Windows 10 Tips and Tweaks
Copyright © 2021–2023 by Stan Brown, BrownMath.com
+i.
If you don’t have the Windows logo key, right-click the Windows Start Menu icon
and select .Copyright © 2021–2023 by Stan Brown, BrownMath.com
Caution: Except as noted, I’ve tried everything on this page. If something here trashes your system please don’t blame me, but do let me know so that I can add a warning.
The repair disk will let you diagnose and fix some problems and may help you to avoid reinstalling Windows. And as the saying goes, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
To create it, you’ll need a blank CD. (A DVD will work also, but most of the space will be wasted.) Open Control Panel, then select » » . Or if you prefer, type backup in the taskbar search box, select in the search results, then click » . When prompted, insert a blank CD or DVD.
The repair disk is quick to make, but those repair functions are also included in the install disk, so you might as well go ahead and make the install disk.
You can download an image of the latest version on Windows 10 at Microsoft’s Download Windows 10 page. If your version of Windows 10 is not the latest, there will be a prompt offering the update. You can do that if you wish, but it’s not required. However, the download will be the latest version of Windows 10, not your version.
Click and run the downloaded tool. You can have the tool write directly to a USB thumb drive or DVD, or have it create an ISO file that you can burn to a DVD yourself.
In the “Type here to search” box on your taskbar, type cmd and press the Enter key.
See also: 10 Ways to Open the Command Prompt in Windows 10
Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager. In the menu row at the top, click . Then, Ctrl-click . This opens a command prompt with “Administrator: C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe” in the title bar.
Source: the article mentioned just above.
Alternative: In the “Type here to search” box on your taskbar, type cmd and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. This may give you a UAC prompt, depending on your settings, before it opens a command prompt with “Administrator: Command Prompt” in the title bar.
Press +i.
If you don’t have the Windows logo key, right-click the Windows Start Menu icon
and select .
See also: Ways to Open Windows 10’s Settings App
Although you still need Control Panel for some things that aren’t in Settings, Control Panel takes more mousing or typing to open, so it’s worth while pinning it to the taskbar or the Start Menu so that you can find it more easily.
To pin Control Panel to the Start Menu: click the Start button, jump to the W’s or scroll down to the folder, and click the down arrow to open the folder. Right-click on Control Panel and select .
To pin Control Panel to the taskbar: click the Start button, jump to the W’s or scroll down to the folder, and click the down arrow to open the folder. Left-click (normal click) on Control Panel to launch it. Then right-click on the Control Panel icon on the taskbar, and click .
See also: 13 Ways to Open the Control Panel on Windows 10
The list of programs in the Start Menu can be quite long, but you don’t have to scroll through them. Suppose you’re looking for the Windows System group. That begins with W. To get to the W’s directly, click the Start Menu icon, then click one of the subheads like Recently Added, #, or A. You’ll see a grid of letters open up. Either click on the W, or type a W followed by the Enter key.
You can get access to the Start Menu for the purpose of adding or removing icons or changing icon properties including assigning shortcut keys. The Start Menu that you see when you click the icon is actually a merge of the all-users menu and your own personal menu.
%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
To use the On-Screen Keyboard, type osk in the taskbar search window and press Enter. Be sure to click to customize the OSK to your preferences.
The OSK can be handy if, for example, your keyboard lacks the
Windows logo key. And by the way, in the OSK the , Ctrl, and Alt keys
are all “sticky” with the following key, so that you can make all
the special combinations like +R.
There’s a different version of the OSK, called the “touch keyboard”, and it’s more versatile than the OSK for typing accented letters and some special characters. To activate it, right-click an empty spot on the taskbar and select .
The touch keyboard reminds me of a cell phone’s on-screen keyboard. On a cell phone, you can long-press a key, such as e, and then select from the list that pops up. On the Windows 10 touch keyboard with a touch screen, you do the same. If you don’t have a touch screen, use your mouse: right-click a character for about a second, then left-click the character you want from the list that pops up. (If this doesn’t work for you, click the keyboard-and-gear icon and select the first keyboard in the first row.) Just like with a phone, if you want a capital letter, you click the shift key ↑ first.
