With Microsoft’s new Fluent Design, announced alongside the Fall Creators Update, Windows 10 is gaining more and more transparency—or, technically, translucency. If you don’t like this effect, you can flip a switch to disable transparency in all parts of Windows 10, from the taskbar and Start menu to apps like Calculator and People.
How to Disable the New Transparency Effects in Windows 10
With Microsoft’s new Fluent Design, announced alongside the Fall Creators Update, Windows 10 is gaining more and more transparency—or, technically, translucency. If you don’t like this effect, you can flip a switch to disable transparency in all parts of Windows 10, from the taskbar and Start menu to apps like Calculator and People.
Wi-Fi is obviously more convenient than wired Ethernet cables, but Ethernet still offers significant advantages. Join us as we take a look at the pros and cons of wired and wireless connections.
You can now hide pages in Windows 10’s Settings app, just as you can hide icons in the Control Panel window. The pages won’t just be hidden in the app itself—there will be no way for users to access the hidden pages. Support for hiding Settings pages was added in Windows 10’s Creators Update.
Just like Chrome, Google offers multiple channels of the Chrome OS operating system. In addition to the standard Stable, Beta, and Developer channels you can choose from on the About page, there’s a special bleeding-edge Canary channel. The process for switching to Canary, however—or leaving Canary if you’re already using it—is more complex.
Windows 10 S is “the soul of today’s Windows”, according to Microsoft. It’s a new version of Windows intended for school PCs, but available to everyone. It’s designed to be more simple and streamlined, so it only runs applications from the Windows Store—unless you spend another $50 to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.
Duplicate file finders scan your hard drive for unnecessary duplicated files and help you remove them, freeing up space. Here are our picks for the best duplicate file finders, whether you’re looking for something easy to use, an application you may already have installed, or a powerful tool with the most advanced filters.
The Storage Spaces feature built into Windows allows you to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. It can mirror data across multiple drives for redundancy, or combine multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux.
Windows plays a startup sound and other sound effects regularly, and they can get obnoxious. They’re especially annoying on Windows 7, where Windows plays a click sound every time you switch folders in Windows Explorer. You can disable them entirely—or even set custom sound effects, if you prefer.
Windows 10 automatically creates the $GetCurrent and $SysReset folders in your C:\ drive in certain situations. These folders can use gigabytes of space, but what do they do, and can you delete them?
The recent WannaCry ransomware attack demonstrates the importance of automatic security updates. No matter how careful you are, malware could exploit a security hole over the network and gain control of your system—unless you install security patches.
Windows won’t allow you to modify files that open programs have locked. if you try to delete a file and see a message that it’s open in another program, you’ll have to unlock the file (or close the program).
Your iPhone is packed with hidden touch gestures and shortcuts you could use, if only you knew about them. You might have discovered some of these already, but Apple is always adding more new gestures. Here are 10 of our favorites.
The SmartScreen filter built into Windows automatically scans applications, files, downloads, and websites, blocking known-dangerous content and warning you before you run unknown applications. You can disable it, if you like.
Most Linux distributions configure the Bash prompt to look something like username@hostname:directory$ . But you can configure the Bash prompt to contain whatever you like, and even choose whatever colors you like.
Origin’s “Great Game Guarantee” applies to all games published by EA itself and a few third-party games. If you’re not happy with a game purchase, you can return it for a refund—just like on Steam. Origin began offering refunds before Steam did, but Steam’s refund policy does apply to a wider selection of games.
Passwords can be reset or bypassed on every operating system, so even if you’ve forgotten yours, there may be a way in. This also means that evildoers can likely get into your system if they have access to it—and it’s way easier than you think.
New computers use UEFI firmware instead of the traditional BIOS. Both are low-level software that starts when you boot your PC before booting your operating system, but UEFI is a more modern solution, supporting larger hard drives, faster boot times, more security features, and—conveniently—graphics and mouse cursors.
Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions use the GRUB2 boot loader. If GRUB2 breaks—for example, if you install Windows after installing Ubuntu, or overwrite your MBR—you won’t be able to boot into Ubuntu.
The classic desktop versions of Solitaire and Minesweeper are gone in Windows 8 and 10. Instead, you’ll find shiny new versions with advertisements, Xbox integration, and optional subscription fees. But you can still play Solitaire and Minesweeper without ads, and without paying a cent.
Many HP laptops released in 2015 and 2016 have a major problem. The audio driver provided by Conexant has debugging code enabled, and it either logs all your keystrokes to a file or prints them to the system debug log, where malware could snoop on them without looking too suspicious. Here’s how to check if your PC is affected.
Many people swear by multiple monitors, whether they’re computer geeks or just people who need to be productive. Why use just one monitor when you can use two or more and see more at once?
Windows 10 includes OneDrive, but if you’d rather not see it, there are several ways to disable OneDrive and remove it from File Explorer on Windows 10.
Spotlight search on iOS 10 now remembers your previous searches. If you tap the Spotlight search bar on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll see a list of searches you’ve performed. Here’s how to clear that list—or hide it entirely.
Virtual machines can use a large amount of disk space. If you want to regain some of that disk space, just deleting files inside the virtual machine won’t help. You’ll need to reclaim that disk space, shrinking the virtual hard disk and making it use less space on your Mac.
If you try to visit a website and see a “500 Internal Server Error” message, it means something has gone wrong with the website. This isn’t a problem with your browser, your computer, or your internet connection. It’s a problem with the site you’re trying to visit.
