Top 10 Tips, Features, and Projects Every Windows User Should Try

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10. Upgrade to Windows 8

Okay, let's get the most controversial stuff out of the way first. Sure, Windows 8 puts a big focus on touch screen devices, and if you have a Windows 8 PC you can always downgrade it—but Windows 8 really doesn't deserve all the hate its gotten. Sure, the Start menu is gone, but even the most tech unsavvy user can bring it back with a bunch of different apps. Furthermore, contrary to what you've heard, it does have useful new features for desktop users: better performance, enhanced security, a new Windows Explorer (which, even if you don't love the ribbon, is more useful than the old one), a much improved task manager, the ability to Reset & Refresh your PC, the well-designed File History backup tool, and more. Even if you have a few annoyances, they're easy to fix. Plus, it even has a few secret features of its own, which leads us to...

9. Discover Windows' Secret Features

Both Windows 7 and 8 have a number of features that go largely unsung, but they can be really handy if you know where they are. From the smallest geeky tricks to the big features you've forgotten are there, a little exploration can go a long way into making Windows more productive. Most of those secret features should work just as well on Windows 8 too—plus, Windows 8 users have their own secret features to try out.

8. Clean Up and Speed Up Your PC

Windows often gets criticized for getting slow and bloated over time, but you don't actually need to reinstall Windows regularly—as long as you're careful about what you install, you shouldn't run into that problem. Of course, if you've already reached that point, you can easily clean up and speed up your PC with a little maintenance. Make sure you don't fall for the big maintenance myths out there, or you'll have problems. While you're at it, you might tryspeeding up that boot time a bit too.

7. Upgrade Your Hard Drive to an SSD

Speaking of speeding up your boot time, have you upgraded to a solid state drive yet? If not, you should consider it—it's probably the best upgrade you can possibly make to your computer. Upgrading is easy, too—you just need to move a bit of your data around, since you'll likely be using two drives (one for your OS and programs, and another for all your files). Check out ourguide to migrating to an SSD for more information.

6. Learn All the Shortcuts

Chances are, with everything you do in a day, there are ways to do those things faster. The easiest way to speed up your tasks in Windows? Keyboard shortcuts. I'm still discovering shortcuts I never knew about and even the simplest shortcut can make a daily task so much easier. Check out our master list of Windows 7 shortcuts, which should work in Windows 8 as well. And, if you're a Windows 8 user, we have a cheat sheet with all the newly added shortcuts for you too.

5. Dual Boot With Another Operating System

Okay, so this list is all about Windows, but even Windows users might need another OS once in awhile. If you occasionally need to boot into Linux, for example, you can dual boot Windows and Ubuntu in perfect harmony. If you want to try Windows 8 but don't want to upgrade just yet, you can dual boot it too. Heck, you can even dual boot and virtualize the same partition, which is really handy. If you need OS X, you'll need Hackintosh-compatible hardware to dual boot—or you could just install OS X in VirtualBox on Windows.

4. Load Up on the Best Apps

There is some crappy Windows software out there, and a lot of it is extremely popular—like Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer, and almost any commercial CD burning software. Don't you deserve something better? Check out our Lifehacker Pack for the essential apps every Windows user should have, our App Directory for the best apps in every category, and the 50 free apps we're thankful for for everything else you could possibly imagine.

3. Explore Windows' Most Advanced Tools

Budding power users have no doubt encountered some of Windows' most confusing and cryptic tools, like the registry, DLL files, User Account Control, and other features. If you still aren't exactly sure what those tools do (or what you can do with them), we've got a guide that teaches you all the basics. With the right knowledge of Windows' advanced tools, you can do some really cool stuff, and customize Windows more than ever before

2. Create a Custom Version of Windows

Okay, so you've discovered some of Windows' best features, but what about all those features you don't want? Or, what about the extra apps and tweaks you want on every version of Windows you install? You may not have known this, but you can actually create a custom Windows installation with all your favorite tweaks, updates, features, and apps in tow, so you don't have to redo them all every time. Of course, that's most useful if you reinstall Windows often—if you're just doing it once, you can also do a clean install without losing all your apps and tweaks using just a few simple tricks instead. Photo remixed from Fer Gregory (Shutterstock).

