A Few Windows 10 Tips

I went online and noticed I was not alone many people were complaining about the same problem. There were all sorts of solutions put forward but none of them worked. At that point I decided to do some digging by doing a data dump of what the motherboard was doing on my AMD and to my surprise the problem appeared to be something I least expected. The AMD motherboard was using Intel wireless chips just as the Intel motherboard was. Who would have suspected? From there it was easy, I went to Intel and downloaded the latest driver for the AMD wireless and guess what? Problem solved.
Most people don’t realize there are tools you can use which Microsoft provides which are useful in solving problems, but it is true you probably need some experience in that area. If you are using Microsoft Windows 10 you can go to the control panel and then select system and security and you will see a list of items. Near the bottom is Administrative Tools. That is where you will find some really helpful things. One of the items is System Information. This will let you find out things like the version of your Windows 10, information on your processor, amount of memory and other things which are much more technical. I am not going to go into every tool because for most people this would be a waste of time since most people are not that interested in the inner working of their computer but there are some very useful things you should know about. One important tool in the Administrative Tools is the “Event” Viewer. The most important part is listed under the Summary of Administrative Events as “Error”. Clicking on “Error” reveals errors which have occurred on your computer. You can click on the error in the list and a screen will open which shows more information about the error. Unfortunately, an error code will usually appear and you will probably have to type it in to Google or some other search engine to find out what it means but it is helpful when you have a problem.

I just want to mention the fact it is useful to create a restore point so if you do have a problem you have a chance of resetting the computer to an earlier date before the problem occurred. There is one problem with restore points and I can’t figure out why Microsoft allows this, but when a new update comes out it erases all the old restore points. All data should be backed up at least once a week just in case you need to reset the computer and the restore points don’t work or are gone. To create a restore point go to taskbar and its search area and type “restore point.” “Create restore point” will appear on a list and select it. The rest is self-explanatory. By the way I usually use the date for the name of the restore point so I can keep track of them. An example is 062918 for June 29, 2018.
Most of the other Administrative Tools are for advanced users with a few exceptions. I should say I wouldn’t play around with them unless you know what you are doing. One very important group of settings can be reached by selecting the keys Ctrl + Alt + Delete at the same time. This brings up a screen with the following choices:
Lock
Switch User
Sign Out
Change Password
Task Manager

Task Manager is the most useful of the bunch. First of all, if you have ever been in a position where you couldn’t get out of a program Task Manager can usually help. You just select the program with the mouse and a list comes up and one of the choices is “end task”. You can see the rest of the choices yourself so I won’t go into them. Another very useful feature is the “Startup” tab. You can select programs which you want to start when Windows loads or select those you don’t want to start and this will make your computer load Windows faster.

If you have a problem with a Windows 10 computer you can’t solve and go to Microsoft or some other company such as I did when I found out what was causing the problem you have a good chance that company will tell you to load one of their diagnostic programs and send them the results after you run it. If you are lucky they will wait for the results, if not you might be told they will email you in a few days. That can be very aggravating when you only have one computer available and have things to do with it. Contacting the company shouldn’t be done until you tried to roll back the computer to an earlier control point. You might even want to consider using a backup you created if that doesn’t work because you could be online or on the phone for hours trying to solve the problem and you might be asked a lot of questions you don’t understand and it might be faster and less annoying to do it by using a backup.

Other things you should know are some of the most important key strokes. If you highlight something with the mouse and press Ctrl + C you have committed the object to the computer’s memory and you can paste it by pressing Ctrl + V. I find this very handy for copying photos and text from one place to another. You can also add a virtual desktop by pressing the Windows key + Ctrl +D. You can create more than one and switch between them by pressing the Windows key + Ctrl + Left or Right arrow. I would suggest going to the following site to see all the shortcut keys:
https://www.windowscentral.com/best-windows-10-keyboard-shortcuts
You can copy and paste the link into your browsers address area. Sorry Truth Facts does not use live outside links.

I have tried to show you a few useful procedures that I have used over the years and which might come in handy someday. I know the casual user may not be interested but there is always someone who might find this useful.