the, effectively the highest speed, the technology that’s used on that network. 802.11N at the time I’m recording this is in general the highest specification in terms of speed that you will get in the U.K. It’s a very common one that you’ll see elsewhere as well. If I go down to the next one and hover over that here, you’ll see this is a Secure Network and the type of Security can be seen there, WPA2PSK. Inside is also a Secure Network. This uses a different sort of Security. It uses WEP, W-E-P Security. And the last one is an Unsecured Network as well. So I could connect to any one of those four. I’m going to connect first to the Inside Network. So I click on Inside. One option I have is, Do I want to automatically connect to that network when it’s


Learn Windows 8 available? I can say Yes, it’s checked at the moment so I click on Connect. So it’s going to try to connect me to that Inside Network and it will find that I haven’t actually stored the Security Key for that Network. So if I know what the Security Key is I’ll be able to connect to it. Now when we looked at those four available networks just now, you may recall that two of them were secured and two of them were unsecured. The significance of using a Secured Network is that there is security on it and probably most notable of the security features on a Secured Network is that the information you send on it is encrypted which means it’s just about impossible for anybody else to interpret the information that has been sent.

This is very

important if you’re doing things like contacting your bank or logging into the bank, transferring confidential information of some kind. So if you’re going to do that sort of thing you need to use a Secured Network. Now, Unsecured Networks are fine if you are just browsing perhaps, looking up the time of a movie, or that kind of thing. But if you’re doing anything where you are in any way concerned about the security of the information, you should use a Secured Network. Now as part of connecting to a Secured Network, there will be a key, some sort Login credentials that you need to know to connect to that network. Now my Inside Network has a Network Security Key and in order to connect to it, I’m going to enter that now. So I’ve entered the Network Security Key, I click on Next, and I get access to the Network. Now do you want to turn on sharing between PC’s and connect to devices on this network? Two options: No, don’t turn on sharing all connected devices. If I was using a Public Network, I wouldn’t either want to use say a printer connected to a Public Network or indeed let somebody else connected to a Public Network use my printer. Yes, turn on sharing and connect to devices. So this is a Private Network I click on Yes and I’m now connected to Inside. Now let me again so to the same set of options again, but this time I’m going to connect to one of the Unsecured Networks. Now with an Unsecured Network, there won’t be a key to enter but you will normally need some kind of login credentials. Now the Public one I’m going to look at here is this one here, BTWiFi-with-FON. And if you’re in a Public a place logging into an Unsecured Network, you may not need any credentials at all. Now BTWiFi-with-FON is one where although it’s unsecured it’s not available to everybody, you have to be a subscriber, you need to be one of their customers. But let’s try and connect to that one. Warning there; other


Learn Windows 8 people might be able to see information that you send over this network. That’s a reminder, that means it will not be encrypted. I’m going to disable Connect Automatically because I only want to do this as a demo once off. If I left that checked, then it will remember whatever credentials I enter and connect me to that whenever I need to connect to it. So let me just click on Connect. Now with this it says Do you have a user name and password for this Wi-Fi Hotspot? I say Yes. It invites me to enter my user name and password and then I click on Sign in. And you now see that I am connected to BTWiFi-with-FON. So that shows you typically how you would connect to a Public Unsecured Network or to connect to a publically available network where you need login credentials to connect to it. Now as you can see BTWiFi-with-FON now says connected. And again if I hover over there, you see the tool tip, it’s unsecured and the type is 11N. All of the others are basically not connected or disconnected. Now the private one that I usually use is the third one. I’ve also got that setup with my credentials to automatically connect. So anytime I want to go for that, I literally double click on that and that will connect automatically and is my preferred Wireless Network. Now I just want to show you one other thing in relation to this and that is if you look right down at the bottom, I’ve got a little symbol down there that reflects the strength of this signal. It’s got five bars which is a good strong signal. It also says the name of the network and internet access. That tells me that I have access to the internet. Now in terms of what I’ve included in this section, I’ve tried to cover as large a range of possibilities as possible, although I have concentrated on wireless connections. To be fair, wired connections work pretty much the same way in terms of what you can connect to and how. Of course, one of the reasons for using wireless is that it’s extremely rare to have a public wired connection. I can’t really imagine all of us in an airport lounge all trying to plug cables in to a wired router. But the connection methods are otherwise pretty similar when you’re using wired connections and in this I’ve tried to cover both public and private situations, connections where you need a key; connections where you need a user name and password. How you connect in your locale will depend on what service provider you’ve chosen, what sort of hardware you’ve got to connect with and so on. But the most basic thing is you need to get to the point where you


Learn Windows 8 get internet access, which is what I’ve now got on this device. And also that you’ve got your Firewall setup and your anti-virus, anti-Malware solution setup, because from now on we’re going to be using the internet a lot. So, in the next section we’re going to start to look at using the internet for real. I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Internet Explorer App Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section and the next one, we’re going to look at the new Internet Explorer in Windows 8. Now to be fair, I probably ought to say the new Internet Explorers in Windows 8 because although it’s Internet Explorer Version 10, IE10, there are actually two versions of it. There is an app and there is a Desktop Application. Now in this section, we’re going to look at the app and you’ll see it there straightaway on the Start Screen, Internet Explorer. And one of the things about the Internet Explorer App is that if you’ve used Internet Explorer before, you’ll probably find the app seems a little bit strange to begin with and I’m going to explain to you why. But, first of all, let me open the app. Now one of the main features of the new Internet Explorer App in Windows 8 is that there are minimal interface elements. There are also no add-ons or plug-ins as such, although Flash Player is built into the app. It’s also ideally designed for use with touch screens, although keyboard and mouse all work fine as well. So let’s look at how we can navigate our way around here. Now, of course, on a page there will be links to other pages. So for instance, here’s a link to another sports story. Under certain circumstances a toolbar will appear at the bottom. I can always make that toolbar disappear by clicking or tapping on the screen and then I can bring it back with right click or its equivalent. I’ll talk about the toolbar in just a moment. But in general terms with any webpage, you can use the mouse wheel to go up and down the page or if you’ve got a touch screen, this is actually a touch screen that I’m using; you can just swipe up and down the screen to move the page up and down. Note how when you move the screen a scroll bar appears on the right as well. So in terms of basic way of moving through web pages, click a link, everything works in pretty much the usual way. Now when you have the toolbar at the bottom, you have Back button, Browser, you have a Forward button. Currently, we haven’t got a Forward; we’ve got nowhere to go forward to. But if I go back to the previous page, I’ve got a Back on the left and a Forward on the right. This button is Refresh and, of course, if you click on that it’ll give you the latest version of the page that you’re looking at. So if you’ve got a page open to follow some sports scores or something like that and you want to refresh it, that’s the button to use. Also for any page that you


Learn Windows 8 particularly like, you can pin that page to your Start Screen. So, if I wanted that particular story, I could pin it on to my Start Screen like that. This is the Page Tools button. Let’s just look at what the Page Tools button does. Now with Page Tools, it basically gives a find facility so we can do Find on the page or we can view this particular page on the Desktop. Now I’m going to come back to the Desktop Internet Explorer in the next section. And of course, here we have this standard Address Bar. Now with the standard Address Bar, you can either type in a URL for a site or you can use one of these frequently used links or you can do a Search. So let’s see how we do a Search. So, I put the cursor into the Address Bar area, clear out the contents, and type in my term will be, let’s say Whale Shark and then I can hit the Go Button here and depending which Search Engine I have setup as my Default, I get a set of results, in this case via Bing, and links related to Whale Sharks. Now as before, I can scroll through all those and look for the link I’m interested in and follow the link through to the relevant page. Now over a period of time, you will build up a History of sites that you have visited. You’ll also have sites pinned to your Start Screen and so on, the places you go quite often. And the Search in this version of Internet Explorer is clever enough that when you start to type in a Search term, when you finished typing in the Search term, it will tell you about occurrences of that term in such sites as the ones you’ve visited most frequently and the ones that you’ve pinned to the Start Screen. So over a period of time it will suggest sites that you’re already familiar with for particular terms. So if you go to a handful of sites or even a larger number of sites regularly, it’ll tend to think you prefer those and will therefore offer those up to you when you do searches. Now, of course, it will still offer you other sites as well, but that can sometimes help you to get to the sites that you’ve used in the past and that you seem to prefer. Now if you’ve used Internet Explorer recently, a more recent version, then you’ll be aware of the use of tabs. And although you can’t see any tabs on the screen here, note again we’re talking about minimal User Interface elements there are tabs available in the Internet Explorer App. Now a little while ago when I clicked to show you the toolbar at the bottom, you may have noticed also a bar at the top, and the bar at the top effectively gives you access to various tabs.


Learn Windows 8 Now let me just click to get rid of it again. If you’re using touch screen, you just swipe down from the top and that does the same thing. Now you’ve got one tab here at the moment, the Current tab which is the blue outlined one. If you want an additional tab, click the New Tab button in the top right or tap it and you have a New tab. And with that New tab, you could, of course, go to another site, from there another link, etc. And now let me just pull down from the top again with the touch screen. You now see I’ve got two tabs. So you still have tabs when you’re using the Internet Explorer App, but they work in a subtly different way to achieve pretty much the same effect as you should be used to. So there we are. The Internet Explorer App is pretty easy to use. It does very much concentrate on putting the maximum amount of information on the screen and the minimum amount of User Interface elements. Having said that, you don’t even really need to bring up the toolbar to do certain things. So for instance, to go backwards and forwards through pages, if you hover with the mouse over the left side of the screen, you’ll see a semi-transparent arrow appear, that’s a Back button; at the other side of the screen, a Forward button. So we can absolutely minimize the need to have what might be described as clutter on the screen when you’re looking at websites with Internet Explorer App. Let’s now take a look at the Desktop Internet Explorer that comes in Windows 8. We’ll do that in the next section. I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Desktop Internet Explorer Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at Desktop Internet Explorer. We looked at the Internet Explorer App in the preceding section. This time we’re going to look at the Desktop version. By now you know how to start these things. I’ve actually got Internet Explorer on my taskbar here in the Desktop. So I’m going to start it from there. Now if you’re a regular Internet Explorer user, you’ll be familiar with most of the apparent features of IE10. Most notably, of course, here we’re no longer dealing with a Full Screen App, but we’ve got a Window App. We’ve got something in a window. So we’ve got a Maximize and a Minimize and a Close button. Let’s maximize it for now. And if you’re familiar with those earlier versions, you’ll be aware of tabs which are still here. And to find your way around a page, there are, of course, scroll bars, vertical scroll bars and where necessary horizontal scroll bars as well. Links otherwise work pretty much the same, as you’d expect. And, of course, to open a New tab, click on the tab and apart from having some frequents here, the ones which we started off with Windows 8, the ones that we’ve visited since. So for instance, the Whale Shark Search that we did. Note that these are transferable between the app and the Desktop Internet Explorer. So the browsing we do on both, they interact with each other. They’re not like two separate streams of internet browsing. So they do talk to each other, they just work in subtly different ways. Now for those of you who aren’t so familiar with Internet Explorer, I’m going to go through this now in a little bit more detail and go through some of the basics. If you are familiar with Internet Explorer, particularly a recent version of Internet Explorer, then you’ll probably know most of this already but there are one or two new features. So this isn’t a very long section; I suggest you follow it through anyway. The page I’ve got open here is a Bing Search Page. I searched in the last section, when I was using the Internet Explorer App for the term Whale Shark and I got a lot of links. The links here you can tell they’re links because the cursor changes to a pointing finger when I hover over them. If I click on one of those links, I’m taken to another website that corresponds to that link. So for instance, if I wanted to go to the National Geographic Page on Whale Sharks, if I click on


Learn Windows 8 that link it takes me to that page. Now I can use the scroll bar at the right to scroll up and down the page. There are various facts about Whale Sharks and many of these facts, many of things on the screen here are links to other pieces of information, other websites. And, of course, I can keep following through, click, take me to another part of their site or to somebody else’s site and that’s the way that I follow this web of webpages and information. At any time, I’ve got a Back button at the top which takes me back to the last page that I looked at and if I’ve been to a page and gone back, I’ve also got a Forward Page which takes me forward again. So that’s one of the many ways of navigating with Internet Explorer. If you need to go to a new site, so you’ve finished following these links through, then you’re going to want to find another site and you can either do that by typing in an address or by doing a search. So let’s look at typing in an address first. Now you type in an address using the Address Bar here. It’s quite a small space but you can make it bigger if you put the cursor on the right hand edge of it, you can drag it to make it a bit bigger, to give yourself a little bit more room. You’ll move these other tabs over, but we’ll come back to those later. If you then click, you can type in an address. Now let’s suppose that I knew that the address for Wikipedia is this. Now that address begins with a standard prefix of http://www.wikipedia.org. And in very early versions of Internet Explorer, you would have had to type all of that in to get to that site. Nowadays, browsers like Internet Explorer are actually pretty clever and if you actually don’t really want or need to type all that in you could just type www.wikipedia.org. Now note that as I’m typing, the browser is clever enough to work out where I mean and it’s actually giving me a history of sites or sites it suspects correspond to where I want to go. And in fact, even more recent versions doesn’t even really need the www anymore. You could actually get away with just Wikipedia, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. So with the Wikipedia.org that’s all I need. Just hit the Enter key and it takes me to the Wikipedia.org site, which is the International Wikipedia Site. Now this Address Bar, apart from typing in an address like that can also be used to do a search. So if you don’t know a particular address of a website, what’s called the URL which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, not that that really matters. But if you don’t know the URL of a site but you just know something about it, if you type there you can do a search. You can also search on really quite a general term. So let’s think of a term. Let’s say Colorado. Now that’s not the


Learn Windows 8 address of a website; that’s just a word. So having typed that word, I’m going to hit the Enter key and automatically it does a Bing Search, and the Bing Search comes up with possible websites which will give me information about Colorado. So I’ve got Colorado Map, Colorado in Wikipedia, Colorado Official Travel Guide, and I can scroll down many, many sites; see if there’s one of those that might have the sort of information I’m after. When I get to the bottom of a page of sites it says, This is Page 1. That’s one highlighted. There’s a second and a third and a fourth and a fifth page. There are probably hundreds and hundreds of these pages. When I finish looking at Page 1, I can say, okay show me Page 2, go through some more, and find some more. There’ll be some ads as well for Colorado. And basically I’ve now started a sort of chain, a sort of paper trail of information on Colorado. If I find one that I like the look of, I can click on that, that will take me through to the Lonely Planet Site on Colorado and so again I can start following this web of information. So now let’s suppose that I’m thinking, Okay, I think what I want to do is I want to get an idea of what the things to do are. So there’s all the things to do, 763 things to do in Colorado. That sounds great. But just at that moment I think, Ah, hang on a moment. I was supposed to book some movie tickets for the weekend and I forgot all about it. I’m going to see that new James Bond movie. So I really want to search for movie tickets but I don’t want to lose where I am on Colorado. Now at the top we’ve got these tabs. There are two tabs at the moment, but you can have more. And the one’s that highlighted says Colorado Travel Information. That’s one of my sort of paper trails. Earlier I had another one where I was looking at some Rugby news. There’s a big Rugby match here in the U.K. tomorrow with England playing Australia, which is always a bit of a difficult game for them. I was halfway through reading that at lunchtime, so I don’t want to lose that. I want to look for movie tickets now so I’m going to click up here where it says New tab and start a whole new Search. Now I don’t remember where to get movie tickets so maybe I need to go, I’m thinking of going to the cinema in Stockton On Tees, so movie tickets Stockton. There we are, movie tickets near Stockton On Tees. I’ll follow that through. Now I’ve got three, if you like, trains of thought going on almost. I’m going to go through there to book my movie tickets. I’m going to get back to looking at that Colorado travel information later and when I’ve got a chance I’m going to read the rest of that story about the England Rugby match tomorrow against Australia. Now these tabs, and I can have more and more, of course,


