Windows 10 tweaks

Lum

A thread for useful tweaks for Win10, feel free to add your own.

Make it less ugly, and get coloured title bars back.
Download WinAero Tweaker, run it, and look for the option "enable aero lite theme". Decide whether you want the version with white or black text (depends what colour you plan to set it to) and enable the theme. Ignore the "enable coloured titlebars" option. It works and keeps the new Win10 theme, but inactive windows look a bit messy due to the way the text is now plotted.
You can then optionally reduce the height of the title bars and reduce the border padding, which is useful if you have a small screen and do not intend on using a touchscreen.

Narrow vertical taskbar, for small widescreens
Not to everybody's taste, but with modern widescreen monitors at low resolutions, combined with websites being more mobile oriented, and document editing being mostly in portrait, it's worth trying out using Windows this way.
Firstly pick up the taskbar and drag it to the left hand edge of the screen. If it won't move then right click it and untick "lock the taskbar".
This is good, but it's still too wide, so download 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, make sure you get the beta version (now fully updated for Win10), and run it.
Install it, configure it to start with windows, and then right click its tray icon and choose Advanced Settings. Scroll down until you find no_width_limit, double click on the 0 next to it and change it to a 1. Close out of everything and you can now make the taskbar nice and narrow. This program also has a few other useful options, such as removing the Show Desktop button at the end of the taskbar, and another advanced setting w10_large_icons which makes the taskbar icons the same size as they were on previous versions of Windows.

Pin the recycle bin to the Explorer quick access bar
Desktop icons are so 80s. With Win7+ pinning frequently used apps to the taskbar is the way to go. Problem is the recycle bin is still stuck there, so...
Open up Windows Explorer, and drag the recycle bin onto the quick access area.
Finally, right click the desktop and choose view -> untick Show Desktop icons, and enjoy a clutter free desktop.

I_have_spoken

How to customize your Windows 10 experience

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-customize-your-windows-10-experience

Big_Graeme

Lum wrote: »

Pin the recycle bin to the Explorer quick access bar

Just drag it to the quick access bar, works a charm.

RumRat

Big_Graeme wrote: »

Just drag it to the quick access bar, works a charm.

I have it in the notification area using 'MiniBin'

Jivesinger

* Check that System Restore is switched on - whenever I've tried to upgrade it ends up switched off by default.

* Create a Recovery Drive on a usb stick. If you tick the option to include System files, the USB will contain enough to fully reinstall Windows.

* If you have a restricted/metered network connection, look at the Update settings and in particular the one to choose how updates are delivered. If you select the option to get it from other PCs, then they can also get updates from you, at the cost of your bandwidth.

Fightsback

For those who prefer not to be spied upon so heavily here are some tweak tools to address the problem:

http://bgr.com/2015/08/14/windows-10-spying-prevention-privacy-tools/

Lum

Big_Graeme wrote: »

Just drag it to the quick access bar, works a charm.

That didn't work for me when I did it (admittedly this was a few days before release) but it does now, so I've updated the post, thank you.