Windows 10 tricks

Windows 10 is the worst version of Windows I've seen as far as user interface and customization is concerned. The following tips will help you bypass some of its many, many shortcomings and make it at least partially usable again.

Shortcomings

This is a list of shortcoming of the OS, and, in some cases, how to work around them.

Bad UI

The user interface of Windows 10 is one of the worst Microsoft has ever made, for several reasons:

• Title bars are no longer standard across forms and many programs abandon the default layout. For example, in an attempt to look "fresh," the designers removed the visual cues on the title bar section for many of their forms (like the Taskbar settings form). They are now the same color as the background of the form making it much harder to know when you're clicking on the form or the title bar. This causes the user to frequently miss when trying to drag a form by its title bar or double-click it to min/max it. Also, by not having a visible title bar, it's impossible to visually know if these forms have focus.
• All of the default form controls, which previously used a visually functional 3D style, have been replaced with flat controls like way back on Windows 3. This makes it harder to know where you can expect a click to be registered.
• Controls like textboxes and drop-down menus no longer show when they have focus, so you can no longer tell by looking at a form which control will accept keyboard input.
• Many controls are now the same color as the form in a dialog. Toolbars, side bars, scroll bars, status bars, and grid headers are all the same color making it much harder to visually demarcate them. This causes a lot more missed clicks, because you can't know where your mouse is. This is especially bad with controls that can accept clicks, like gird headers, because you will frequently click them when you mean to click the top record in a grid.
• Several scrollbars are now hidden on various forms and require you to hover your mouse over them before they will become visible. This causes the user to often miss out on additional data because, without a scrollbar, it appears as though there is nothing else to see.

Can't Customize Colors

Windows 10 removes the majority of color customizations. In most previous versions of Windows, you could set a custom color for pretty much every aspect of the interface including the forms, controls, even to the point of being able to change the highlight and shadow colors of 3D elements. Unfortunately, in Windows 10, they removed this entirely from the theme engine. Now, you can choose only between a bright white form or a total black form (both of which are harsh on the eyes). Your only other option of customization is the screen's background color and a form highlight color (which is not used on several forms), everything else is mandated by the theme with no way to customize it.

Case Change File Refresh Bug

If you rename a file but only change the case of some letters (for example, rename "test" to "Test"), Windows 10 will not refresh the file name. You must manually refresh the file explorer in order to see your changes. This bug existed in Windows 7 as well.

Default Applications Can No Longer Be Changed Easily

Even when running with administrator privileges, programs can no longer change which application should open a file extension by default. For example, if you install a PDF viewer, it cannot replace Edge as the default viewer. Instead, you have to manually set this, either by right-clicking on the file and changing the default viewer, or by using the hugely bloated default apps form which has hundreds of extensions for files you don't even have installed and requires a lot of manual filtering or multiple clicks for each extension.

Disable/Enabled Visual Effects

Windows 10 slows down your ability to use it with a lot of stupid animations. Some of these are a little helpful at letting you keep track of what is going on, but others are very slow and/or obtrusive. To toggle various animations off or on, do the following:

1. Open Control Panel.
2. Open System.
3. In the left menu, click Advanced system settings.
4. In the System Properties dialog, select the Advanced tab.
5. Under Performance, click Settings.
6. In the Visual Effects tab, check or uncheck the visual effects you desire.

Dragging Programs Out of the Search Results

In Windows 7, when you searched for files, you could drag a file from the results list and copy, move, or create a short-cut directly from the list. Windows 10 eliminated this feature. Thankfully, in a later version, they added it back.

File Explorer Confusingly Highlights Whitespace

When you click on a file or folder in File Explorer, Windows 7 would only highlight the icon and name of the object, but Windows 10 highlights all the whitespace in the column and also has a lighter hover highlight. How Windows 10 handles various functions involving the whitespace changes depending on what you're trying to do:

• Drag-and-drop transfers: You can copy or move a file by dragging it into the whitespace of a File Explorer window. However, if you drag-and-drop anything onto a folder, Windows assumes you want to transfer the file into that folder. Likewise, if you drop onto an executable, Windows assume you want to run it with the dropped file. In Windows 7, this was easy to avoid because you could drop the file in the whitespace after the file or folder, but, since Windows 10 highlights all of the whitespace, it will assume you want to open the file instead. In order to transfer files safely, you either have to carefully position your cursor in the narrow strips between the columns or scroll to the end of the file list where there is more whitespace each time you transfer a file.
• Right-click: You get a different result when you right-click on the whitespace of a file or folder depending on whether the whitespace is selected or not. For example, if you first left-click the whitespace to highlight the file, then right-click, you will get the file's context menu. However, if you right-click the whitespace of a file you're only hovering over, but haven't first selected it, you will get the context menu of File Explorer.
• Second click: Performing a second click on a highlighted file or folder is supposed to activate the rename function, but, it works differently than both right-clicking and drag-and-drop. To enter the rename function, you must click on just the name portion of a selected file or folder. A second click in the whitespace of even a selected file will not enter the rename function.
• Double-click: Unlike the right-click and second click, double-clicking the whitespace does open a file.
• Click and move to select: In Windows 7, you can left-click in the whitespace after a file name, hold the button down, and move the cursor to generate a selection box. Files and folders would become selected if their name or icon was touched by the selection box. This is also more confusing in Windows 10. The hover highlight implies that you will be dragging a file if you left-click, hold, and move while in the whitespace, but it won't. Instead, you will get the selection box like in Windows 7, however, highlighting occurs, not when the selection box touches the icon or name portion, but any of the whitespace area. This is generally tolerable, although it makes it impossible to only highlight files based on the length of their name, a trick I occasionally employed.