Learn Windows 8 give me different lines of research, thought, investigation in one copy of Internet Explorer on one computer. So that’s what the tabs are all about. Now I want to talk a little about these three buttons up here. The first one is Home, the second one is Favorites Feed and History, the third one is Tools, and let’s start with Home. I will have a Home Site specified and if I click on Home, it will always take me back to the Home Page in whichever tab I’m working in. So let’s suppose I’m in the movie tickets tab; if I click on Home, it will take me to my Home Page. Home Page for me is this MSN. If I go now into the third button, one of the things that it lets me do there is to specify my Home Page. Now two entries from the bottom, Internet Options opens up this big dialog, Internet Options and the first item on the General tab is Home Page. There is my Home Page, something setup by Samsung the manufacturers of this computer. But I’m going to change that Home Page to, there we are, click on OK. Now when I click Home, I get to the Wikipedia Page. Now let me go back to the Colorado Travel site again. Let’s suppose that I plan to use this site quite a bit from now on and perhaps planning a trip there for some way off and I need to spend quite a bit of time planning my trip. Then I can make this a Favorite Site. Now to make it a Favorite Site, it’s pretty straightforward. If I click on the star up here there is a drop down option list here, one of the items in it is Add to Favorites which is what I want to do. Click that, a little dialog comes up, Add a Favorite. Add this webpage as a Favorite. Now I could leave that full name, Colorado dah-dah-dah-dah-dah. I think I’ll just shorten that name to Colorado Lonely Planet. I’ll create it in Favorites, perhaps on the Favorites Bar, click on Add. Now I can now see that in the Favorites Bar. So you may well say, well, where’s the Favorites Bar? Where is it? If I right click on the Header Bar of the Desktop Internet Explorer, I’ve got a whole load of other options and the top few related to making certain bars visible and one of them is the Favorites Bar. So if I click on Favorites Bar, it will appear and I can see my Link to Colorado Lonely Planet. So let’s suppose I was on another tab on another day doing a particular piece of work and I thought to myself, I just get back to thinking about Colorado. I just want to check something. All I need to do is to go down to the Favorites Bar and click on Colorado Lonely Planet and it will take me back to that site. Now just one other thing about that particular exercise, instead of adding that to the Favorites Bar, I could’ve added it just to a list of Favorites. And the reason that I might want to do that is


Learn Windows 8 that very often people want the maximum amount of space to look at the websites they’re browsing and having things like bars like this one just takes up space on the screen. If I just added it as a regular Favorite, it would appear in a Favorites list here. So I could just add it as a regular Favorite; if I just add Add to Favorites and not Add to Favorite Bar. The other thing I could’ve done, which is a new feature in IE10, let me go back again to the tools here. One of the options on the tools is to add the site to the Start Screen. Now I’m going to do that now and then I’ll demonstrate the result of that in just a moment. So Add to Site Screen. There’s the site. It’s fine, Colorado Travel Information. Yep that’s fine. That’s done. I can close that now. I’ll demonstrate that to you in just a moment. And really that’s all the time we’ve got to cover on IE10 in this course. But as you can see there are many, many other things to look at and apart from showing you the Start Screen I’m going to leave that at that. We’re going to be looking at a couple of websites later on anyway. So there should be an opportunity to point out some of the other features of IE10. One final point on tabs, when you finish working on a tab like this one, just press the X in the corner there, just close the tab, and we’re all done. So here I am at the Start Screen. Let me just scroll right over to the right hand end and low and behold Colorado Travel Information. There it is. Click on that, Open it up, and it takes me into Colorado Travel Information. Now I wasn’t quite telling the truth when I said that was the last item. There is one other thing to briefly mention. If you go back into the Options here, Internet Options, go to the Programs tab. Right at the top, Opening Internet Explorer, choose how you open links. Now links may come to you in all sorts of ways. You may get them in e-mail messages, in documents, and so on. You can tell Windows 8 which version of Internet Explorer to open links in by default. Now one option is Let Internet Explorer decide. Drop down; the other one is say Always in Internet Explorer, which is the App version, or Always in Internet Explorer on the Desktop, which is the Desktop Application version. So once you’ve been using them for a while you may decide you prefer one to the other and you can then say Always in Internet Explorer on the Desktop or Always in Internet Explorer. You can leave it on Let Internet Explorer decide and see if you’re happy with that as well. Anyway that’s it on Internet Explorer for now. I’ll see you in the next section. Bye for now.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Family Safety Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the very important subject of Family Safety. We’ve looked at some of the aspects of safety when accessing the internet earlier in the course. Now we’re going to look at making sure that children using the internet are safe. Now Safety, in this case, is not just a matter of protecting them from unsuitable websites and unsuitable sources, but can also mean possibly restricting to sensible hours their use of a computer. Now all of this has been bundled together by Microsoft in Windows 8 under the heading of Family Safety. Now I’m going to assume for the purposes of this section that the young member of the family for whom I’m going to setup Family Safety is Jane. Now there’s a very important point here. You saw me create Jane’s account earlier in the course. It’s important that Jane’s account is a Standard Account. If Jane had Administrator privileges she could unset or change anything that I setup. So for young members of the family if you’re going to restrict their usage either in terms of hours of usage or what websites they’re able to get to, etc, then you need to set them up with Standard Accounts so that they cannot unset or change these settings themselves. Now by default in Windows 8, Family Safety is off. So the first thing we need to do is effectively to switch it on. I’m going to go there from this part of Control Panel. I’m currently on Manage Accounts. If I go back to User Accounts and go back one from there one of the items I have there is Family Safety. Choose a user and setup Family Safety. If you’ve not so far created that User Account, there’s a link down here to create a New User Account. But I’ve already setup Jane’s Account so I’m going to click on that. Setup how Jane will use the PC. Is Family Safety going to be on or off? Well it’s going to be on. Next question, Activity Reporting. Do you want Activity Reporting on? This means collecting information about Jane’s PC usage or do you want it off in which case you won’t collect information about Jane’s PC usage. Well I’m going to put it on for the moment just to show you what it looks like when Jane uses the PC. Now at this point I’m going to close this window because I have in effect said that Jane is going to be subject to Family Safety. However, at the moment I haven’t placed any restrictions at all via Family Safety. So although Family Safety applies to Jane, there are no current restrictions.


Learn Windows 8 So I’m just going to close it down. Jane is subject to Family Safety, but Family Safety at the moment involves no restrictions at all. So I know that Jane is subject to Family Safety but at the moment that involves no restrictions at all. Let’s look at the sort of restrictions that we can put on. They basically come in four categories:

Web Filtering, Time Limits, Windows Store and Game Restrictions, and App

Restrictions. And there’s a Summary on the right, Web Filtering – Allow All. As far as the webs concerned, Jane can go anywhere on the internet. There are no time limits on her use. There are no restrictions on games. There are no restrictions on applications. So let’s start with putting some time limits on when Jane can use the PC. Click on Time Limits. Now we get basically this choice, Set the number of hours that Jane can use the PC per day or Set the time of day when Jane can use the PC. So we could either say she can use it for say two hours a day or we can say Define the curfew hours, define the times when she cannot use the PC. Let’s go for Set curfew. When can Jane use the PC? Jane can use the PC all day or Jane can only use the PC during the time ranges that I allow. Let’s go for Time Ranges. Seven days of the week. The white squares represent the times that she’s allowed to use it and the blue squares represent the time that she’s not allowed to use it. So let’s suppose that because of the time that Jane goes to bed she won’t be able to use it between 9 p.m. and midnight any day of the week. I can also say that from midnight to 7 a.m. she won’t be allowed to use it. During the week when Jane’s normally at school I’m going to allow her an hour in the morning in case she needs to finish off a bit of homework and I’m going to allow her a couple of hours in the evening, maybe three hours in the evening. So again I can do this by painting and that’s the times, the white times are the times Jane’s allowed to use it. Now at the weekend I’m, in theory I’m going to let her use it at any time on a Saturday or a Sunday. Now, of course, I could block out certain times in order to restrict the amount of usage. But hopefully from that you get the general idea of how the curfew works. Now this is a Browser Interface. So when I’ve setup those times I can go back with the Back Button, go back to there, and I can see now that Time Limits are on. Now let’s look at App Restrictions. Now with App Restrictions Jane can use all apps or Jane can only use the apps that I allow. Now obviously your list of Apps is going to be different from mine. You may well have a very long list of apps as well and you may be more interested in saying well, generally speaking I think it’s okay to let Jane use anything. But I’m just going to


Learn Windows 8 stop her running one or two things. Now if, in fact, you only want to let her run one or two programs, you could go through and tick those. But if you want to do the opposite, which I’ve just described, the I’m going to let her run everything except a couple of things, you can use this Tick All Button here which basically selects everything for Jane to be able to run and then you might say, for instance, well in fact there is an app there I don’t want her to be able to run. Maybe she can’t run the Family Finances App or she’ll find out what our budget is for her Christmas present and I may want her not to be able to use the tools that I use to create these videos, for example. So there’s a few things I may not want her to be able to run. Having done that, having said that then I’ve setup Jane’s restriction on apps. If there’s an app that doesn’t appear in this list which is always possible, then I can Browse and find it with this button. So having decided which apps she can run, I go back again and now I see that there are Application Restrictions on as well. Now I’d like to quickly look at the other two categories within Family Safety. First of all, let’s look at Windows Store and Game Restrictions. Now one of the things about Windows Store and Game Restrictions is that the restrictions that apply in relation to games, one of the main options relates to your local Classification System. And the Classification System in North America, in the U.K., and in the rest of Europe varies from country to country. Now at the moment, by default Jane can play all games and view all Window Store Apps. If I want to put restrictions on I can say Jane can only use games and Windows Store Apps I allow. So if I click there and then I can say how am I going to apply these restrictions? Now there are two main options. One of them is to set Game and Window Store Ratings and the other is to allow or block specific games. Now let’s deal with the second one first. If I’ve got say half a dozen games on this machine and one of them has maybe got a high adult rating, perhaps there’s got a lot of horror in it or something like that, then I might not want to allow Jane to play that particular game. I might look at the list of games and exclude that one. I’ll block that one. The other option is to set Game and Window Store Ratings. Now within the U.K. the Rating Systems is the PEGI System, the Pan European Game Information System, and the British Board of Film Classification System. So if I go through I can choose pretty much related to Jane’s age what the maximum rating she’s allowed to play. So I might, for instance, say she can have anything up to that rating, that’s the range of ratings that basically the younger children ratings that she’s allowed. If she’s a sort of mid-teenager I may go for one of these higher ratings. Now that’s a different


Learn Windows 8 system depending on your locale and what your country uses. A lot of Europe uses a similar system to this. So let’s suppose that I decide to set a maximum of Jane of the equivalent of PG, Parental Guidance, according to the British Board of Film Classification and for games that would be a maximum 7+ for games. So you can either use the Rating System like this, which is what I’ve used in Jane’s case or you can allow or block specific games. So we now see that we’ve got a restriction on games and the game restriction is up to the PG Classification for the British Board of Film Classification which is just above the 7+ PEGI Classification. So now let’s take a look at Web Filtering. Now the system for web filtering again uses a different approach. And by default Jane can use all websites. But if I say Jane can only use the website that I allow, then I again have two options. I can either set a Web Filtering Level or I can allow or block specific websites. Now allowing or blocking specific websites is a bit of a cumbersome thing because the list that you’d need to block or the list that you’d need to allow can get quite long. Now obviously that you could do that and it’s actually quite straightforward, but I’m going to look here at setting the Web Filtering Level. Now if you choose Web Filtering Level there are basically five possible settings plus an additional option. I want to quickly describe to you what those five levels correspond to. Now the first level is Allow list only. And in this case your child can view only websites that you have added to an Allow list. Now the Allow list is per child and at any time you can click in here to change that list. The second level is the sort of child friendly level and your child can only view sites that were specifically marked as allowed and those with child friendly content. All adult sites will be blocked. The third level, General Interest, your child can view websites specifically marked as allowed, those with child friendly content, and those with content of general interest. Again, adult sites are blocked. The fourth level, the one that’s selected here, Online Communication is basically the same as the third level but it also allows social networking sites, web chat, web mail. Adult sites are still blocked. The fifth setting basically means that a child can view all websites but will receive a warning when a site contains specific adult content. That’s probably quite an unlikely setting for children in most places, but I know that some adults use this setting so that they get a warning if they accidentally stumble across an adult site. The additional checkbox at the end is basically a way of saying that a child cannot download files.