1. Add More Awesome Features to Windows (and Improve the Built-In Ones)

Windows is a great operating system, but it isn't perfect. With the right apps and tweaks, though, you can add all the features you want and make its built-in offerings much better. For example: out of the box, Windows Search doesn't work incredibly well. But, with a few settings tweaks, it can be a million times more useful. Similarly, jump lists are cool, but it'd be nice if they were customizable—enter Jumplist Extender. Check out our top 10 downloads that enhance Windows' built-in features for more.

Making the switch: moving from an iPhone to a Galaxy S4

One noob's guide to successfully migrating from iOS to Android, and the best apps to make it all work.
I’ve recently made a very difficult life decision.
I’ve decided it’s time to try a phone other than my trusty iPhone.
Since the iphone 3 I’ve been firmly in the Apple camp for my smartphone. Yes, I’m aware it’s a terrible walled-garden, and yes, I know that Steve Jobs was a notorious puppy-killer and megalomaniac – or something, if you pay attention to the constant inter-camp bickering. But, in my defense, I would just like to say what everyone usually says in defense of Apple products.
They just work. I do enough tweaking and fiddling with the various PCs in my life that something that just does what it says in the tin is pretty attractive. Plus I’m a long term user of iTunes, and while I know people who really do think it is the devil, I’ve never had issues, and really like the easy integration of music across my devices.
That said, a couple of things have influenced my decision to move. My current iPhone is a 4s, and it’s a little on the heavy side; I wear suits quite a bit, and it’s not unusual for my phone to ruin the line of a well-cut suit, both in terms of bulk, and in the way it drags down one side. When I’m wearing jeans, though, the phone lives in my back pocket, where its hard edges have worn two inconvenient holes in the back pocket of every pair I own.
And then there’s just plain curiosity – I probably should have a go at the other side of things, given my line of work.
So, being a firm believer that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing in an extreme way, I’ve gotten hold of a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S4, and I’m making the leap. I’m not the only person to switch sides, or contemplate it, so I thought I’d document the process and list what apps and tools have made the transition as easy as possible.
Hopefully...
OMG it’s light!As I said, one of the big draws of the Galaxy S4 is its weight, and it’s a pretty amazing piece of kit in that regard. The plastic is a big change from the glass-backing of my iPhone 4s, but the new handset does come with some drawbacks.
First up, it’s so large that it doesn’t fit in my jeans pocket properly, and while my iPhone never fell out of my pocket, the S4 has dropped to the floor twice in a single week while I’m sitting down.
Thankfully, the plastic seems plenty tough – there’s not a scratch on the unit. And yes, it does buckle a far better swash in a suit, despite being larger. So that’s one win for the new phone right away.
Of course, the sartorial scale is just one measure of a good phone, and for the majority of users, not even the most important (you philistines!). As weird as it may sound, the prime use for a phone is still communication, so the first step of the conversion process was to get all my contacts across to the S4.
Thankfully, there’s Samsung Smart Switch, which worked pretty seamlessly, though not perfectly.
You can download the software here, and once you’ve got your iPhone backed up to your PC (not a cloud backup, but one on your actual hard drive), you’re in luck. And no, there isn’t a version for Mac as of writing, but one is apparently coming.
Once the application’s installed, run it and it will ask you to plug in your Samsung device. Once it’s connected, you can select what device’s backup you’re using, and which particular backup to use. In our case, it was a little trickier; my iTunes files are stored on the home NAS, and Smart Switch didn’t seem to like navigating beyond my desktop. I had to copy the backup from the server to my PC, but then it worked fine.
With the backup chosen, you get a simple menu where you can pick what you want to backup, including not just contacts, but images, videos, music and more. Of course, it’s also worth remember that, out of the box, the S4 has only 8GB of storage – I skipped porting my music across, because even on my 16GB iPhone I was pushing things to its limit.
But that’s okay. With the ability to expand storage via a MicroSD card, I was looking forward to going nuts and getting my entire collection across.