This unwanted behavior appears to have been added in the Creator's Update. According to a Microsoft forum, it's impossible to revert back to the far more intuitive Windows 7 functionality.

Fixing the Start Menu

The start menu in Windows 10 is an absolute mess. It's full of advertisements for garbage Microsoft products, it lists every single program on your computer (and many you don't even have!), can't easily be customized, and it takes up the entire screen. Later versions of Windows 10 made it slightly less hideous and more configurable, but it's still pretty much impossible to make it function in a useful manner. Since it can't be configured to the way you want it, you'll have to resort to a free third-party solution. Download and install Classic Shell. It will give you a much higher level of control over your start menu and file explorer menus.

Hide Windows Notifications

In previous versions of Windows, you could move the notifications icon into the hidden fold in the system tray, Windows 10 has removed this ability. Notifications are now also populated with desperate attempts at getting you to buy shitty Microsoft products. If anyone figures out a way to hide this, let me know.

Quick Launch Toolbar

The Quick Launch Toolbar was a wonderful feature of Windows XP that was removed in Vista and above which used the less-intuitive and more cluttered Pin/Unpin feature. To re-enable the quick launch, do the following:

1. Right-click on the taskbar.
2. Select the Toolbars menu.
3. Click on New Toolbar...
4. Navigate to .\Users\Your User\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch.
5. Highlight the Quick Launch folder, and click "Select Folder".
6. Right-click on the new Quick Launch toolbar in the taskbar.
7. In the menu, uncheck "Show Title" and "Show Text".
8. Use the toolbar's handle to drag it fully to left to position it like XP.

Re-Enable Volume Mixer

Being able to easily adjust volume per application was one of the few decent Windows Vista improvements, so, naturally, Windows 10 removed it. By default, Windows 10 returned to the less-functional single master volume slider like Windows XP. The Volume Mixer has a master volume control as well, but also includes application-specific volume sliders. To set the taskbar volume icon back to opening the more useful Volume Mixer, do the following:

1. Open RegEdit.
2. Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
3. If there isn't a key named MTCUVC, create one.
4. Inside of the MTCUCV key, if there isn't a D-Word (32-bit) Value named EnableMtcUvc, create one (it's case-sensitive).
5. Double-click the EnableMtcUvc value, set its Value Data to 0, and click OK.
6. The taskbar volume icon will now open to the Volume Mixer by default once more.

Set a Default Folder Style

In File Explorer -> View -> Options -> View -> Apply to Folders, Windows claims to allow you to set a default icon view (details, list, large icons, etc.) for all folders. As far as I can tell, the Apply to Folders and Reset Folders buttons has not worked since Windows XP, and every version since only partially processes these buttons for a few folders or just the folder you're in. If anyone can find a way to get this to work properly again, please let me know.

Setting a Custom Background Color

The latest version of Windows 10 finally reverted back the ability to set the background to a custom color and added decent colors to choose from, but the earlier versions were garbage and required to to have to use run an older program to get access:

control /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper

Turn Off User Account Control

Microsoft assumes that the default Windows user is incompetent (probably a safe bet) and pops an annoying nag message every time you try to do anything of substance on your computer. This was added to prevent users from granting admin rights to dangerous programs, but, if the user is stupid enough to install a virus, do they really think a confirmation dialog is going to solve the problem? To turn this waste of time off:

1. Open Control Panel.
2. Select Security and Maintenance.
3. On the left side, click Change User Account Control settings.
4. Drop the slider all the way to the bottom.
5. Give a middle finger to Microsoft's "Not recommended" warning.

Turn Off Admin Nag Message For File Access

Even with UAC entirely off, Windows 10 feels it necessary to require a nag message every time you modify files anywhere on your boot drive outside of your User folder. To turn this off entirely, do the following:

1. Open RegEdit.
2. Drill down to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. In the right pane look for EnableLUA and modify its value to 0.
4. Close RegEdit, reboot.

Turn Off Updates

Windows 10 eliminates the ability to turn off or even pause updates, and, when they need to reboot your system, they will do so without your permission. In addition to destroy all unsaved data in the process, Microsoft has a long history of creating updates that damage or corrupt their system under certain circumstances. I haven't looked too deep into how to turn this off, but I have heard the laptop users can put their network into roaming mode which prevents Windows 10 from downloading updates automatically.

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