Learn Windows 8 So for Jane I’m going to restrict this to General Interest at the moment. I need to think about the social networking sites, the Facebook, etc. But I’ll stick on General Interest for now and I’ll go back and I’ll now see when I get back to the Family Safety Settings for this particular user, for Jane, that everything has been setup. An interesting thing now is to see what Jane has been doing over a period of time. So let’s just roll the clock forward a little and view an Activity Report for Jane. So click on View Activity Reports and we can see this is Jane’s PC activities for the last week. Most popular websites, we get a list of the ones that she’s visited most often. Note Facebook.com, latest blocked Pages, Facebook.com one visit. She was blocked from using that site, accessing that site. Now I’ve only just switched this on. Jane’s only done a test for me. So it’s only really today and she’s used the PC for 10 minutes today. She also hasn’t used any of these applications so far. But as she starts to use them, I’ll get an idea of how much she’s spent on them and which ones she uses the most. So you get a pretty detailed comprehensive report of Jane’s activities as part of this Family Safety facility. So if you’re a parent or otherwise responsible for a young person, I think this is a really good facility that’s part of Windows 8. That’s it on Family Safety. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 7 – Network Video: Network Sharing Settings Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this little group of sections, we’re going to look at Network Sharing. We’re going to look at Network Sharing in general and we’re also going to look specifically at the Homegroup. Now it wasn’t so long ago that Networks were really the preserve of at least medium size businesses. But nowadays not only do most small businesses, companies with three or four employees have computer networks, but many people, an increasing number of people, have computer networks at home. Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, people don’t even realize that they have a network. Merely the fact that you’re sharing a connection to the internet can often create a situation where effectively the devices you’re using with your computers at home for a network. So the first thing we’re going to look at what Settings Windows 8 provides, what options Windows 8 provides in terms of sharing on a Home Network or perhaps a small to medium size Business Network. So, first of all, let’s go to Control Panel, then to Network and Sharing Center, and then there’s an option on the left there, Change Advanced Sharing Settings, and that brings us into a page where we have settings in three groups. Let me just collapse the first group; Private, Guest, or Public and All Networks. Now I’ve talked about these groupings, the first to anyway, before. The Private Group which is as you see is the current Profile, a Private Network is the one you probably have at home, the one you probably have at work where it is as the name implies, Private. You have Authentication required. You have to have a user name and password to login and generally what you’re doing on the network is to some extent private. You don’t give general public access either to the network or your computer or the files and folders on your computers to the general public. If however you were say in a café or a shopping center, shopping mall or an airport and using a public computer network, this is what the second set of settings apply to. It’s a situation where there is really as far you’re concerned no security. You’re probably primarily using the network to get internet access. You’re not really expecting


Learn Windows 8 to find lots of useful files on the network or to look at other people’s computers on the network. And you certainly don’t want other people to look at yours. The third group here relates to settings that apply to all networks. And I’ll come back to that in a little while. But to begin with, let’s look at the Private Settings. Little arrows on the right here enable us to expand and contract. So I’m just going to expand the Private Settings and talk about those first. Now remember that we’re dealing with a situation here where we’re on a Private Network. I’ll assume for the balance of this section that we’re talking about a Home Network. Now we’ve got three groups of settings. The first is called Network Discovery. When Network Discovery is on, this computer can see other network computers and devices and is visible to other network computers. By default this is set on and what that means is that you can see the other network computers and the other network computers can see you. This is the default setting. It makes the most sense. If you switch this off, then other computers wouldn’t know yours was there and you wouldn’t know that other computers were there. There are situations, perhaps you’ve got one particular device connected to the network that you don’t want other people to know is there, perhaps it’s one with confidential information on it or applications that you use of a confidential nature. You could effectively make that device invisible to the others on the network. But by and large, particularly say if you’re dealing with a Home Network, then probably this is turned on for all of the devices. When you have Network Discovery turned on, there’s an additional option here, note the checkbox, Turn on automatic setup of network connected devices. If you connect to a device on another a computer and that’s something we’re coming to in a couple of sections time, then if you have this enabled it means the setup of a network connected device can be automated. As far as your computer is concerned, if for example you’re using a device on another Windows 8 computer, then the setup of that device is automated. So that can save quite a lot of time and trouble as well. The second category here, File and Printer Sharing, is also very important. When File and Printer Sharing is on, files and printers that you have shared from this computer can be accessed by people on the network. Now you’ve got to be a little bit careful of how that’s worded because it’s sort of implies that all of your files and printers are shared. That isn’t the case at all. You can actually limit what is and isn’t shared. This is a sort of overarching setting. This is one that you need to have set on in order for you to share files and printers from this computer.


Learn Windows 8 Now let’s look at this third setting which relates to Homegroup and we’re really going to talk about Homegroup in the next section, so I won’t go into this in detail now. Basically by default Windows 8 will manage Homegroup connections, so that’s the connections between your Home Network computers. But if you have the same user account and passwords on all of the computers in your Homegroup, then you can just tell Windows 8 to use your account instead. So let me collapse the Private Settings and expand the Guest or Public Settings. Hopefully these will not surprise you at all. You have a setting for Network Discovery and a setting for File and Print Sharing. And on a Guest or Public Network, both are normally set off. You don’t want people to discover your computer if you’re on a Public Network and you don’t want people to look at your files, share your printer if you’re on a Public Network. You do have the option of switching them on.

I guess there is some particular circumstances where this may be

appropriate. But by default they are switched off. Now before we start looking at the next set of options, I want to return to File Explorer for a moment and look at Libraries. We looked at Libraries earlier on. We saw that by default we have a Documents Library, Music Library, Pictures, and Videos, and within each of those Libraries if we expand we have what we’ll call our Private Documents; in this case I have Public Documents. With Music, we have Private Music; music we can only play ourselves, and Public Music; music that we share with other people. Now that’s the library arrangement of documents, music, pictures, and videos. If I now go to Computer and on the C: Drive, I’ll see there is a folder at the top level on the C: Drive called Users. And if I expand users, I’ll find a folder for each user. So there’s TobyA and TobyA2 and there’s Jane. But there’s also a folder within users called Public. And the Public Folder in C: users is the one that holds all of the public content. If I expand that I have Public Documents, Public Downloads, Public Music, Public Pictures, Public Videos. And if I, for instance, then click on Public Music, you may recall we had just one song in there and we’ll come back to the Public Music a little bit later on. But this is really where the public content, the Shared content is stored. Now it’s important to understand that now as we look at the final group of settings.


Learn Windows 8 So under All Networks we have four settings. The first setting relates to these Public Folders. When Public Folder Sharing is on, people on the network, including Home Group members, can access files in the Public Folders. It’s not just reading either; it’s writing. They can read and write files in the Public Folders. That means that people have access to those Public Folders. They can share the same music that you share and they can also put content into those Public Folders. Now if you don’t really need that it’s suggested that you turn it off for Security reasons. But if you are sharing music with other people, if you’re sharing photos, videos, documents, then you’re going to need it turned on. The second one relates to Media Streaming. Now when Media Streaming is turned on, people and devices on the network can access pictures, music, and video on this computer. But that means they can stream it, which means they can open it using Windows Media Player and actually play it. They can actually stream the content directly from your computer. The third option concerns the encryption of data carried over File Sharing connections. Windows uses 128 bit encryption to help protect files sharing connections. But some devices don’t support that higher level of encryption. Now there’s a very specific thing. You may find a situation where one or more devices doesn’t support 128 bit encryption and you may need to enable File Sharing for devices that only use 40 or 56 bit encryption. By default, it’s 128 and you should leave it on 128 unless you have a real problem and you really do need to enable the lower level encryption. The final option, when Password Protected Sharing is on, only people have a user account and password on this computer can access shared files, printers attached to this computer and the Public Folders. To give other people access, you must turn off Password Protected Sharing. So what this means is if you’ve got content that you’re prepared to share but only with people who have an account on this same computer then that’s what turning on Password Protected Sharing is. If you want to give that access to people in general, then you need to turn off Password Protected Sharing. So, overall there’s quite a lot of settings there to take into account and as we work through the balance of this and the next couple of sections I’ll be referring back to a couple of these. But it’s very important.

Obviously your local settings are very specific to your own personal


Learn Windows 8 requirements. But start with the defaults if you possibly can and then generally speaking the rule here is only change these settings if there’s a good reason to. Okay. In the next section, we’re going to look at the Homegroup so please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Setting Up a Homegroup Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at setting up a Homegroup. And, first of all, I need to tell you a little bit about the background to Homegroup and some of the limitations on it. The idea behind Homegroup was to give a very straightforward way of setting up a Home or small Business Network. And it was introduced in Windows 7 and Microsoft have, I think, considerably improved it in Windows 8. It really gives you a way of sharing devices like a printer at home, but also sharing things like family photos or sharing music. Similar kinds of sharing are obviously advantageous to a small business although perhaps they might be more interested in sharing documentation. But amongst the key features of a Homegroup is that it also provides a way of keeping other people out of the Homegroup. It gives you a secure setting for sharing what you’re sharing. One of the key limitations on the Homegroup is that really it’s only possible for a PC running Windows 7 or Windows 8 to join a Homegroup. Technically one with an older Windows Operating System can be made to join it but in terms of the convenient Interface and the straightforward way of setting it up it’s really restricted to Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines. So let’s see how to setup a Homegroup, which is really a straightforward Private Network. You can do it via PC Settings or via Control Panel. On this occasion, I’m going to use PC Settings. So I’m going to use Windows-C to bring up the default Charms, go into Settings, and then change PC Settings and then right towards the bottom of the list of PC Settings, I have Homegroup. Now the first thing to note is that if you look right down at the bottom here, the Homegroup has already been created and it is given a randomly generated password. Now it’s probably a good idea to write that password down, although you can always find the password if you’re a member of the Homegroup and, indeed, you can change the password. We’ll look at that in just a moment. But certainly early on it’s probably a good idea to write that down in case you forget what you’re doing and you can’t find the password and I’ll show you how to find the password in just a moment. If at any time you or another member of the Homegroup wants to leave, there’s a Leave button at the bottom as well.


Learn Windows 8 Now having seen that we now have a Homegroup and notice that we have a password there let’s go back up to the top section. For this PC, we can now decide what we want to Share. Do we want share documents? Do we want to share music, pictures, videos, printers and devices, media devices? The media devices one here relates to streaming. So I’m going to say that we can stream from this machine. So I’m going to enable that. I’m not going to share documents. I’m going to share music and I’m going to share pictures and I’m not going to share printers and other devices at the moment. I can change these settings at any time. But for this particular PC, they’re the settings that I’m going to use. Now clearly we’re going to need to join other devices to this Homegroup and I’m going to join a device to it in the next section. But I also want to talk here about some of these settings and in particular the password. The password that’s generated and that you need to use to join the Homegroup tends to be quite a long sequence of characters. You may be completely happy with that sort of password, but you may want a different kind of password and it is possible to change it, which is what we’re going to look at next. But if you are going to change the password, I suggest you do it before you join other computers to the Homegroup. Because if you let them all join and then change the password, they will all automatically be un-joined and they will need to join again with the new password. And any that are logged in will be logged out and when they login again, they’re going to reconnect to the Homegroup with the new password. So, get your password right before you connect other computers to this Homegroup. So to change the password, you need to go into Network and Sharing Center. When you’re in Network and Sharing Center, you then need to go down here to Homegroup, the bottom left hand corner. There’s a link there to Homegroup. Now note when you get to this point, you have an option here, View or Print the Homegroup password. It’s there. You can print this page out. You can put it somewhere safe if you need to. To change the password make sure that all Homegroup computers are on and are not asleep or hibernating when you change the password. After you change the password, immediately go to each Homegroup computer and type the new password. So, let’s change the password. Now you can ask for Windows 8 to generate a new one. So it’s generated a replacement now. I could ask to refresh. I could ask for another replacement. You can type your own password in. It has to be at least eight characters long. So for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to say tobya111. That’s eight characters. It’s got


Learn Windows 8 some digits in it. That’s the new password, and you’re Homegroup password was successfully changed.

Before you can access files and printers located on other computers add those

computers to your Homegroup, you’ll need the following password. And then there’s an option here to Print password and instructions. If you ever forget your Homegroup password, you can view or change it by opening Homegroup in Control Panel. So there we are. That’s how to change the password. In the next section, what we’re going to do is to use a different PC and join this Homegroup. And when we join the Homegroup, we’re going to look at sharing a device and looking at folders on another computer in the Homegroup. So, please join me in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Joining a Homegroup Toby: So I’m now on a different PC and I’m going to join this PC to the Homegroup. I can do it via PC Settings or Control Panel. On this occasion, I’m going to do it via the Control Panel. So into the Start Screen, Control Panel, then into Network and Internet.

If I look at the

categories here on the Network and Internet, there’s View Network Status and Tasks and then Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options. So let’s go for Choose Homegroup and Sharing Options. And what it tells me is TobyA on Aguila has created a Homegroup on the network. It tells me a little bit more about Homegroup, let’s me change my Advanced Sharing Settings, but I can join now. So let me just check my own settings before I go any farther. I’ve got the defaults for Private, that’s fine. For Guest or Public, again, Private but I’ve got File and Print Sharing turned on, on a Public Network. I’m not going to have that so let’s change that back to off. I’ve also got a third option here which is Domain. The PC I’m using here is the one that I used earlier on in the course, which is actually part of a Business Domain. There’s absolutely no reason it shouldn’t belong to a Homegroup, but I’ve also got a set of Domain Settings; two of which are the same as the ones on the Private Network and they’re set to turned on for Network Discovery and File and Printer Sharing. So I’m going to keep those turned on as well, and then, of course, I have similar settings to the ones we saw earlier for all networks in terms of Public Folder Sharing, Media Streaming, and File Sharing. So I’m going to leave the first option turned off. I’m going to say that other people cannot share my Public Folders. So there we are. I’m going to save the changes. That’s all saved. So now I can set about joining that Homegroup. So we click on Join Now. Join a Homegroup. You can share files and printers with other computers. You can also stream media to devices. The Homegroup is protected with a password and you’ll always be able to choose what you share. So join a Homegroup Wizard Next, type the password which was as you may recall tobya111, click on Next. Homegroup.

You have joined the

You can begin accessing files and printers shared by other people in the

Homegroup. So click on Finish and there we are. So on this page we have some links to things like Leave the Homegroup halfway down there and View or Print the Homegroup password. Several of these are also available in PC Settings. But


Learn Windows 8 if you do want to do something related to a Homegroup, it’s always a good idea to do it via Control Panel because all of the commands are there. One other very useful option here that you might need is the very last one, Start the Homegroup Troubleshooter. If, for example, you’ve setup a Homegroup and you can’t see it on one of the other computers on your Network or you just can’t get a particular device to share in the way that you want it to, the Homegroup Troubleshooter is a sort of Wizard Troubleshooter. If you click on that it starts up a Troubleshooter, Homegroup find and fix problems with viewing computers or shared files in a Homegroup. And then it takes you through, looks to detect any problems, and then it says maybe you’ve got network problems, skip this step, look for something else. So if for some reason you can’t get the Homegroup to work the way that you think it should it’s worth trying that troubleshooter. The next thing we’re going to do now is to look at doing some actual sharing. We’re going to cover that in the next section. So please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Sharing on a Network Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at Network Sharing and particularly at Homegroup Sharing and we’re going to look at sharing in relation to both devices and to files. We’ll start with devices. Now the first thing to point out is that there is at least in theory and often in practice a difference between the Network and the Homegroup. You may have a network of say 10 computers all able to talk to each other but maybe only four of them are in your Homegroup. You may work in a small office where your team has its own Homegroup or even at home you may now have four or five computers of which just a couple of them may be the children in the family have a little Homegroup of their own. So, as we look at sharing devices, I’m going to separate it out into talking about sharing on the network and sharing in the Homegroup because they’re actually quite different. So let’s start with sharing on the Network. Now on this particular computer I have a printer plugged in and I’m going to share that printer on the network. I’m in Control Panel and under Hardware and Sound, I’ve got View devices and Printers. So I’ve got a list of the available devices there. The one I’m interested in is this one, the default HP PSC2500 Series printer. If I right click on that, one of the options on the Contextual Menu is Printer Properties. So let me click on Printer Properties.

