Free Performance Check for Your PC: Get the Best Windows 7 Features Back

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1 Take Control of Your Windows Libraries With Windows Libraries you can organise data from different folders by type, making it easy to find, for example, all of your image files in Explorer. Click on Remove to remove a selected folder from the library. Taking time to manage your libraries is especially important when the locations of folders may change on your hard drive. To make changes to a library, open Explorer and right-click on the library that you d like to change in the lefthand menu bar, then select Properties from the pop-up menu. Click on the Add button to add a new folder to the library. Add new folders to your library and remove ones you don t need Free Performance Check for Your PC: Get the Best Windows 7 Features Back One of the major differences between Windows 7 and Windows 10/8.1 is that the Performance Index is no longer included as part of Windows. In Windows 7 the Performance Index was a useful way to evaluate the performance of your PC and its main hardware devices. It tests the five most important components of the PC: processor, RAM, graphics, 3D performance and hard drive and then grades them on a scale of 1 to 7.9. Fortunately, there is a hidden tool in Windows 10/8.1 that you can use to reveal the Performance Index of your system. Although it is not as simple to 3

2 use as the one in Windows 7, this tool is still very useful since it helps you to uncover performance weaknesses on your system. If the evaluation report reveals that your memory performance is letting you down, for example, you can add more RAM to your system. On Windows 7 the Performance Index is shown in the System Control Panel. This is not the case on Windows 10/8.1, and instead you have to open the Command Prompt and run the Performance Index command manually: 1. Press + X and click Command Prompt (Admin). 2. At the Command Prompt type winsat formal and press Enter. Windows will then calculate the Performance Index. 3. Once the process is completed, close the Command Prompt window and press + E to open Explorer. Note, if Command Prompt admin is not available on your system, select Windows PowerShell (Admin) then type cmd and press Enter. 4. Navigate to the folder C:\ Windows\Performance\Win SAT\Datastore. 5. Look for a file called something like Formal.Assessment (Initial).WinSAT.xml. The start of the filename contains the date and time that the report was created. 6. Right-click on the file, select Open with and choose the WordPad program. 7. In the top menu bar click on Find then and type systemscore and press Enter. 8. The first search result will display the Performance Index for your CPU (processor), this is then followed by the other components. The Performance Index on Windows 10/8.1 has a maximum value of 9.9. If you encounter a value below 5, you should update the component in question. 4

3 Access Drives from the Taskbar Quickly It is much quicker to access drives from the taskbar and cuts down on the number of clicks. You can add a custom taskbar menu that allows you to quickly access your drives. To do so, proceed as follows: Toolbars > New toolbar from the pop-up menu. 2. Select This PC (Windows 10/ 8.1)or Computer (Windows 7). 3. Click on Select Folder. 1. Right-click on a blank area of the taskbar and then select You ll immediately see a new toolbar appear on the taskbar containing your drives, as well as some other folders. Quickly Fix a Stuck Print Job When a document you send to the printer fails to print out, it will often just sit in the queue blocking you from running any further print jobs. You can solve this problem by removing the stuck job, directly from the print spooler directory. To do so, proceed as follows: 1. To turn off the print queue service, press + R, type SERVICES.MSC and click on OK. 2. In the Services Control Panel, select the Print Spooler service. 3. Click on the Stop link on the left-hand side. 4. Press the + E key combination to open Explorer. 5. Navigate to the folder: C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS folder and then delete all the files in the folder but not the folder itself. 5

4 6. Swap back to the Services window, make sure that Print Spooler is still selected. 7. Click on the Start link on the left-hand side. Stop the Print Spooler service before deleting the stuck jobs Organise Your Start Menu in Windows 10 The more software you install on your PC, the more chaotic your Start menu becomes. Fortunately, it is possible to bring order to the chaos: Remove the tiles you never use from the Start menu. Right-click on the tile you want to remove, then select Unpin from Start. After you ve removed the tiles that you don't need, sort the remaining tiles to make them easier to find by assigning them categories. You can do this by clicking on a tile and keeping the mouse button pressed down drag it to the place you want it. You can create a new category by dragging a tile to the top of the menu so that a blank title bar is shown. Click on New group and enter a new name for the category. You can now drag further icons to this category. Remove Unnecessary Components from Windows During the installation process, Windows sets up numerous additional components and functions. The Windows components appear as entries in the Start menu or the tile view but there is absolutely no way of uninstalling them from here as you would with normal software. 6

5 These can only be removed via the Control Panel: 1. On Windows 10, simply press + R, type control and click OK. On Windows 8.1, press the + X key combination, then click Control Panel. On Windows 7, click Start > Control Panel. 2. In the Control Panel set the View by drop-down list in the top right-hand corner to Large icons, then click Programs and Features. 3. Select Turn Windows features on or off and wait a few seconds until Windows has gathered all the system information. 4. On this screen you can choose which Windows elements you wish to delete by removing the corresponding tick. Click OK when done. In order to disable a function, simply remove the tick in the checkbox How to Fix System Recovery After Installing Windows Updates Imagine that you need to reset Windows 10 due to a major system problem, but when you open the tool you find that System Restore no longer works. This means that you can t reset Windows back to a previous point in time when it was working correctly. Occasionally, Windows Updates silently disable the System Restore tool. What is even worse is that your old restore points are no longer available following the update. Once you have installed a Windows update, you should immediately check to see if System Restore is still working. 7

6 You can solve this problem by doing the following: 1. Press + Pause. Click on System protection on the left-hand side. 2. In the Available drives box, you will see all the drives present on your system. The drive named System needs to show On in the Protection column. If it doesn t then System Restore has been disabled. 3. In order to activate System Restore, select the drive labelled System and then click on the Configure button. 4. Select the option Turn on System Protection and click on OK. 5. Immediately click on Create to create a new restore point. You can only fix your PC if System Restore is active The problem is now fixed. If any Windows problems occur, you will be able to reset your system to a previous point in time. Display Notification Messages for Longer When new s and messages arrive, Windows 10 displays notifications in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. However, these messages only pop up for a few seconds and are then hidden, making them easy to miss. If you find that messages are not shown for long enough, you can increase the display time as follows: 1. Press + I to open the Settings, then click on Ease of Access followed by Other options. Use the Show notifications for drop-down list to set how long messages should be displayed for. 8