If you don’t like long-right-clicking, there’s a left-click interface too. On the main keyboard, click &123 then click Ω. The bottom row becomes a clickable list of categories, and the top three rows become a scrollable list of characters in each category, like this:
See also: How to Use the Touch Keyboard in Windows 10 from PC Magazine explains the touch keyboard’s options and gives lots of usage tips.
J. P. Gilliver pointed out in alt comp.os.windows-10: If you have an AltGr key — mapped to the right-hand Alt key on some keyboards — you can produce some accented letters and some special characters. Many Web pages list the keystrokes and their output, which are different for different national keyboard layouts. (US English keyboards typically do not have an AltGr key.)
There are a lot of methods for entering any Unicode character at your keyboard. Here I’ll just present a few that I like.
Assuming you know the hex code, press and hold the Alt key, then press and release + on the numeric keypad, then type the four-digit hex code and release the Alt key. For example, U+21D2 is a right-pointing arrow, so you would press and hold the Alt key, press and release the + on the numeric keypad, then type 21d2 or 21D2, then release the Alt key.
You can type digits on the numeric keypad or the top row of the main keyboard; letters can be upper or lower case. If there are leading zeroes in the hex code, you can omit them.
It’s possible nothing will happen when you try this method. In that case, you need to enable this form of input in the System Registry, in the following one-time procedure:
HKCU\Control Panel\Input Method
If you have a list of Unicode characters, the list may show the values in decimal or hex. How can you tell which is which? Codes in the form U+xxxx are hex; and if any codes in the list contain letters a–f then all the codes in that list are in hex. Look in the table for 215: if it’s a × multiplication sign you have a list of decimal codes; if it’s u with an odd-looking accent the table is hex codes.
You can press +. (the Windows logo and the period
or full stop together) to bring up the emoji picker. This also has a
bunch of accented language characters, special characters, and so on.
But it’s only a fraction of the full Unicode list.
Character Map is part of Windows; just type charmap in the taskbar search window and press Enter. You can scroll down looking for the character you want, double-click it to put it on the clipboard, then Ctrl+V to paste it where you need it. If you check (tick) at the lower left, you get a search window.
Personally, I prefer BabelMap, which you can get here for free. The interface is similar to Character Map, but there are more options and more output formats.
Don’t assume you necessarily have to enter Unicode numbers or search in apps. There are other possibilities.
Some applications have “Rich Edit Controls” and can enter common Unicode characters with multi-key sequences. For instance, in Word you can press Ctrl+apostrophe and then e to get an acute e (é), so you don’t need to know that the Unicode number is 0233 or hex E9. If you use an application frequently, check its help file; or check Rich Edit Shortcut Keys on the Microsoft site and test whether the key combinations work in your application.
The popular and excellent free AutoHotkey lets you define your own keystroke sequences to produce anything from elaborate and variable text down to single Unicode characters. The active user community has provided many scripts that you can use, without having to become an AutoHotkey expert yourself.
Unlike Windows 7, you can probably get along without a third-party clipboard manager. Windows 10 comes with one that will hold up to the last 25 items you copied or cut. The clipboard is there, but you have to enable it, as follows. Open Settings and select » . Slide the switch under from Off to On.
Once Clipboard History is enabled, what can you do with
it? First you need to
press +V to display the history on screen.
Then you can do any of these:
As an alternative, you can use the arrow keys to get to the
clip you want to paste, and then press the Enter key to perform the
paste into whichever app was open when you pressed +V.
Even after you enable the clipboard history, you don’t have to
use it every time. If you want to copy (Ctrl+C) or cut (Ctrl+X) some
text or a picture from one place and paste it (Ctrl+V) somewhere else,
you can do that the same way you always have, with no need to bring up
the history(+V).
What if you don’t have a Windows key? There
doesn’t seem to be another key combination to bring up the Windows
Clipboard History. But you can use the On-Screen
Keyboard. Or you could use a utility like the free
AutoHotkey to define a
custom key sequence that AutoHotkey will translate to +V.
I’ve been using AutoHotkey for years, and recommend it.
A lighter-weight open-source keyboard mapper, mentioned in the newsgroup alt.comp.os.windows-10, is sharpkeys; I haven’t used that one, but on a quick read it seems to be easier to learn than AutoHotkey.
Windows 10’s minimalist interface is all very well, but the difference between the active window and other windows can be awfully subtle. Too often when typing, I notice that nothing is going into the window I expected.