I’ve got a

Properties dialog with several tabs, one of which is sharing. Now to share this printer, all I really need to do is to click on share this printer, and I then give it a Name. Windows 8 will use part of the name of the device as it’s sharing name and that maybe that’s rather a long name so I might just call that HP Printer, something like that. And hopefully the other people that are going to use the Printer that’s actually connected to my device will recognize what it is. And bear in mind this printer is plugged directly in. So there’s an important note up there. You can share this printer with other users on your network. The printer will not be available when the computer is Sleeping or turned off. This printer is plugged into this laptop. So if this laptop is Asleep or turned off, people won’t be able to use the printer. So, having made that selection I click on OK and the printer is now shared. And anybody using another device on the network will be able to see that. Now, of course, don’t forget on this


Learn Windows 8 particular computer file and printer sharing is enabled. And if it wasn’t enabled, I wouldn’t be able to share this printer. So that’s how to share a printer or other device on the network. What about sharing in the Homegroup? In the Homegroup, the situation is very different because when you share in the Homegroup, you can only share all of your available devices and printers. So you have one switch that says share my devices and printers and that’s it. If we go into PC Settings, at the moment for this PC, the one that joined the Homegroup, documents, music, pictures, videos they’re not shared and printers and devices are not shared. To share them, Printers and Devices, click there, Printers and Devices are now shared. And any other member of the Homegroup can access those Printers and Devices. So if I went back to Aguila itself, the PC on which I setup this Homegroup, it would now be able to use the printer attached to this PC. So there’s just one more thing to look at on this PC and that is can it see the folders that we shared on Aguila. Well, that’s a straightforward enough question to answer. I’ve gone back to the Desktop on this PC and I’m in File Explorer and now if I expand Homegroup which we haven’t looked into before, but if I expand Homegroup, I can now see the Homegroup which is called TobyA. And on the machine Aguila, there are two folders that I can see, a Music folder and a Pictures folder, and they are the two folders that Aguila Shared with the rest of the Homegroup. Now in the case of the Pictures folder, it’s only got that one picture plus a couple of System Files. And in the Music folder it’s got a number of things, including that one track that we looked at before. But we’ll come back to all of this music in a little while. So as we can see the second PC in the Homegroup can now see the files that were shared by the first PC and, of course, the first PC, Aguila, would now be able to use the printer on this PC. So they’re sharing resources with each other and if other PC’s were added to the Homegroup, of course, they could share their resources and they could use those belonging to the two that are all ready members. Now some aspects of this we’re going to return to in subsequent sections, but I’d just like to quickly show you one other very useful thing about sharing. Let’s suppose that I’m on the second PC in this case, so this is the one that is sharing it’s printer. Note there under Homegroup, it can see a couple of Folders on Aguila. Supposing this PC I now want to share its Music folder.


Learn Windows 8 Now I could go back into PC Settings and make the same sort of changes that I made on Aguila a couple of sections ago. But I can also use a thing called the Sharing Wizard. If I select the relevant folder in File Explorer one of the tabs on File Explorer, one we’ve not really looked at before, I just mentioned it much earlier on, is Share. And you can actually use the Sharing tab to setup the sharing of a folder such as this one. Having selected the folder, you then have a list of entities that you could share it with. Now at the top of the list you’ve got, I would like to share this folder with Homegroup. So that’s the whole Homegroup, all of the machines in the Homegroup, but to view. They can view it but they can’t change it. Or I could say I want to share it with the Homegroup to view and edit. I also then have a list of User Account Names, and I could choose to share this folder with one of those account names. Now they would have read-only permission but I could specifically share it with a person. And there is one other very important option right down at the bottom there, Specific People, and this enables you to share the selected item, the folder or the file with pretty much whoever you want. This can include computers that are not part of the Homegroup or specific User Accounts. This is very useful to share it outside of the Homegroup. So if you’re on a Network with many more machines, many more Users, maybe even connected to a Business Domain, you can specify another computer or another user here to Share it with. If you select specific people, you come up with file sharing and then you can specify, for instance here, the name of a person, the permission level they’re given, and then you can add other computers, other people and so on. Now I don’t have time on this course to go into this, but it’s something to be aware of, something for you perhaps to look into if you’re running a Homegroup within a broader network. Now there are just a couple of other things to tell you about in relation to this before we move on. Now one thing to point out as you maybe have noticed already. If you take this Music folder, for example, and look at share, there is always a Stop Sharing button. So if you’ve been sharing this particular folder with the Homegroup and you want to stop sharing that is the button to do it by. If you’re sharing a printer here, you may recall in PC Settings that we had the On/Off switch, that’s how you stop sharing in that situation. And if you were stopping Sharing from Control Panel, when you go into the same dialog that we saw before for sharing the printer, you would just uncheck the box; so there’s always a way of stopping Sharing.


Learn Windows 8 And just one more thing to point out here; if you in File Explorer click on the View tab, on the right hand end there, there’s an Options button. Click on the arrow on the Options button, Change Folder and Search Options, and then click on the View tab. There’s an Advanced Settings box with a scroll bar, scroll down to the bottom and right near the bottom, there’s a Use Sharing Wizard Recommended. Make sure that’s checked. If you want to use the sharing Wizard, what I showed you just now, then make sure that’s checked or you won’t be able to use the Sharing Wizard. So, that’s it on Networks Homegroup and Sharing for the moment. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: SkyDrive Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at SkyDrive which is an important feature of Windows 8 and what it really amounts to is some storage space that you can use free of charge on Microsoft’s Servers. So let’s see why you might want to do that. Well one reason for using SkyDrive is that you can put some files in a place on Microsoft Servers and then access them from anywhere. You don’t need to carry them around with you on a memory stick, on a laptop, on a tablet, on a phone, on any other device. They’re stored safely with Microsoft and you can just access them securely from anywhere. A second reason is that it’s a great way of sharing files with families, friends, business colleagues, because you can give them a link, you can give them access to those files and then you don’t actually have to arrange to send something to them. They can collect them securely and safely subject to the information that you give them to enable them to have access. It’s also a very good way of collaborating on documents; either collaborating on a work document or perhaps working with family and friends on say putting together a photo album, something like that, and you can use it to synchronize those documents between your devices. So if you have a document that you access both on a PC and a laptop, or perhaps a laptop and a tablet, or a tablet and a phone, then you can synchronize that document or those documents using SkyDrive. Now at the time of recording this, the amount of space available on SkyDrive free of charge to a Microsoft Account holder is 7 GB. There are paid plans to enable you to have more space than this, but I’m going to work on the principle that we’re sticking to the 7 GB limit, which after all is quite a reasonable amount of space really. So let’s try accessing SkyDrive. It’s straightforward enough, just go to the Start Screen and start typing SkyDrive. There we are, SkyDrive. Add your Microsoft Account. Now you need to have the Microsoft Account attached to your PC Account. If you don’t have a Microsoft Account already, you’ve got to sign up for a Microsoft Account option at the bottom here. I’m going to use this one and it’s called Toby’s SkyDrive; now three items any file anywhere. The graphic here shows the synchronization of three machines really. There’s also a help video about SkyDrive which is well worth watching if you want to find out a little bit more about it. And © Copyright 2008-2012 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Windows 8 over here we have the main folders. Now at the moment, if you look at the tip that comes up, the top one, the top folder, Documents. Its size is 0 bytes. It’s empty and it’s shared with just me. So only I have access to this folder. The second one is Pictures. Again, empty, just me. And then there is a Public Shared Folder which is also empty. So let’s go back into SkyDrive again. When we went in before we did it by just starting to type SkyDrive at the Start Screen. You almost certainly have a tile for SkyDrive on your Start Screen. So you can start that way. Here we can see those three folders again. It’s important to realize that these three are the defaults that are setup and you can add your own new folders. There’s some Charms at the bottom here. So for instance, I could add a new folder pretty much any name that I like, and similarly I could go into one of these folders and create further folders inside it. So I can create a whole structure here based on whatever suits me in my use of SkyDrive. Now the first thing I’m going to do is to upload a single file just to show you how that works, and I’m going to put it in this Documents folder. So if I just go into Documents, it’s currently empty of course. To bring up the Charms, I just right click and one of the buttons in the middle there is Upload. When I click Upload, the first time it takes me to my My Documents Folder, my Private Documents Folder on my PC. That in turn has a number of folders inside it. And a single Document, this one, ACME Change Request Procedure.pdf; it’s PDF File. Officially SkyDrive only supports a limited number of File type. It’s quite a big limited number. So it’s PDF files, text files, pretty much any Word format, pretty much any Open Document format for documents. Many different types of Picture file and so a long, long list. But it does have a definition of what files are allowed in SkyDrive. If you’re using something really strange, you may want to check it or who knows it may cause problems. I have never yet so far come across a document that has caused SkyDrive a problem. Anyway, once I’ve identified the document that I want to upload to SkyDrive, all I’ve got to do click on it, make sure it’s ticked, and then at the bottom Add to SkyDrive. So click on Add to SkyDrive. It’ll take a moment or two and then when it’s finished uploading that Document it will appear in that folder. Now I’ve got a choice of how I view that document. There’s a button to the right of the upload that says, Details changes to thumbnails and then back. So whichever method suits you best really, and that’s in a very simple form how to upload a single document to SkyDrive.


Learn Windows 8 So let me just go back to the next level up. Let me now go into the Pictures folder and let’s suppose that I want to this time upload several pictures. So let me just bring up the Charms again, Upload again. I’m back to the same folder. The pictures I want are in my My Pictures Folder. So to navigate my way around here I can do Go Up; that takes me to Pictures. From Pictures, let’s say I want to upload these technical pictures here. There are three of those technical diagrams. Hold the Control key down as I select. I’ve got three of those, and then with three selected, you can see the three that are selected along the bottom here. Click on Add to SkyDrive and as you can see it’s pretty much the same procedure to upload three different documents. It’s also important to recognize that although those folders were called Documents and Pictures, they’re actually general purpose. They’re not dedicated to a specific purpose. It’s probably convenient on SkyDrive to name the folders and the folder structure according to something that you can easily recognize. So that’s how to upload the documents to SkyDrive. Let’s now take a look at one of the documents on SkyDrive. Let’s say look at this middle one here. If I click on it once, the document opens; it’s actually a picture of a network. Now to bring up the Charms, just right click with the mouse and one of the options is Open With. Now if I click on Open With, I’m presented with a list of programs that I could possibly work on this picture with. So there’s Movie Maker, there’s Paint, Photo Gallery, etc. I’m not actually going to go into this and edit this now, but I could do. I could go into Paint and do a bit of work on it. The other thing that I can do, obviously the other very important half of using SkyDrive is I could download this picture. So if you imagine that I was looking at this on a different PC, instead of doing Open With, I could do Download. That would then give me the option of downloading. I could choose a folder using the same navigation tools that I used before. So again working on a different PC, I’d have a different structure, a different default, My Pictures or My Documents Folder. In this case, it would be Documents. And I could download this picture to there and basically that’s the chief way in which I could synchronize these documents between my devices. Now let me just point out something else important about SkyDrive. If you don’t have access to your Windows 8 machine, you’re not using your Windows 8 machine; you only need a web browser to look at you SkyDrive. There is a URL you can go to, which is skydrive.live.com.


Learn Windows 8 That takes you to SkyDrive. If you went here from your Windows 8 PC, logged in with your Microsoft Account, you wouldn’t need to enter your Microsoft Account details. But I need to enter them now. So let me just login, and once I’ve signed in, as you can see, I can see my SkyDrive just from a web browser. I’m not using the SkyDrive App on my Windows 8 PC. I’m logged in using a web browser. And I’ve got pretty much the same facilities and, of course, I could take one of these Files, Download it on to the PC that I’m using here and work on it. Similarly, I can work on documents in situ as I discussed just now. Note that if you work on a Microsoft Office Document, then you essentially use a cut down version of Microsoft Office when you’re working on a document with SkyDrive. One very important final point about SkyDrive is that you can use SkyDrive to synchronize the settings on your Windows 8 PC’s. So if you go to PC Settings and sync your settings, and if you’re using a Microsoft Account, you switch them on, Sync Settings on this PC, and then you can choose which settings to sync. Now this doesn’t cover every single setting, but it covers an awful lot of them. So you can synchronize things like Desktop Personalization, passwords, like sign-in information for some apps, websites, networks, and Homegroup. Your Ease of Access Settings, your Language Preferences. So an awful lot of the settings on your Windows 8 PC can be synced between your Windows 8 PC’s using SkyDrive. So if you’ve got two or three devices that you use, use the same Microsoft Account to log into them all, make sure they’ve all got sync your settings enabled, switched on, choose the things you want to sync, and SkyDrive and Windows 8 take care of the rest. So that’s pretty much it on SkyDrive. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 8 – Media Applications and Downloads Video: Windows Media Player Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to start looking at Multimedia and we’re going to begin by looking at Windows Media Player. I’m also going to briefly talk about Windows Media Center. In the subsequent sections, we’re going to look at one or two of the Windows 8 Apps that also deal with Multimedia. Now Windows Media Player has been around for a long time. Apart from enabling you to play various media, including CDs, DVDs, and so on, on your PC, it’s traditionally been used to synchronize music with portable devices and also to burn and rip music CDs. Windows Media Center offers these and other options. You get additional things with Media Center, such as the ability to watch and record live TV and to create photo slideshows and so on. Now there isn’t time on this course to cover both of those, so I’m really on this course only going to cover Windows Media Player. So, first of all, let’s startup Windows Media Player. I’m starting it from the Start Screen. So I’m going to type media. There it is, Windows Media Player. This particular PC, Windows Media Player hasn’t been run before. So you’re going to see how to set it up. You basically have two choices. You can either choose the recommended settings which will make Windows Media Player the default program for playing media, automatically download usage rights, and media information to update your media files and send you usage data from the player to Microsoft. Or you can customize privacy, playback, and online store settings. Let’s just go with the recommended settings for now. You can always change these later on if you need to. So, having clicked on recommended settings, click on Finish and it’s basically setup. Now, note the message there. There are no items in your Music Library. Click Organize and then click Manage Libraries to include folders in your library. Now there’s a very important point to note here even at this early stage and that is, of course, that the PC this is running on, this is the second PC I used when I was setting up the Homegroup. This is a member of a Homegroup, this PC, so it should be able to see media on the first member of the Homegroup or indeed any other existing member of the Homegroup.

And this really

demonstrates the advantages of a Homegroup and the ability to not only share media but also to stream media.


Learn Windows 8 So let’s now look at some of the features of Windows Media Player. You’ve already seen that there’s no music in the Music Library on this machine. There is also a Video Library, also empty; Pictures Library, also empty. It has access to a removable device and a removable device is quite a feasible place to keep additional media. In fact, this one has none on it, but I could put music, videos, pictures, etc on it if I wanted to. And down here because of this PC being part of a Homegroup, we have access to the other libraries. Now there are three users on the Aguila PC. The first one in the Homegroup and each of those users may be sharing music with other members of the Homegroup. So we’re going to look at their music in just a moment. Towards the top of the list here, we have Playlist. Now also we have no playlist. But if you’re familiar with using a product like iTunes, you’ll know about playlist where you can take perhaps a sequence of songs that you particularly like, put them together into a playlist or maybe effectively filter your music selection and make that into a playlist as well. So this really gives us the main categorization, the main sort of catalog that Windows Media Player can play from. Now there are other important controls in this workspace. So let’s have a look at some of these other important controls. Basically at the bottom of the workspace here, we have the Play Controls. So we have the first control here is Turn Shuffle On, obviously Shuffle Play on an album or a playlist. Then we have Turn Repeat On which will enable us to repeat a playlist or part of a playlist. Then we have this regular Play, Pause, Stop Control, Rewind, Previous, Next, and, of course, a Volume Control and a Mute Control. To the top right we have three tabs, very important. The first tab is the one that lets us create a playlist here merely by dragging tracks on to there. And, of course, we can save the playlist to use again later on. We then have a Burn tab where we can burn a list on to a removable disk, CD normally. And then we also have a Sync tab where we can sync to a removable device. In this case, the removable device is the one that I referred to earlier, but also I could obviously have some sort of media player there specifically dedicated to playing selected music from my library. So depending on what we’re doing we may want one or other of these three tabs selected and there’s a little option box over here, one of which is Hide List. So let’s now play some music on this device. We know that on this PC there is no music saved but we also know that we have access to another PC on the Homegroup. So let’s go down to Aguila, let’s look at TobyA’s Music Shared Folder, and we see the music here listed by album.