You can never tell when you’ll want to play the most obscure track in your collection, right?
One last thing – Smart Switch will offer to download Samsung’s Kies handset management app, but it’s really not at all essential. In fact, it's pretty dire.
Contacts and Google interactions are... oddOne of the oddest things about signing into Gmail on the new phone is the way your contacts are suddenly full of Google+ and Gmail contacts – the G+ stuff is especially annoying, as I used G+ for approximately 47 hours before finding it inherently pointless (which is harsh, but I really do only have time/spoons for a handful of social media avenues). Thankfully you can turn off G+ contact-syncing, though it is about three screens down in the Accounts part of the phone’s settings.
So, with all that cleaned out of contacts, I was able to see that pretty much everything had worked fine with Smart Switch – which was sadly wrong. As some SMSes started coming in, it looked as though while some contacts had came across, the numbers associated with them didn’t. Not too many, but if you’re going through the process it’s worth doing a quick double check for missing details, and then manually copying across whatever’s needed. In my case, it was only three phone numbers out of 46 people.
One thing that has really opened my eyes to Android (even Samsung’s rather bloated version of it) is the sheer amount of customisation power on offer, in terms of the look and functionality of the various home screens. So, having gotten a taste of that in nixing G+’s control of my phone, I went digging a little further.
There are a tonne of voice and motion control options in the S4, and to put it mildly, some work better than others. At the best of times I’ve always found voice control to be quite the gimmick, so killing off all of that not only means there’s that much less processing on the CPU, but you can also then speed up the response of the home button. By turning off the ‘Open via the home key’ option for the S Voice shortcut, you actually get faster performance when you actually want to go to the home screen – so, pretty much all of the time.
The gesture input tricks are kinda neat, but, again, hardly world-changing. Half the time we find the phone can’t even pick them up, so turning them off entirely is, again, a bit of a battery saver. And anyway, answering your phone by passing your hand over seems like a great way to accidentally answer the phone a lot.
(Or perhaps I’m just anti-social like that)
Quick Glance is useful, though, and generally works pretty well. I’ve kept that enabled, so that I can simply pass my hand over the phone to get a rundown of missed calls, messages, and check the time.
The S4 comes with a host of security options, and I couldn’t resist giving the facial recognition a try. Sadly, it too falls into the cute-gimmick category. The contortions required to get your face at the right angle to the phone, with the right lighting, renders the function torturous at best. Either stick with a simple passcode, or use the pattern method.
Finally, one of the most useful things for anyone who worries about exceeding their data cap – so, most people, really – is the ability to not only easily monitor daily usage, but also set a mobile data limit, via Settings | Connections | Data Usage. I’d consider this one essential for anyone who uses their device for media consumption, and even more so if you’re a frequent traveller.
I’ve got the music in me (and my phone)I’m really blown away by the ability to expand my phone’s storage capacity, and the MicroSD cards are pretty cheap – a 32GB card will set you back less than $50. My music collection currently runs to over that, but jests aside, there are some albums I know I won’t have the sudden urge to listen to on the road.
I’m sorry, Enya, but teenage me was really only into you because you had a track called Lothlorien.
Of course, Android devices obviously don’t play nicely with iTunes, but there is in fact an app for that, to borrow a phrase. iSyncr has both a free and more fully-featured version for $3.99, and it’s generally considered one of the best Android/iTunes syncing apps out there. It’s a two-application solution, requiring the free/paid version on your phone, and then another free version on the PC you want to get your files off.
Then it’s just a matter of syncing tracks from device to device.
There’s a tonne of other, more or less personal tweaks that I’ve made, like turning off annoying typing sounds, and re-arranging the home screens, but otherwise, my new phone is now up and running as I want it to.
Now to find jeans with a slightly bigger back-pocket...