You can set Windows to color in the title bar of the active window:*
* Actually the title bar and the window borders are colored. But the title bar color is very visible, and the borders’ color is very subtle, easy to overlook.
When I implemented the tip above on my PC, I was surprised to see that Firefox’s title bar was still the default boring black, gray, and white. I asked for advice on alt.comp.os.windows-10, and helpful folks there posted two different solutions.
Option 1:
Ralph Fox pointed out that the apparent title bar in Firefox isn’t actually a Windows title bar; it’s just the tabs with their titles. You can enable the Windows title bar in the Firefox menu, but surprisingly not in Settings. In the menu, select » and check (tick) the box in the lower left corner that’s labeled . Of course, adding the title bar will take up some space, slightly reducing the screen space available for the content of Web pages.
Option 2:
Min-wai Chang posted some lines for userChrome.css to style the tabs bar, at the top of the Firefox window, like a Windows title bar. He also posted his source: How to Get Windows Accent Colors back in Firefox 92?
Your userChrome.css file lives in a folder called “chrome” under your Firefox profile folder. It’s not created by the Firefox install, so you may have to create it yourself. And you also need to tell Firefox to use the file, as explained in Set Firefox to look for userChrome.css at startup.
Before Windows XP, file and folder names sorted alphabetically in Explorer and in common dialogs. Starting with XP, and continuing through Windows 10, ABC10 sorts after ABC2, rather than before. Some people like that, but I prefer a strict character-by-character sort.
A simple Registry edit controls this behavior. Type regedit in the search box in the taskbar, and press the Enter key. If you get a prompt asking whether to let Registry Editor make changes, select .
Paste this string into the search window just below the menu, and press Enter:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
If there are multiple users on your PC and you want to do this for just yourself, change HKLM to HKCU in the above before pressing Enter.)
If you don’t see NoStrCmpLogical in the right-hand panel, click in a blank spot in that panel and select » . After entering the name NoStrCmpLogical, double-click it or press Enter to edit it, and enter 1 in the box. The change is effective when you log off and log on, or if you select Explorer.exe in Task Manager and restart it.
If you change your mind later and want to go back to the Windows 10 default sort, go back to the same spot in the registry and change the 1 to a 0.
Instead of using the GUI Registry Editor, you could open a command prompt as administrator and execute this command (all on one line):
reg add
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
/v NoStrCmpLogical /t REG_DWORD /d 1
Different people will consider different ones useless, so you can pick and choose.
This procedure will hide , but it won’t actually delete any data or folders.
Type regedit in the search box in the taskbar, and press the Enter key. If you get a prompt asking whether to let Registry Editor make changes, select . Paste this text into the location window just under the menu:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\{0DB7E03F-FC29-4DC6-9020-FF41B59E513A}
Right-click on {0DB7E03F-FC29-4DC6-9020-FF41B59E513A} and select *.
If you have 64-bit Windows 10—and you almost certainly do—also delete this key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\{0DB7E03F-FC29-4DC6-9020-FF41B59E513A}
If you don’t have the Wow6432Node key, your Windows 10 is the 32-bit version, and you needed to delete only the one key.
For most users, there’s no need to reboot, or even to log off
and on again. Test it by opening a new File Explorer window (press
+E). You should no longer see
. It worked that way for me, but if you still
see , a reboot should make them go away.
This information came from How to Remove “3D Objects” From This PC on Windows 10.
You can hide all six of these by clicking the drop-down arrow to the left of in the main (right-hand) panel of the File Explorer window. (Again, these procedures don’t actually delete any data or folders; they just hide things.)
To hide these folders in the folder list under in the left-hand panel, use a registry file from this article at How-to Geek: How to Remove the Folders From “This PC” on Windows 10. There's a file to hide all six of them, and separate files to hide individual ones. Whatever you hide through the registry hacks will be hidden in both the folder tree at the left and the main display at the right.
How-to Geek says that you’ll need to restart Explorer by using Task Manager, or else log off and on again. But check before you do—I simply opened a new Explorer window, and the objects were all hidden.
Windows 10 Home: You can just uninstall OneDrive in » , according to How to Disable OneDrive and Remove It From File Explorer on Windows 10.