Learn Windows 8 In most cases, the albums will have Album marked. So let’s scroll through see which albums, see what we’ve got here. There we are. That’s Autumn People by Sally Gatenby. Let’s try a track on that. Let’s try this one. (Music) Now, of course, once we start playing we have all the regular kinds of controls that you would expect. We have a Pause Control, a Play Control, then we can go Previous, we can go Next, and, of course, we have Volume and Mute Controls as I mentioned earlier on. So we’ve seen now how to play some music. In this case, music in a library on another PC in the Homegroup. This PC has no music on it. So let’s put a bit of music on it now and we’re going to do that just by ripping an audio CD. This is obviously an audio CD that I own myself. When I load the CD into the drive on the PC, the PC has a little think about it and it does come up with this message in the top right hand corner, DVD-RW Drive Audio CD. Tap to choose what happens with audio CDs. You can actually setup a default action to take when audio CDs are loaded. I haven’t set such a thing up and I’m not going to set it up here. So turn back to media player. What Windows Media Player will do when you load an audio CD and provided you’re connected to the internet, is it will look on a database of CDs to try to recognize the CD that you’ve loaded. If it does recognize it, it puts track listing up and it puts the album art, the cover art on it as well. So it’s recognized this album, it’s filled in the track names for me, and I could, of course, play the album now if I wanted. Straightforward case, just as we played the Music just now, choose a track, and click on play or just double click the track. But what I’m going to do on this occasion is I’m going to rip this CD, which means I am going to convert this CD from the format it’s on an audio CD and it will go into the Music Library on this PC. It will be the first album in the Music Library on this PC. So it takes it a couple of minutes. So I’m going to click on Rip CD. I get some Rip options. Select one of the following options. Add Copy Protection to your music. This means music rips of CDs can be played on this computer and on compatible secure devices. Do not add Copy Protection to your music. This music rip can be played on any computer on any device. So I’m going to check that. I’m going to check that and I’m going to click on OK. Now it’ll get started. I’ll see Rip Status. Ripping will begin here. It’ll work its way through the tracks and when it’s finished we’ll come back and have a look at the Music Library on this PC.


Learn Windows 8 So, first of all, I’m going to Eject the audio CD just to avoid any confusion. Now I’m going to click on Music and, of course, in my Music Library I have now got my first album. Now as I mentioned earlier, there are several other things you can do in Windows Media Player including burning to CD and also obviously syncing all or part of your Media Library, including playlists to an external device such as an MP3 Player. And, of course, we’ve got the whole question of playlists. But on this course we don’t have time to cover Windows Media Player in a great amount of detail. So I’ve just given you a flavor of a couple of the most important things you can do with Windows Media Player and I think it’s a great thing to experiment with yourself. And if you also decide to go for Windows Media Center that adds additional media related functionality as well. So, we’ve looked at Windows Media Player. In the next section, we’re going to have a look at the media related apps in Windows 8 and included in that we’ll see how the media related apps cope with the music that we’ve now got in the Homegroup. So I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Music and Video Apps Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to take a look at the default apps that come with Windows 8 that are specifically related to multimedia. In the previous section, we looked at the Windows Media Player. So you should have some idea of how media are stored on a device. When using the default media related apps, you’re probably less likely to be concerned too much exactly about where everything is stored; although, of course, you might be. And more about making it easy to find what you want to do. So we’re going to start with the Music App and, of course, the music we’ll be using will be the same music that we looked at with Windows Media Player. We’re on the first PC that we’ve been looking at. So it’s got probably about half a dozen albums loaded on it. But we’re also going to look at how you’d go about purchasing music as well. Now the first thing to note is that you almost certainly have a tile on your Start Screen to start music and the likelihood is if you’ve been playing music already as it’s a Live Tile that it will give you details of whatever music is playing. So here I have a Now Playing with a picture of an artist and there will be a picture of an album as well. But click on there. It may just be a Blank Tile if you’ve not used the Music App before. So click there and the best way to think of what you see when you open the Music App is that you’ve got a sort of horizontal line of available music. So in this sort of central Panel here, we’ve got Now Playing, gives details of the currently playing track. Then we have options below that: Play and Artist. If I were to click on Play and Artist, it would let me enter the name of an artist. There’s a selection here of available artists which are basically the promoted ones on the site at the moment. And then we have the option to play a playlist over here. So if you’ve created a playlist, you could choose that playlist. And then if effectively what we have on the right here are promotional tiles. So we’ve got three artists here. If I say clicked on Rihanna, then I would see an option here to play her top songs, explore the artist, get more information about the artist, Play Smart DJ which is a sort of Smart Playlist facility. So that gives me access to sort of three selected artists plus some of what’s going on at the moment. If I scroll over to the left either using the mouse or obviously by swiping the screen across, I can see My Music and this is the area containing the music that is


Learn Windows 8 currently on my device. I can choose an album or I can play all music. Let me just right click here for a moment because there’s also a set of Charms at the bottom. You have straightforward Play Control, Play Previous, Next, and then the Playback options down here include the option Repeat On and Off, Shuffle On and Off. And so let’s go back here. Let’s choose the album we played before, click again on Sally Gatenby’s album, Autumn People and choose a track, click on Play. (Music) And, of course, when a track is playing all you need to do is to click on the Pause Button and then if you just click away, you’re able to choose another track. You’ve got an option here to Play All Music and if we go back into the middle now, of course, the track we were just playing is the one that is the Now Playing Track. So we’ve seen how to play some of the music that’s already on the device. What about buying some more music? Well if you go the other way, we’ll go off to the right here. Again, we’ve got an All Music section here which shows again some promoted artists. Further off to the right still we’ve got Top Music, some promoted albums usually here. Obviously the list you see may be different. But let’s suppose there’s a particular album I like the look of. I might click on that one and say; there’s the details. I could try a little bit of that album. I could play part of one or two tracks. If I want to buy the music, click on Buy Album and it would take me into my Xbox Music Store Account. Now if you don’t have an Xbox Music Store Account, it’s very easy to set one up. You can access it via your Microsoft Account and, of course, as the name implies, you can buy some music there. You can get it added to the music on your device and play that music on your device. It’s pretty straightforward. And obviously they’re promoting certain albums and certain artists at any time. But once you get into the Xbox Music Store, into the Marketplace, you can browse, you can search, and so on to find the music that you want. So if you say wanted to buy this album, you’d be asked to login. In my case, it’s with my Microsoft Account. But if you don’t already have an Xbox Music Store Account, it’s very straightforward to create one and then you can look around and if you want to you can buy some music. So that’s pretty much a basic outline of what you can do with the default Music App in Windows 8. Now let’s look at another of the media related default apps and that is Video. So find the Tile, click on Video, and again we have a Spotlight section in the middle. If we go to the left, if you have any video in your library, then this is where you can select it. So under My Videos, I have a bit of underwater video there taken in the South Pacific. So I just play a very short piece of


Learn Windows 8 that and you get Pause Control, Play Control, and so on. When you finish watching that, use the Back arrow in the top corner to go back. If you’ve got your own video, it will appear here provided you put it in the videos area. And then if we just go back to the Spotlight area, clearly there are a number of things highlighted there, Recent Movie Releases, Popular TV Programs, and so on. If you move further off to the right, you have the Movie Store and further off still the Television Store. And again if you wanted to buy a particular TV Series, click on that. So there’s synopsis. You can look at the available seasons and so on. So you can go into the Television Store or the Movie Store and make a purchase. So in this section on the default Media Apps we’ve looked at music and video. In the next, section we’re going to look at photos. So please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Photo Apps Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the Photos App.

Now we’re actually going to start this section looking at File Explorer to

demonstrate something that we haven’t really looked at so far. In this particular library, the Pictures Library, we have a number of pictures. Some of them are photographs, some of them are graphics, some of them are actually the output of the Microsoft Program Visio, some technical diagrams. And we’ve got an assortment of different images here. And the Photos App will show us all of these, as you’ll see in a little while. Now they’re in the Pictures Library. You may recall if I click to the left of the Pictures Library, we can see we’ve got My Pictures, which is where they are, and then we’ve got Public Pictures. At the moment, there are no Public Pictures. And one of the key things you’ll need to be able to do is to get photos into your system. Now I’m going to assume, in this case, that we’re getting the photos from a memory stick. It could, of course, be say an SD Card from a camera or it could, of course, be wirelessly transferred from a phone. But I’ve got these photos on a memory stick, but I’m going to put them into the Public Folder here. But rather than just put them straight into the Public Pictures Folder, I’m going to create a folder within that to represent what these pictures are about. So in the Public Pictures Folder, how do I create another folder? Now there’s one feature of File Explorer that we haven’t looked at so far and if we go to this icon here, just hover over that, New Folder. Click on New Folder and it will create a New Folder where we are. Now I’m going to call this Folder Pacific Night and it’s going to hold the pictures that were taken at a Pacific Night in the South Pacific. So having put the name in, now I’m going to go to my removable device which is the F: Drive there. There’s a selection of images with names including the words Pacific Night, selected the first one, hold the Shift key down, select the last one. And then on the Home tab, you may recall this, Copy. Now let’s go back to Public Pictures, double click on Pacific Night and then Paste., and those pictures finish up in that folder. So that’s got a whole set of pictures into a New Folder in the Public Pictures area of the Pictures Library. Now one other thing I’d like to point out with this is that we’re looking now at the Public Pictures sub-folder Pacific Night. We’ve got all these pictures. If I click back on Public Pictures


Learn Windows 8 itself, on the left you’ll see all I see is the folder for Pacific Night and, of course, the pictures are in there. If I go back to Pictures, the actual Pictures Library you always see what is effectively a merge of what’s in the private area. The My Pictures area, that’s reserved for you or your machine and the Public Pictures area, the one that you’re probably sharing with other members of the network possibly, but probably the Homegroup. So this always represents a merging of the two. Now let’s have a look at that Photos App. So the tile for photos is up here. It is live in the sense that it’s actually showing the pictures that I loaded just now. So let’s click on Photos. Within the Photos App, it will show us photos from a variety of sources. So starting with the Pictures Library it’ll then also show SkyDrive Photos. There’s nothing there. Devices, nothing there. But it’ll also show us Facebook Photos and Flickr Photos. Now I’m going to talk briefly about Facebook later on. It’s quite straightforward to setup to see Facebook photos and Flickr photos here. Devices also very straightforward to see the photos on there and SkyDrive, and I’ll look at those in just a moment. But let’s go into the Picture Library first. Within the Pictures Library, I’ve got a mixture. I’ve got a mixture of a folder here that’s called Pacific Night, the one I just created. And then I’ve got all of those pictures that we looked at before in File Explorer. And I can scroll through those, look at any picture I want. If I choose a particular picture to click on it and it will open Full Screen. The reason it’s a Full Screen that it can. And if you then hover over the screen, you’ll see you’ve got an arrow to the right so you can effectively give yourself a little slideshow; an arrow to the left in the middle there as well. And then right click and you’ve got a slideshow here which you can setup. You can crop; you can rotate, you can delete; Plenty for you to experiment with there. And when you finish looking at this particular picture Full Screen, if you click on the Back button, the back arrow there, that takes you back to the list again. And, of course, when you’re back at the list, if you click say on Pacific Night, that takes you into the folder with the Pacific Night Pictures in it. Again, you can scroll through using the scrolling bar. Or if you’re on a touch screen, you can just drag it through like this. When you finish there, Pacific Night Pictures Library 16 Files, Back takes you back to the main list again. So that’s the basics of looking at the pictures in your own Picture Library. Let’s now upload a few pictures to SkyDrive and see how that works.


Learn Windows 8 Now I hope that you followed all of the course so far through and by now you should be starting to feel comfortable with this. You probably found your own way of starting certain things. For me I’m going to click on SkyDrive here and what I’m going to do, I’ve got Documents, Pictures, Public. I’m actually going to bring up the Charms. I’m going to say New Folder. I’m going to say Fish Pictures, Create Folder. Okay I’ve got my new Fish Pictures Folder. Click in there. Now I’m going to upload some pictures. So upload. I’m going to find those by getting the from a removable drive. So I’m going up to Computer, click on Computer, there’s the removable drive. There are the fish pictures. There are four of them. So I’m going to select the four of them. Click on Add to SkyDrive, and then finally we can see the four fish pictures uploaded. So now let me flip back to Pictures Library and from there back to Pictures and I can now see that my four pictures that I’ve uploaded to SkyDrive are now going to cycle through on that tile. Now, of course, I can also get pictures from my Facebook Account. So I can show the pictures in there by connecting to the Facebook Account. I’ll show you that a little bit later on. We can look at photos uploaded to Flickr. And in fact, if you have connected devices with photos then they would show here on this Devices Tile as well. So several options there for seeing pictures both on accounts elsewhere and on connected devices. So that’s the basics of using the Photos App. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Store Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the Store, the Windows Store as it’s often called or sometimes called the Apps Store. We’ll just call it the Store. This is where you can download and buy, if necessary, apps to run on Windows 8 or Windows RT. Don’t forget with Windows RT, you’re restricted to running apps from the Store. You can’t install separate Desktop Applications from other providers where you’ve bought on DVD or whatever. So we’re talking about the apps that you get from the Microsoft Store. To get to the Store, just click on the Store Tile on the Start Screen. Now I should point out that the content of the Store are completely under the control of Microsoft. Apart from the fact that you know that what’s there is safe and that it basically does what it’s supposed to do, then you also know that the contents of the Store, anything you download doesn’t have any Adware, Spyware, or anything like that. So you’re safe with anything that you download from the Store. Whether you like the particular piece of software, of course, is another matter. You’ll see some names that you recognize and plenty of names that you don’t recognize. Even looking at the Spotlight on the front screen here, you can see a free app there and a paid app there and you’ve got links here to Top Free, New Releases and so on. We’ll take a look at those in just a moment. Now we’ve seen the Spotlight Page. There are then several other effectively pages of different categories for the Store. The Spotlight Store has these highlights. If you use either the scroll bar at the bottom of the screen, if you’re using a mouse or if you’re actually swiping with a touch device, let’s look at some of these other pages. Pics by the maker of the device that I’m using, so that’s the Samsung Pics. But then we have a Games Page. Note again a mixture of free and paid games. The prices vary quite a bit. And each category we have Top Free and then we also have a link through to New Releases. So apart from Games we have Social, Entertainment, Photo, Music and Videos, Sport, Books and Reference, New and Weather, Health and Fitness, Food and Dining, Lifestyle, Shopping, Travel, Finance, Productivity, Tools, Security, Business, and so on, right up to Government, the very last one. So there are many categories there and as you’d expect, these categories are very likely to change over time and at any one time what you can see in a category will vary depending on what’s new, what’s popular, etc.


Learn Windows 8 Now one thing you’ll want to be able to do is to look at the Apps that are available. So let’s go to say the Games Page first and let’s look at the Top Free Games. Click on Top Free and we’re given a listing showing currently the top free games. And if we want one of these, we can click on it. And as we’ll see later on we can then download and install it. The number of these I think over time is going to grow quite considerably, but as you can already see when it comes to free games, it’s already a very large number available. When you finish looking at a particular category, you can go Back, then you can look at New Releases. So let’s look at the new games that are available. Clearly these won’t necessarily be the same when you look at New Releases, depending on how long after I’ve recorded this video you look at this list. But there we are, that’s the New Releases. Now if you see a particular app that you like the look of, to get more information about it, all you do is click on the tile. When you click on the tile, you get quite a lot of information about it. So you have an Overview, you have Details, and you have Reviews. Now if you look at the Overview first, on the left here we’ve got a panel. This is not rated at the moment. It’s a Free App. This is where you go to install it. I’ll talk to you about that a little bit later on. This app has permission to use your internet connection. I perhaps should have pointed out earlier on that you can only look at the Store when you have an internet connection and you can only, of course, download one of these apps when you have an internet connection as well. We have an age rating here, 3+, there’s download size, and so on. Now over here apart from a little graphic shows us a little bit about what this looks like. We have a description of the app with a Read More option. Features, easy to play, hard to master, addictive game play, cute character. There’s a website. There’s a link to the support for this game. There’s then some legal terms, Privacy Policy, License Terms, and so on. If there are problems, if you but feel that this game or this app violates the Stores terms of use, you can report it to Microsoft down here. So that’s the sort of information that is available on the game. Now if we click on Details, we get technical details. It’s the initial version. The processes it will run on, supported Language English/United States. This app has permission to use your internet connection. And then if we click on Reviews and there are any Reviews available we’ll be able to read them here. So it’s pretty straightforward to browse through. Don’t forget the Back button, the back arrow up there. It’s pretty straightforward to browse through to try to find a particular app that you


Learn Windows 8 might be interested in. But the other thing you might also want to be able to do is to Search. So let’s suppose you wanted to find an app which would say help you do your accounts. You can use the standard default Search Charm. So if I do Windows-C and click on Search, note that Search here says Search Store. It knows that I’m trying to search the Store because that’s where I am. Why don’t I search something about accounts. Now a recommendation comes up, Sage 50 Accounts Pulse, click on that, in the Store, and it tells me it’s a Free App. Let’s read the description. Sage 50 Accounts Pulse is a new experience for owner, manager, and directors with the heart of the business at their fingertips. It’s all about steering your business. Review your Profit and Loss. Ah, okay that sounds quite interesting. It’s free. Its category is Finance, 2.28 MG. It’s age rating 12+. I can look not only at the Overview but there are Details there. And then in terms of Reviews, yeah, there’s some useful Reviews there. Easy to use and beautiful app, excellent piece of kit and so on. So apart from one Review there which says Rubbish I don’t think I’ll go to that one. I might read the other four and then try to form a valued judgment on whether this is the app for me or not. So you can search the App Store like that. Note that as the Store gets bigger and bigger, the number of products gets bigger and bigger I’m sure that the search is going to be a more and more useful facility. So I’m going to go back to the Games Page again. I’m going to look at Top Free again. I’ve decided that I’m going to give one of these games a try. I’m going to try Cut the Rope. It’s a Free App and it’s age rating 3+. So I’m okay with that. Let’s see how I set about installing that app. Click on Install. You’ll see a little progress dots running along the top. And while it’s installing, I can do other things. And when it’s finished installing, I’ll be able to find it on my Start Screen. Now new apps are always installed on the far right and there is the new app there, Cut the Rope. Of course, we saw very early on in the course how to move these tiles. So if you want to move these Games Tiles somewhere more conveniently on your machine it’s quite easy. It’s just a drag and drop job. So let’s click Cut the Rope. Now when you get a new app, there’s quite often options to setup. You may need to setup an account or at least attach an account to it. This will vary totally depending on the app that you’re using. So in this case, Cut the Rope, which I’ve never played before, there’ll be some options that I can set here. So Cut the Rope by ZeptoLab UK Limited. Settings, About, Privacy, Permissions, Rate and Review. Let’s look at the settings. We can turn the Music On and Off. We can turn the Sounds On and Off. And


Learn Windows 8 we’ve got a couple of other options that we can use there as well. Obviously, what’s there depends on the particular app. So let’s suppose that I played Cut the Rope a couple of times and I think, I don’t really like that. I don’t really want it cluttering up my system. If you right click or equivalent with the touch screen on the tile there, you have the option to unpin it from the Start, which we talked about earlier on which basically means you don’t see it on the Start Screen there. It will appear on All Apps but it won’t be on the Start Screen. Or if you want to get rid of it altogether, you can click on Uninstall. So I’m going to uninstall Cut the Rope. This app and any related info will be removed from your PC. So this confirmation message, Uninstall, and in the background the last visages of that will be uninstalled from my PC. Now, of course, the other thing you may want to do is to try a bought app. So you may be prepared to spend some money. Let’s try a Rocket Riot 3D which is 6-pounds-99. So click on Rocket Riot 3D. We get exactly the same sort of information. We get an Overview, Details, Reviews. I can, of course, read the Reviews there. If you’re interested in this game, I’ll let you read the Reviews. Click on Overview and then apart from the price, the rating there, we’ve got a Buy and a Try. Now very often there is a Try option where you can try something for a period of time and then you can basically convert it to a paid version. Sometimes the Try version is one which is limited in some way, so you can’t quite do as much as you can on the bought version. Now notice the Message up in the top right hand corner, Installing Rocket Riot 3D. There’ll always be that sort of message when something is downloading and installing. You probably noticed Updates – 3. We’re going to come back to Updates – 3 in just a moment. So let’s wait until Rocket Riot 3D is installed as a trial and then we’ll take a quick look at that. So here we see Rocket Riot 3D now. Now this is a good example where you’re asked to enter your Microsoft Account information to go with the game and it will be used in conjunction with the game. So I put my account details in, login, and there I can see the Play Controls. And as this game can be linked to Xbox Live, the app asks me for permission to access and update my Xbox Live information. So I’ll say Yes. And amongst the options apart from playing the game and looking at things like picking characters, looking at leader boards and so on, I have the option up here to buy the full game. Confirm Purchase. Do you want to buy this item from the Windows Store? Once you tap or clicked Buy, you won’t be able to cancel this purchase. So


Learn Windows 8 that’s one route through to buying that game. I’m going to cancel on this occasion and in fact if I now went back via the Store, again Rocket Riot 3D. I would now see that the Try option is gone because I’ve already started a trial. I’ve still got the Buy option there, of course. If I click on Buy, I get a similar message to the one that I get from the Try version of the game. So it says at the bottom, “Once you’ve tapped or click Confirm, you won’t be able to cancel this purchase.” So you can go through and buy it there. Now there’s one other thing I’d like to look at in relation to these games and so on and that is the option to write a Review. Once you’ve tried or bought, you’re able to write a review. If you click on Write a Review here, you’re able to give a game a rating. Give it 4 stars. Give it a title. Hopefully something a little bit more interesting than that and then write a review of up to 500 characters. And note the name and picture for the Microsoft Account you use with the Store will be posted with your review. So, you can go through, post a review, submit it, and it will appear for the benefit of other potential users or buyers of Rocket Riot 3D. So let me cancel that review and now I’m going to deal with the last thing here, Updates – 3. Let me just go back to the Store. One of the other things that the Store will do is to provide updates to the apps, games, etc that you have installed. It keeps an eye on what’s on your device. If I click on here, Updates – 3, it tells me which of the apps are due to have updates. There’s Skype, Music Maker Jam, the Music App in general. They’re all due for updates. So if I select them all and click on Install, it will install those three updates. Again, as usual it’s something where you can leave it, it’ll run away in the background and update those three and you see the progress as each one is downloaded and installed. You see the progress bar going there. When it disappears it means that that particular update or installation has finished, and there we are. When the updates are complete, we get a message like that one, “Your applications were installed.” And pretty much everything’s up to date now in the Store. So that’s it on the Store. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Social Apps Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the Social Apps. This includes Mail, Messaging, Calendar, and the like. This could actually be a very, very long section of the course. But really what I’m going to concentrate on here is showing you the key features of each because they’re absolutely ideal for you to go ahead with and experiment on your own. And in particular things like the setup of your mail, your calendar, and so on can be very personal to you. So really I’m just going to give you some pointers in the right direction. Now the first thing to point out is that the Social Apps are basically this group, grouped together at the beginning.

They’re all basically Live Tiles, although I’ve really not got anything

connected to any of them so far. So they don’t look particularly exciting or interesting. Let’s start with Mail. Now you can attach more than one Mail Account. But, first of all, I’m going to add my Microsoft Account. Click on Save and the Message at the top tells you that it’s synchronizing. It’s actually just finished synchronizing and I now have access to my Inbox. Now you notice that while I was actually looking at that message, another one arrived. It appears at the top. So I’ve got the newest at the top and I can basically look at these messages. I have some standard Charms up here. I’ve got a Delete. I’ve got a Respond or a Reply. And then the plus let’s me create a New Message of my own. If I right click or equivalent with touch, I can move a message. I can mark a message as being Unread to remind me later on that I haven’t read it yet. And I can also pin this Inbox to the Start. Sync will basically do a fetch of outstanding e-mails. So Live Inbox here is the inbox of my Live Mail Account, the one associated with my Microsoft Account. If I go back I’ll see all of the folders, which are actually the default folders for a Microsoft Mail Account. An Inbox Folder, the one we were looking at just now, a Drafts Folder that holds drafts e-mails that I’m working on. Sent contain the e-mails that I’ve sent. Outbox that contains the e-mails that are waiting to go. I’ve already given the instruction to send them but they haven’t gone yet. A Junk Folder to hold suspected Junk Mail and a Deleted Folder which is the mail equivalent of the trash bin or recycle bin where I deleted something but it hasn’t actually been completely flushed away yet. So that’s pretty much how we connect to a


Learn Windows 8 Microsoft Mail Account. I’ll just show you one other thing and that is that how to add a second Mail Account. One of the important things to remember when you’re working in Windows 8 is that the Charms, the Charms on the right hand side of the screen are relevant to the application you’re running. So if I’m running Mail and I do Windows plus C and click on Settings, the Settings I get are those that are relevant to Mail. Now I still get the standard group at the bottom and Change PC Settings, but the main group here relate to Mail and one of those is accounts. Now at the moment, I’ve got one live.co.uk account setup. I can add another account. I’m going to add another one of these I think. So, No Message over the last couple of weeks, but I’m expecting one at any time. And there we are. My new e-mail has arrived into my second e-mail account. Now because this is a Live Account, a Microsoft Live Account by default it has the same name as the other one. It’s quite straightforward. If I bring up the Charms again, Windows-C, go into Settings, and if I go into Accounts, choose this particular Account, click on that, and I have a whole load of settings about this account. I can change the name. So I could call this one TB24 which is actually how I refer to that as one of my Microsoft Accounts. Download new e-mail as items arrive. Download the e-mail from the last two weeks. So older e-mail is held on the relevant servers and only the last two weeks worth is shown here. I can also sync not only e-mail content but Contact content and Calendar content as well. Do I automatically download external images when they appear in e-mails? Yes I do. Do I use an e-mail signature? Yes. What is my e-mail signature? Sent from Windows Mail. I might want something like, okay. E-mail Address, Password. Show e-mail notifications for this account. It’s currently off. I’m going to switch it on. And there we are. That’s that account done. Now I’m going to go back into the other account. So let me bring that up again. Settings, Accounts, Live Account. I’m going to keep that as my, I’m going to call it Microsoft Live. Same Setting as otherwise. Show e-mail notifications and there we are. So I’ve setup two accounts. I could also, of course, add Google Accounts and other accounts to here. And if I go back now, I can switch between the two accounts: Microsoft Live and TB24. And basically manage the mail in both accounts. To create a new e-mail say on this account, TB24 Account, that’s what I use the plus sign up here for, to do New. And then you’ve got all the regular things for creating a new e-mail. Who it’s to, Copies, more options available here, Sent By, and then you just type you’re message in there and then when your message is done you send it. So, that’s the Mail App.


Learn Windows 8 So having setup my Mail Accounts and having looked at the mail that was already there, from now on any new mail that arrives as I’ve got notifications switched on will appear in the Mail Tile there. So since we’ve done that another e-mail has arrived saying, Further change to meeting. And if I wanted to read that e-mail I’d click on there and go into my Mail. So let’s now go into look at People. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on People. I’m going to give you some of the basic outline here. That’s me there. Obviously no picture there at the moment. And what’s new. See friends’ posts and more. At the moment in this list here, I’ve just got one contact and it’s just one of the companies that I do business with. If I click on that Company Name Work Number, E-mail, Profile, More Details, and so on; that one individual Contact. If I want to add more people, more Contacts, then I can connect to other accounts. Again, as with Mail, if I use the Charms, go into Settings. One of the options I have there is Accounts. And bearing in mind that with both of these accounts, I may well have Contacts on those two accounts and if I do I can synchronize the contacts to here. You may recall that there’s a facility when you’re setting up the e-mail accounts to decide whether you want to sync the contacts or not. Or I could add a different account. Now the choice of accounts is quite wide. I could add a Facebook account, another Hotmail or Live account, Twitter, Outlook, LinkedIn, or Google. Now I’m not going to go through all of those now. It’s a pretty straightforward job with any of them to go through, link to that account, and then you’ll see contact information for that account. Just as an example, let’s take Facebook as an example. It connects to the service. Stay in touch with your Facebook friends. It points out what’s going to happen. It gives you some more information. If I click on Connect, which is normally what you’re going to do, what you’re saying is that for this device and my current count on this device I want to connect to a Facebook account, presumably my own Facebook account, and in that Facebook account, I’ve got contact information that I want connected through to here. So I want to be able to access all of that from Windows 8 on this machine. So I click on Connect. I put in details, my e-mail address associated with my Facebook account. I put in my password. I can decide whether I want to keep me logged in or not. Click on Login and when I’m logged into Facebook what it’s then going to say to me, Microsoft is requesting permission to do the following, then gives you a list of all the ways in which it is going to synchronize the information in Facebook with your Microsoft Account as it is represented in the People App on this PC. So all of the information that it can represent in the People App, it will. You’ve got a choice there of Allow or Don’t


Learn Windows 8 Allow. If you say Don’t Allow, what I’m going to do at this occasion is to logout. But obviously if you want to connect to your Facebook friends information there, that’s the way to do it. Similarly you can do that with LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. Now clearly one of the reasons I’m not doing that here is that I don’t particularly want you to have a contact with all my Facebook friends, LinkedIn Contacts, and so on. But it’s a pretty straightforward process once you get to there and then you’ll start to see within the People App the number of contacts and the amount of detail you have about each of those contacts start to build up. And, of course, it’s synchronized between here and your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc accounts. Now a couple of other things to point out about People before we move on; one of them is that the accounts you’re connected to are represented up here by these little icons. You’ll get used to seeing those. And the other one is that if you look at the Charms on this People Page, the Home Page, one of them is New Contact. You can, of course, add individual Contacts. You don’t rely on connecting through to those other accounts. So, if you wanted to add a particular contact, if you like manually, you can do that via this screen as well. When you’ve entered all of the details, click on Save or if you change your mind partway through, just click on Cancel. There are additional buttons up here that enable you to add address details and other information. So that’s another area to leave you to experiment with. However, one thing I should point out to you when you’re doing this, you do specify an account name here and this is the account that the People App will synchronize this contact with. So even though you’ve entered the contact manually, it’ll be synchronized with the selected account. Obviously here I’ve got two to choose from. So at that point I’m going to cancel there and we’re now going to take a look at the Calendar App. Again, it’s in the same group as the others. So I click Calendar App on there and once again the basic principle here is that we can synchronize the calendar with other accounts. And as you probably worked out by now, if I look at the default Charms here on the right, go to Settings, click on Accounts, both of those are available to me. Both of them are syncing their calendar entries. But in fact, neither account has a calendar entry in it at the moment. That’s why there’s nothing appearing on the calendar for this month.