Windows 10 Pro: Microsoft really wants you to use OneDrive, so even uninstalling it won’t remove it from File Explorer. Instead, use Group Policy Editor, as follows:
Seems like every time I right-click, the context menu includes and an icon to really draw attention to it. That’s fine for Skype users, but for the rest of us it’s just another annoyance. You could uninstall Skype in Control Panel, but then if you ever do need it you’ll have to go to the trouble of reinstalling it. Disabling it via the System Registry seems like less of a hassle overall.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions
You should see this:
Restart File Explorer and right-click a file. You should no longer see . If you do, but everything is correct in the Registry Editor, the change should become effective the next time you restart your computer.
Acknowledgement: This tip was adapted from Disable “Share with Skype” from Context Menu at Technipages. That page also has several other methods to accomplish the same goal.
You put your computer to sleep and go off to do something. When you come back, it’s running again. How can you prevent a device from waking your computer?
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
to display all the devices that are currently allowed to wake the computer, or
powercfg -lastwake
to display the device that triggered the latest wakeup.
powercfg -devicedisablewake
Use quotes around the device name if it contains spaces.
Acknowledgment: I learned about the devicequery wake_armed command in this article from Ars Technica.
This one seems incredible to me, but by design Windows 10 is set up to transmit Windows updates from your PC to other PCs, not only on your local network but anywhere on the Internet. In effect, your PC becomes a Microsoft server, with no payment to you. And, depending on your ISP’s rate plan, it could even cost you money.
If you don’t like that, Open Settings, then select » » » . Set “Allow downloads from other PCs” to “PCs on my local network”, or to Off if you don’t have any other Windows 10 PCs on your LAN. (Yes, “Allow downloads from other PCs” controls your PC sending updates to other PCs.)
See also: How to Stop Windows 10 From Uploading Updates to Other PCs Over the Internet
Windows 10 really wants you to use Edge, and OneDrive,
and Windows Hello,
and other things that you may or may not want to use.
After booting, it may pop up a blue screen headed “Let’s finish
setting up your device”. If you’ve already set things up the way you
want them, this is just an annoyance.
To suppress that reminder, start Settings, then select » and remove the check mark in the box labeled “Suggest ways I can finish settings up my device to get the most out of Windows”.
This one is definitely a matter of personal taste. But I’d rather skip the lock screen and just go directly to the login screen after booting, or waking the computer from sleep.
If you feel the same, a Registry edit will accomplish that.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
The change will be effective immediately, with no need to sign out and sign back in.
See also: How to Disable the Lock Screen on Windows 10 from How-To Geek says that the registry exit works only in Windows 10 Home and you need to use Group Policy in Windows 10 Pro. But I have Pro, and the registry edit did the job for me.
I haven’t researched Windows 11, because my PC isn’t eligible for it, but it looks like a lot of people would rather not move to Windows 11, or at least not yet.
If you want to prevent the update to Windows 11, use a Group Policy setting if you have Windows 10 Pro, or a Registry edit if you have Windows 10 Home. This article explains the procedure: How to Block the Windows 11 Update From Installing on Windows 10.
You won’t get the Windows 11 update; you also won’t get Windows 10 updates past the version you specify. So you’ll need to check Microsoft’s site periodically, and when there’s a new version update the policy setting or Registry value on your computer.
There’s also InControl, a simple GUI program available as a free download from Steve Gibson’s grc.com. From the description, it seems to use the same mechanism as the article mentioned above, but you may find it more convenient than manually editing policy or the registry. I have used other freeware from grc.com, including the program to block Microsoft’s forced updating of Windows 7 to Windows 10 on my older laptop, and have been quite pleased.
My thanks to Brian Gregory in the newsgroup alt.comp.os.windows-10 for posting about InControl.
If you have the opposite problem — you want Windows 11 but Windows 10 says your PC is unsupported — see How to Install Windows 11 on an Unsupported PC from How-To Geek. The article gives workarounds for many of the common issues that prevent installing Windows 11.
This can’t be done in the usual way, because the Calculator entry in the Start Menu doesn’t have any shortcut file (.lnk file) behind it, not in either of the Start Menu locations (see above). It’s just a bit of Windows 10 magic, I guess.
Of course you can find Calculator in the Start Menu, right-click it, and select . Or you can run it, then right-click on it in the taskbar and select . I don’t like those solutions because they add extra visual clutter. I prefer shortcut keys because my hands never leave the keyboard (and I’m not very accurate with a mouse.)