Learn Windows 8 So, let’s suppose I’m going to put something in here. I want to make an entry in the calendar. I’m sure that by now you’ve worked out quite a bit about how these Full Page Apps work. There’s a high level of consistency between how they work. If I right click with the mouse, I bring up the Charms at the bottom. Before we actually create a New Event in the Calendar, note that you can choose a Day View, a Week View, or a Month View using these buttons over here. And to go to today you click on Today and to add a new Event you click on New. That brings up a page on which you can add a title for today. So let’s say we’re adding going to watch a movie. It’s today. It starts say at 19:30. It’s two hours. And cinema is there. It’s at Stockton Showcase. I can add a message on the right if I want to. I also have some more fields here. Is this a once off event or is it a recurring event every day, weekday, week, month, year, etc. No it’s a one off Event. Give me a Reminder say an hour beforehand so I can get ready. During that time what’s my Status? Busy? Yes. Who am I going to invite? If I’m going to invite other people to it put the details of the other people there. And if I want this as a Private Event, so there are situations in which I can share my calendar with other people. They can see what I’m up to. I might choose to make this a Private Event so that other people can’t see it. But on this occasion, I won’t make this a Private Event. I’ve got all the details in there, just click up here on Save this Event, and that event now appears in my calendar. Now as I said before, you can synchronize the calendar with the other accounts. If you do the events that are in the calendars of the other accounts will be color-coded so you’ll be able to work out which events are in which calendars. And that pretty much in a nutshell is how the Calendar App works in Windows 8. So I’m back at the Start Screen. Notice that the Calendar App, the tile is only half the size of the others. We saw how to change that before. Right click, make it larger, and when it’s larger it’ll actually say, Movie Stockton Showcase, 19:30 to 21:30. So I’ve got the date on there and I’ve got the next upcoming event shown as well in this Live Tile. So finally let’s take a very, very quick look at Messaging. Now there isn’t time to do a complete example here. But let me just give you an outline of what happens with Messaging. If you want to chat with Facebook friends, then the Messaging Service only gives you a facility to have conversations online. You can’t leave them offline messages. So it’s not a way of sending the messages if they’re not actually available online. However, you can leave offline messages using the Microsoft Messaging Service. So this is for contacts via your Microsoft related


Learn Windows 8 Accounts, etc. Basically a conversation, a sequence of messages is seen on the left, that’s you or, in this case, me on the right, and here you choose from your available contacts and when you’ve chosen a contact, you start a conversation over here. You can then type, look at replies, type, look at replies, and just have the normal messaging type of conversation. One of the advantages of doing it this way, of course, it’s very easy to find your contacts if you’ve got all your contacts connected through from your other accounts here. It also gives you a good written record of the whole conversation. So, this is as I’ve said many times before, an extremely good example of one where you can try this out for yourself and you can also switch on the Camera App which we haven’t got time to cover, but which can also give you a facility to have a conversation with a camera as well so you can actually see the person that you’re communicating with. So that’s it on the Social Apps. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 9 – Personalization, Displays, and Task Manager Video: Personalizing your Desktop Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at some of the other Personalization options in Windows 8. We looked at a few very early on in the course. We looked at ways of changing the Start Screen, changing the color scheme for the Start Screen, and some of the settings for the Lock Screen. Now we’re going to look at some of the other key settings that you might want to be able to change on your installation of Windows 8. By now you may already have been using the Desktop quite a bit. To personalize the desktop there are actually several things you can do. First of all, let’s just right click on the Desktop and you’ll see a number of options on a Contextual Menu. Some of them are things like the size of the icons that are shown; Large Icons, Medium Icons, Small Icons. If I switch to Large, notice how big the Recycle Bin becomes. So there’s a whole range of settings there that you can try. But I want to look at a couple of very specific ones. One of them is if we go to Personalize right at the bottom, we can change the theme on the desktop. Now at the moment, we’ve got what’s called the Windows Theme there. Let’s try the Earth Theme. When we’ve done that Close there and we now have a new theme. Again back into Personalize. There are various themes. We’ve got the default themes: Windows, Earth, and Flowers. We have additional installed Themes. One of these is provided by the maker of this computer. We also have a thing called a Clear Sky Theme. And then we have some high-contrast themes that are particularly good if you have a sight impairment. Now when you’re using the desktop, you, of course, have a picture in the background called the Desktop Background and you can change that. In fact, you can setup a slideshow as your desktop background, and you can pretty highly customize the slideshow. So starting at the top here where it says Choose your Desktop Background, you can specify a picture location which can be Windows Desktop Backgrounds. You get a whole selection of those with Windows 8, including the one that we’ve seen most of the time. That one with the two flowers on it, but also there’s one provided by the computer manufacturer and then a whole lot of standard ones that come with Windows 8. You can check which ones you want included. These are the ones basically that come with the theme. So with Earth, we have these. And instead of those, you could also choose to get pictures from your own Pictures Library. You can choose


Learn Windows 8 your own Top Rated Photos or you can, in fact, use Solid Colors if you’d prefer that. You can choose or go into and select the pictures that you want to use using the Browse button there. You can go into your Pictures Folders and choose the images that you want to use. Now in terms of positioning of the pictures, right at the bottom, you’ve got a Picture Position drop down here. Bear in mind that you’re pictures may be different shapes. You may have some Portrait, some Landscape. They may or may not fill the available screen area. You can either say fill the screen area or fit them, stretch them, tile them, center them, various settings you can try there. And then you can say how frequently you want the picture changed. So it’s currently set to 30 minutes by default. You could change it to say every 30 seconds. You could even say, let’s actually change it to 10 seconds. You can even say let’s shuffle them every 10 seconds. So highly customizable. Let’s try that. Save changes and then again we’ll close the panel now. There’s our new picture and you can see the picture changing every 10 seconds. Something else that can be personalized is the taskbar that you can see. So far we’ve always had it at the bottom of the screen here. That’s conventionally where it goes. The color of it does depend on the theme and as you can see at the moment it’s semi-transparent. But you can actually do quite a high level of customization here. I very briefly mentioned this right at the beginning. I’m going to look at it in a little bit more detail now. If I right click on the taskbar and unlock it, one of the things you can do is to drag it and put it elsewhere on the desktop. So you can put it down the right hand side or you could drag it over to the left hand side. You could even put it up the top. Some people do prefer it in one of those other positions. I’m going to put it back down at the bottom. I’m used to working with it there, but there’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t put it in one of those other locations. It’s a good idea wherever you have got it though to lock it because it’s very easy to accidentally grab the taskbar and put it somewhere else. So let’s look at a couple of the other options. If we right click on the taskbar, if you click down the bottom at Properties, there are a few useful things we can try there. One of them that you may have used in earlier versions of Windows is this one, Auto-Hide the taskbar. Now if I change that by checking it and click on Apply watch what happens; the taskbar actually disappears. It gives me a little bit more of the screen that I can see. But if I move the cursor down towards the bottom, the taskbar will reappear, I can select something on it and then when I


Learn Windows 8 move away again the taskbar disappears again. I personally don’t really like Auto-Hide but a lot of people do. So sometimes if you have a lot of buttons on the taskbar, you might have trouble squeezing them all in. One option here, Use small taskbar buttons. Try that. The buttons get much smaller. You can certainly fit a lot more on there. That’ll partly depend on your eyesight, of course, as to how easy you find that. Again, I prefer to have them at this size. I’ve so far not come across a situation where I can’t have them back at the standard size. You have some drop downs here, things like taskbar location on screen. If you don’t want to drag it around, you can choose between the four possible locations there. And you can in fact, customize the notification area down there in the bottom right corner. So if you click on Customize, you have options as to what you can show there. So Action Center, Network, Volume. You can see with each of these, Action Center for instance, I’ve got Show Icon and Notifications. Network, Show Icon and Notifications. Whereas here for Bluetooth devices I’ve got only Show Notifications. I’ll only see something there when there is say a request for a connection from a Bluetooth device. Now there are several of these and obviously the setup on these is very personal to you. I’ve got mine setup the way that I want it setup for me. As with many sets of these settings where there are quite a few for you to choose from you may use them after a while, you may lose track of where you are. There is very often a button like this one further down, Restore Default Icon Behaviors. So I haven’t made any changes there, click on Cancel. Now there are some other very useful options with the taskbar. I’m not going to go through all of them now, but let’s just look at one or two on the third tab on Taskbar Properties, Toolbars. You can in fact put on there an address, which is basically an Address box. Let’s just Apply it; as in a URL for Internet Explorer. So let’s see if I’ve got anything on there. Yep. If I go to msn.co.uk, I can literally put a web address in there, Internet Explorer will open, and take me to that page or, in this case, wherever that page is redirected to. So that’s a very handy way if I want to go quickly to a location. You’ve obviously got a recent location address list here; a very simple way of getting there.


Learn Windows 8 So let me just remove that address again, click on Apply, and in fact I’m going to cancel any changes with Taskbar Properties and I’m going to look at another very important aspect of Personalization. That is to; I’ll go into Personalize to look at Sound. Now if I look on the button down here towards the bottom, Sounds, into that, and it brings up a dialog box, Sound dialog box, where we can change the System Sounds. If you look here at sounds, a Sound Theme is a set of sounds applied to events in Windows and programs. You can select an existing scheme or save one you have modified. Now the current Sound Scheme, I’ve got here is the Windows Default. There’s a choice here. There’s No Sounds at all or I could create my own. So, first of all, let’s go with Windows Default. For each event that might happen, there is a sound. So let’s try one or two of those out. What about a Critical Stop. Now, if I select one of these events, Critical Stop, the sound that plays is Windows Foreground.wav and I can test what that actually sounds like. The Default Beep; again it’s Windows Background.wav. I can test what it sounds like. Critical Battery Alarm, same thing. Now I can choose whichever sound I want with each of the key Windows Events. And if I want to choose a different one, I can browse in the available sounds. And as you can see here, the little Browse dialog that tells me what I’m looking for, Browse for new Critical Battery Alarm Sound. So if I scroll down there, I could maybe choose say Alarm07.wav. Try that. Let’s Test that. Okay. And as you can see you could go through and pretty much save your own scheme. So if I wanted to save my own Sound Scheme for this I go Save As, call it Toby. Now to be fair if I was really going to setup my own Sound Scheme, I’d probably change quite a few more sounds than one and I’d probably be a little bit more selective about the sounds. But this is just to give you the general idea. Once you’ve setup all the sounds the way you want them to be, you can save that as your own Sound Scheme and then obviously when you use the machine at any time, you can either switch back to the default or you can go to the Toby Modified Scheme. So that’s how you setup your own Sound Scheme to personalize sound on your device. So let me Cancel out of that. I’m now going to go back to Control Panel and on Control Panel note that there is a section in Control Panel for Appearance and Personalization. That’s very important. You’ve got change the theme as one subcategory, change desktop background as another subcategory, adjust screen resolution in case you need that as another subcategory.


Learn Windows 8 Now there are a couple of other areas that I need to look at here which probably strictly speaking you’d say are not really quite personalization but perhaps come pretty much under the same heading. And for this we need to go to the Hardware and Sound category and look at Power Options. Now with Power Options, we have a couple of ways of setting up the PC, particularly a portable PC, a laptop normally, to either deal with low power or to try to save as much power as possible. So let’s look at Power Options and a Power Plan. Now, first of all, when you look at this area on your PC or your tablet, it’s very likely that it’ll look a little bit different from mine because very often the manufacturer of the device puts in their own recommended Power Plan. The other important point is that currently, I’m recording this on a PC, not a laptop. So one thing that’s missing here is the set of settings, the couple of situation when the device is on Battery Power, because the PC I’m doing this on is always on mains power. But basically you have two or three sets of settings for the different scenarios you may be in. So you have a standard scenario normally, which in the case of a laptop would be when it’s plugged in and on power. And a second scenario when the typically a laptop or a tablet is running on Battery Power, in which case it’s much more important to save power. And then you may have an Optimize Setting in either case, even with a desktop PC where the general idea is to save power. So in here on this machine I’ve got two plans, Samsung Optimize and Power Saver. Now the Power Saving Setting here saves energy by reducing your computers performance where possible. Now in the basic Samsung Optimize, which comes from the computer manufacturer, if I look at the Plan Settings, the Plan Settings basically say that after 15 minutes of not using the PC in this case, turn off the display. And after 20 minutes, put the computer to Sleep which saves even more Power. Now I can change those settings, reduce or increase the time to turn off the display; similarly for putting the computer to sleep. Obviously the time to put it to sleep must be more than or equal to the time to turn off the display. And I’ve also as ever got a Restore Default Settings button. Now there’s also a Power Saver option here which does the same things but does them much more quickly. So five minutes to turn off the display, 15 minutes to put the computer to Sleep. Now if you’re looking at this or using a laptop, then you’ll have a set of settings that are more appropriate for a laptop, probably doing both of those things more quickly and certainly doing


Learn Windows 8 them more quickly when you’re on Battery Power. So, the Power Plan depends on the device, but the general principles are as there. So in terms of personalization and some people argue or maybe would argue that Power Options aren’t really personalization but for the purposes of this they can be. So as far as personalization goes, we’ve covered all the main features now and we’re going to move on to the next section. So I’ll see you then.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Windows Mobility Center Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, we’re going to look at the Windows Mobility Center and this is basically a tool or really more a set of tools which will only work on mobile computers. So it’ll work on a laptop or a netbook. It won’t be available on a desktop computer. So if you’re going to look at Windows Mobility Center on a desktop PC, you’re going to have a little bit of trouble finding it. So let’s look at Windows Mobility Center. Now in certain circumstances Windows Mobility Center will start itself up. Let’s just see how to start it up under general circumstances. Just go to Control Panel. So start Control Panel. And then go into Hardware and Sound and if you’re on a portable device, one of the options in there is Windows Mobility Center. Click on Windows Mobility Center and it comes up with a set of options, and we’re going to talk about these options. Now the basic idea behind Windows Mobility Center is that you or somebody who is mobile, you perhaps take your portable computer to other locations and you do presentations. Now in order to do that, there are a number of things that you need to bear in mind. One of them is that you may well need to adjust volume, which, of course, is not at all unusual. But in terms of say a Display, you may well have an additional external display. Now at the moment, I haven’t connected an external display to this device. I’m going to do that in just a moment. But if I need to connect an external display, I’ve got this set of settings over here for the external display. I can also adjust Display Brightness here. In terms of running a presentation, I have here a set of Presentation Settings. Currently, I’m not presenting. I can turn on Presentation Mode here. I can also sync content between my laptop and other devices. And I have a Sync Center here and Sync Settings that I control here. So it’s really meant to be a situation where your mobile, you’re carrying your machine around, you’re doing presentations, you’re syncing content on other devices, you’re adjusting Display Brightness, Sound Levels, and the like. So, first of all, let me now connect this external display. So note that the external display is now connected and I have a Disconnect button. One of the decisions to make here is whether you want only the external display, only the laptop, both, or neither displayed. Now the shortcut key for that is Windows-P and it brings our choice on the