To assign a shortcut key to the calculator, you have to create a shortcut and assign the key to that, as follows:
(The above was adapted from Method 4 of Easy Ways to Open Calculator in Windows 10.)
See also: If you want to open Calculator with a keyboard shortcut, you’d probably like to know the keyboard shortcuts for doing things in Calculator. My list, here, corrects some errors in Microsoft’s list and supplies some shortcuts that were not in Microsoft’s list.
This information should apply to any version of Windows that supports your version of Office.
It can sometimes be handy to open an Excel workbook or Word document from the command line, for instance if you want to open it read only, or if you want to open the app without your usual add-ons.
Microsoft’s Command-line switches for Microsoft Office products lists some of the command-line switches for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access. There are instructions on the page to get the complete list, but when I followed those instructions I got a page showing the first 10 of 457,000(!) search results. None of the 10 were relevant. I googled and found options for Office 2010, which is the version I have, but I couldn’t find an authoritative list for Office 2016 or later versions.
The Microsoft Software Collection that comes with Windows 10 is gorgeous, but the ads are definitely annoying. Windows 7 came with a good collection of ad-free games, several of which, including Minesweeper, Chess, and Mahjongg, didn’t make it into Windows 10. You can download a 100% free Windows 10/11 installer of the original Windows 7 games here, at Majorgeeks.com.
That page warns: “Some Windows Updates have been known to revert these changes and delete your games. We recommend you bookmark this page in case your games are deleted on a future Windows Update.” They do seem to update the installer to overcome this problem; on 23 Dec 2021, when I downloaded it, the page was dated 19 Oct 2021.
This information should apply to any version of Windows, back to Windows 7 at least.
In general, it’s a good idea to accept updates for all your apps, because they may contain bug fixes, particularly security fixes. However, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird have the unfortunate habit of breaking add-ons with their new program versions. The GUIs no longer let you turn off updates, but you can do it through two methods that were posted in alt.com.os.windows-10.
Method A: Registry Edit, posted by MikeS on 2022-01-23:
The update screen will now show “updates disabled by Administrator”, but you can download and run the installer for a new version when you want to.
Method B: policies.json file, excerpts from Disable Updates in Firefox 63 and above posted by Frank Slootweg on 2022-01-23:
{
"policies":
{
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
and move it into the subfolder. If there’s already a file there, don’t replace it but add the above text to it.
I haven’t tried this method, but Frank Slootweg verified that it works for Thunderbird, and the poster on the original page verified it for Firefox.
I have a Canoscan LIDE 50 flatbed scanner, which I bought on clearance in January 2005. (Judging from a Google search, a lot of other people have the same model.) Canon abandoned support of it some years ago, but they made a good product, and it’s been working just fine with Irfanview on my Windows 7 laptop. But naturally I want to use it with my Windows 10 desktop PC. Here’s what I discovered along the way to accomplishing that. (This should apply to any driver of legacy hardware, not just to a scanner.)
When I tried running the driver installer, there was no error message but also nothing happened. It turns out that you don’t install drivers, you just tell Windows 10 where to find them and it does the install. Follow these steps:
You may get the error message “The hash for the file is not present in the specified catalog file. The file is likely corrupt or the victim of tampering.” If you do, the actual issue is that your driver isn’t digitally signed, and Windows versions starting with Windows 8 don’t want to install unsigned drivers. To get around this and install the driver, you will need to reboot Windows 10 in a special mode:
After a successful install, you may wish to reboot your PC, which will automatically return to the default mode of not allowing unsigned drivers to be installed.
But after a reboot, I found that Windows would not allow my driver to run. There was no error message from Windows; Irfanview just couldn’t connect to the driver. My temporary solution is to open an administrative command prompt and execute this command:
bcdedit -set testsigning on
and reboot. Windows shows a “Test Mode” warning, but the scanner works fine.
After I’ve scanned my documents, I get out of test mode by executing this command in an administrative command prompt:
bcdedit -set testsigning off
and then rebooting.
I also added a section on the Windows 10 touch keyboard.
Also created an image for the Windows logo key. (But see 11 Apr 2022, above.)
Updates and new info: https://BrownMath.com/general/