Learn Windows 8 right there, second screen, Project to a connected screen. Do you want the PC screen only, a duplicate? Do you want to extend or do you want to use the second screen only? Now the Extend option is a special one because the second screen extends your laptop screen and can be used as an additional desktop. So this is not a case of a duplicate, this is a case of showing different things on the two screens. And I’m going to come back to that particular subject a little bit later on. For the moment, let’s just say that we’ve got a duplicate. So we’re going to show the same thing on both screens. So that’s the basic setup that we might have for a typical presentation. Obviously, we can do things like adjust brightness here, we can adjust volume, and this is keeping an eye on battery status. Obviously, this particular laptop that I’m recording this on isn’t actually plugged in at the moment. So I can see or you will see that the battery status is dropping there as well. But before we actually go into Presentation Mode, there’s another set of settings that we need. So I’m just going to minimize that for the moment, go back to the Hardware and Sound Windows Mobility Center, and adjust settings before giving a presentation. So having connected up the external screen, let’s go into Presentations Settings. Now when you go into Presentation Settings, I am currently giving a presentation. When giving a presentation, your computer stays awake, system notifications are turned off, and the following settings are applied. Now this is what you choose your settings to be. You can turn off the Screen Saver. So particularly if you’re showing a duplicate screen and you perhaps have got a PowerPoint Presentation going or something, then you don’t want after a period of just talking and not changing anything on the screen, your Screen Saver to come on. So that’s one option. You can also set the volume to a fixed level. You can experiment with this beforehand, get that level just right and stick to that. You may be using external speakers. You may just be using the ones on your device, and you can also show one of a choice of backgrounds. So there’s few things there that you can choose between as the background. So having setup all of these things to the level that you want, let’s go back into the Mobility Settings dialog again. You’ve got your display connected, you’re ready to present, you just say turn on, and do the presentation. Now we saw there how to access the Presentation Settings from the Control Panel. In fact, the little projector icon there gives you a little convenient route into changing the Presentation Settings. So you can go in there at some time and change those. And


Learn Windows 8 when you finish presenting, if you click on turn off, let’s suppose you’re doing this in two stages. So let’s say turn off that. Let’s go back to the little projector icon again, change Presentation Settings. When you’re not presenting, of course, this is unchecked. Windows 8 is keeping track of this. The Windows Mobility Center keeps track of this. So at the moment I’m not currently presenting. When you click and say, right, let’s go back on again, click on there, now it says I am presenting.

So, the two halves of this work in harmony while you’re giving your

presentation. I did mention there the use of the Extend functionality and we’re going to cover that briefly in the next section. So, please join me for that.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Multiple Displays Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Windows 8. One of the great strengths of Windows 8 is its ability to deal with multiple displays in terms of size and specification. So it can deal with everything from a very small tablet type display right up to a pretty huge display up to I think the maximums about 82 inches, which is a pretty big display. But even on your regular laptop, desktop, you can take advantage of the Multiple Display features in Windows 8 whereby if you have two displays available, you can display different things on those two displays. And I’ll just briefly explain to you how to do that. One of the frustrations of recording this particular part of the course is that, of course, I can’t show you two displays at once. So what I’m telling you now I’m afraid you’re just going to have to believe. Now if you looked at the previous section on Windows Mobility Center, you’ll know that the keyboard shortcut you know here is the Windows-P keyboard shortcut and you get this fly out on the right hand side, PC screen only, duplicate – so the same thing on the Extended Screen as on the Standard one, Extend, or Second Screen only. Now, of course, in order for this to do anything at all, you’ve got to have your second display plugged in. Mine is plugged into this particular laptop using an HDMI connection. I’m now going to switch from duplicate which is how I had it in the previous section to extend. And what happens in this situation is that potentially the display on the laptop and on the additional display are different. Now the way in which you can see these are different, and this is the part that you won’t really be able to see, is that if I press the Windows key now to bring up the Start Screen, the Start Screen is now on my laptop display, but on the Extended Screen I can still see the desktop. So the two screens are showing different things. Now on the laptop what I’m going to do is to go back to the desktop and I’m going to right click on the desktop and bring up Screen Resolution. Now when you have two displays connected, a one and a two, you can independently set Screen Resolution, etc, for each display. So the first one, the mobile PC Display as you see here, the resolution is set at 1024 by 768 which is the resolution I’ve used for recording this video. It’s Landscape and it’s an Extended Display. The second one which is the screen that this is extended to is set at a much higher resolution and that also says Extend these displays. But in effect I can see different content on both screens. The


Learn Windows 8 main thing here to note though is that you can have different Screen Resolutions on the two and that you can have different content displayed on the two. So for instance, if you look at the second one, Multiple Displays. Extend these displays, Show the desktop only on one, Show the desktop only on two, or Duplicate. Now at the moment with the Extension Setting, I’ve got different things showing on both screens. Now as I say unfortunately without being able to show you both displays at once you’re really going to have try this yourself by extending the display on your own PC or laptop. So that’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Windows 8

Video: Task Manager Toby: Welcome back to our course on Windows 8. In this section, I’m going to look at one of the features of Windows 8 which has been a feature of Windows for a very long time and it’s called Task Manager.

Now if you’re used to using Windows Operating Systems, you’re

probably very familiar with Task Manager. But just in case you aren’t, here’s a very brief introduction to what Task Manager is all about. Perhaps the best way to describe Task Manager from many people’s experience is to talk about people’s first encounters with Task Manager. And typically what would happen then, we’re talking about several versions of Windows before this one, but usually what would happen is your PC would lock up. You would apparently not be able to get the keyboard to do anything, the mouse to do anything. You’re fairly sure you’ve got two or three programs running but you don’t know why they’ve stopped, you can’t seem to make anything work. You maybe got a document open in Word that you can’t save and basically everything’s stopped and what you really want to do is either pull the plug out of the wall or just shut the machine down. And sometimes when you want to do that, that’s probably about the only option that’s left to you that will work. But there is a program called Task Manager that you can run, and Task Manager, to some extent, can really rise above all of this and Task Manager can show you what is happening on your Windows PC. And if you have, for example, a particular program that’s managed to get itself tangled up, it’s stuck, it can’t move. The expression you’ll often hear is not responding. If you’ve got a program that’s not responding, you can stop it with Task Manager without necessarily affecting anything else on your system. So what sometimes happens is you can use Task Manager to spot a problem and to fix it and recover the situation in the other programs that you have running. Now there’s one very important caveat on this and that is that Task Manager is by no means fool proof in the sense that it won’t fix all problems all the time. It sometimes fixes problems and in many situations it’s the place that people will go to look for a potential solution. So let’s take a look at Task Manager now. Now the conventional way of starting Task Manager is to press together the keys Control, Alt, and Delete. If you do that, you see a little Menu appear and from that Menu you can select Task Manager. There is a faster way in Windows 8 to launch Task Manager and that’s to press


Learn Windows 8 Control, Shift, and Escape and that launches Task Manager straightaway without having to select it from a Menu. Now when you launch Task Manager in its simplest form, which is what you can see here, it is a list of the running programs. There are two programs running, Camtasia Recorder, Camtasia Studio. Camtasia Recorder is the piece of software I’m using to record the screen and my voice when I’m doing this course. Now if I select one of those, Camtasia Recorder for example, and click on End Task it will stop that program running. Now I’m obviously not going to do that at the moment because that would be the last you hear from me. But if that program was having a problem, if it was behaving strangely, if it wasn’t doing what I expected it to do, or which is more likely, if it had a message here like Not Responding or some other message that indicated that the program wasn’t working properly, I could click on End Task and that would stop the program and then I could maybe just restart the program or perhaps restart my PC and restart the program. Generally speaking when you see a couple of programs like this with no messages next to them it means that as far as Windows 8 is concerned those programs are running fine. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are and sometimes Windows 8 will think something’s working and you can see that it isn’t. In that case, start Task Manager, select the thing that you think is stuck, click on End Task. Now it can be a dangerous thing to do if one of these was Microsoft Word and you were halfway through typing out a long document and you just clicked on End Task you wouldn’t normally be given the opportunity to save your work. So you might lose all of the work you’ve done on that document. But if you can’t stop Word any other way, sometimes you have to take that sort of measure in order to recover the other programs that are running on your computer. So, that’s the basic use of Task Manager. Now what I’m going to show you next may be well beyond anything you need to know, but I’m going to show you anyway because it’s at least interesting and sometimes this really can help. Task Manager doesn’t only let you look at the programs that are running and potentially stop one that appears to be stuck or one that is obviously stuck because of a message you’re getting from Windows 8. Down near the bottom of the Task Manager Window here, there is a More Details arrow, click on that and Task Manager takes on its second identity. Now its second identity reveals a huge amount of information about what’s going on, on your computer. We already saw Camtasia Recorder and Camtasia Studio, two of the Applications that are running and both of


Learn Windows 8 them record us using about 6% of the CPU, the Central Processing Unit on my computer. I can see what percentage the other programs are running. Task Manager itself is using some of that, of course. I can see how much of my memory each of them is using, how much disk, how much network capacity, and so on. And I can also see the huge number of background processes that are running on this machine when I’m using it. Some of these would probably take hours to describe what they are, but the sort of things that we can see there relate to anti-virus and online backups and then various other things to do with Windows Audio devices, Windows Media Player, and so on. So this lists everything that is actually running on this computer when I’m using it. I also have several other tabs at the top, each of which gives me additional information. Now if you look at something like Performance, it gives me a map of the performance of my machine, how much memory is being used. So out of a total of 3.9 GB, we’ll call it 4 GB, that’s how much memory is in use. Disk, use of Wi-Fi, and so on. And then several other categories that I can look at to see what different things are doing and have done. One of the most interesting things here is this Startup list, and this shows all of the processes that startup when I start my PC. Now with some of them, like this one, this is a Bluetooth Application. This is, has a high impact on Startup. It’s the only one here that says High. Now if I decided that I wasn’t going to use Bluetooth machines in the vicinity of the PC I’m running this on and therefore having the Bluetooth tray running was a bit of a waste of time, I could disable this at startup and it would make my computer startup more quickly. Now we’re headed here into areas that may be well beyond what you’re interested to see, but these are very useful tools. And if you don’t appreciate them now or you can’t fully understand them now or perhaps you don’t even have time to look at them now, you may find that at some point in the future as either your knowledge gets greater or you have more time to look at it, the information that Task Manager can give you will help you to tune the use of your PC and to get the most out of it. So that’s it on Task Manager. It’s mainly used for the first purpose that I said, which is to stop something that’s stuck, but you can see you can do an awful lot of other things with it as well. So I’m going to close Task Manager and that’s the end of this section.


Learn Windows 8

Chapter 10 – Additional Topics and Closing Video: Clocks, Hardwares, Help and Support Toby: Welcome to this last section in our course on Windows 8. In this section, I’m going to look at a couple of things that I haven’t had time to cover. I mentioned two or three during the course anyway, things that were outside the scope. But there’s a couple of things that I think you should take a look at yourself. They will certainly help you in your use of Windows 8 and even if you’re a little bit new to Windows, I think you’ll find that they’re understandable either just by experimenting using Windows 8 yourself or perhaps looking at the Help and Support that’s available online from Microsoft. Now I’m going to start with Control Panel and virtually everything in Control Panel we’ve covered to some extent except for this area: Clock, Language, and Region. Now Clock, Language, and Region is one of the setups that you will have done when either when you first installed Windows 8 on a new PC or the settings for this will have been inherited if you did an upgrade from an earlier Windows version. But if you do need to reset these, they’re pretty straightforward to use. Obviously under normal circumstances you will be primarily driven by your locale in terms of Time Zone, Date and Number Formats, and so on. So for instance, when it comes to Date and Time, for me I’m based in the U.K. We’re currently on Greenwich Mean Time. We do have a British Summer Time Setting but that’s only from late March to late October. When I’m recording this it’s late November so we’re on Greenwich Mean Time. And I can actually set the Date and Time and I can also change my Time Zone. I can store information about additional clocks. So if for instance I had a client say in Los Angeles, I could show the clock for Los Angeles, even show it down here on the taskbar just to remind me what time it is there. Internet time available from time service and so on. So the Settings for these, for Regional Settings, Date/Time, Number Formats, Currency Formats, and so on are all from that location in Control Panel. Also something else that we didn’t look at, right down here, Add a device. One of the options you have is to add a device and one of the things that Windows 8 will do for you if you’ve installed/attached a new device to your PC and perhaps it doesn’t seem to be working properly, if


Learn Windows 8 you click on add a device, Windows 8 will look at your PC and search for newly added devices. If it finds something it will either install the required driver software for it or try to locate that software and then install it. Or it may start to ask you questions about it. And between you and the computer, hopefully, you can find the right software to make that device work. Now there are several other areas which I haven’t covered on this course. These include things like the use of the more traditional Windows Accessories in detail, things like Notepad and Paint which we looked at very briefly earlier on. We haven’t really looked at Encryption and many of the tuning and maintenance functions of Windows 8 to keep your PC running smoothly and making sure that you tune it to the best performance that you can get given what will probably be a very large number of applications that you run on it and the increasing demands the computers that we all use. There are other functions like being able to restore the system if it’s broken, to reinstall, and so on. But the one last thing I’d like to cover, just as a last topic on this course, one thing we’ve seen a couple of times but just to give you a more centralized view of it, there’s of course Help and Support. To get Help and Support the latest Help and Support, the best source for that is Microsoft itself. If you type H-E say on the Start Screen, go into Help and Support. This brings up Windows Help and Support and from here you have a really good access to very broad Help and Support on Windows 8. There is a Search facility and then we have Categorize, Getting Started Help. So if you really are getting started and you want to get started on some new topics, install some applications, find out how to connect your devices, and so on, Get Started is good. Internet and Networking tells you more about networking, setting up connections to the internet, and particularly troubleshooting problems when you try to make those connections. And then a lot more information about Security, Privacy, and Accounts, that includes information about viruses and the like. Now you can also get access through there to the Microsoft Community website as well as the Windows website itself. Now I haven’t spent a lot of time on that but there is a lot more on Windows Help and Support and it’s a really good place to look if you either want to find out how to do something, if you’ve forgotten, or maybe just to get a different view on some things. Of course, some of the topics that I haven’t been able to cover on this course are included in Help and Support as well


Learn Windows 8 So, that’s it from me. My name is Toby. I hope you’ve enjoyed this course as much as I’ve enjoyed preparing and delivering it. And I hope to see you again online sometime soon. Goodbye for now.
