Windows 10 is chock-full of handy, hidden new features worth exploring, especially after the recent May 2020 Update. Check out the best tips and tricks here.
Windows 10’s constantly evolving nature means fresh features arrive twice per year, most recently via the (mostly incremental) October 2020 Update. With all the new goodies come a legion of new tweaks and tricks—some of which unlock powerful functionality hidden to everyday users. Others simply let you mold the Windows 10 experience into the shape you see fit. Here are some of the most useful tweaks, tricks, and tips we’ve found over Windows 10’s many iterations. Be warned: Some of these may break as the operating system evolves given Microsoft’s new “Windows as a service” mentality. The Cortana digital assistant served as a cornerstone for the operating system since Windows 10’s inception, for example, but relegated to lowly app status in 2020. We’ve updated this article over time to reflect the OS’s current status. If you’re into playing around on your PC, Windows 10’s Game Bar—summoned by pressing Windows + G in-game—holds all sorts of nifty extras. It’s always been able to take screenshots or videos of gameplay clips, but it also offers easy-peasy Beam game streaming and the intriguing Game Mode. Better yet, the May 2019 Update transformed it into a full blown overlay that does stuff no rivals offer. The now-customizable interface packs a performance widget, an audio widget with system-wide and per-app controls, a Discord-like interface for Xbox Live friends, a photo gallery, and even full Spotify integration. It’s great, and the May 2020 Update added more helpful features in the form of a frame rate counter and GPU temperature monitoring. The Game Bar’s handy even if you don’t actually play, as it can be used to record video of any app—not just games. Windows 10 also has a dedicated Gaming section in its Start menu Settings to let you tinker with options, including Xbox networking and parental controls. Timeline helps you pick up where you left off. Clicking the Task View button in the taskbar or pressing Windows Key + Tab summons the feature, which displays a—you guessed it—time line of your activity in supported apps, stretching back over the past. Even more handily, Microsoft lets you group related apps together into “Activities” in Timeline, so that when you open that week-old budget document, for example, the presentations and websites you referenced at the time can be easily summoned as well. This even syncs across devices, so it could be especially useful if you use multiple PCs. The fly in the ointment: Only a limited number of apps work with Timeline currently, though Microsoft offers tools for developers to bake in support. That includes Office, Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and native Windows 10 apps like News and Maps, but Microsoft Edge is the only compatible browser. Bummer. You can deactivate Timeline by heading to Settings > Privacy > Activity History. Want to tie your phone and PC closer together? With the right combination of phone and PC, the Your Phone app on Windows can now show recent photos shot with the phone, view and send SMS messages, be alerted with the phone’s notifications, see the phone’s battery life, view and interact with the phone screen and apps, and even make calls. You’ll need the Your Phone app for Android as well, of course. There’s also an iPhone app but it’s much more limited. Check out our Your Phone tutorial for everything you need to know. Windows 10’s copy and paste functionality has been hit and miss for years, but now you can deploy that bugginess across multiple PCs with cloud clipboard—a genuinely useful feature introduced in the October 2018 Update. Head to Start > Settings > System > Clipboard and enable “Sync across devices” to start copying data on one PC and pasting it on another PC. While you’re in this menu, enabling “Clipboard history” lets you save multiple items to the clipboard so you can use them again later. Nifty stuff. It started with the simple Bash shell, but over the years, Microsoft’s built up its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) into a surprisingly robust feature for developers. The latest iteration, dubbed WSL2, now runs Linux on its own kernel in what’s essentially a virtual machine, improving performance. You can even store files within the Linux root file system, then access them via Windows File Explorer inside the Linux virtual hard disk. You’ll need to enable the optional Linux compatibility and download a Linux distro from the Microsoft Store to use it, though. Several distros are available, including Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Kali. You can hack a graphical interface into existence, but WSL2’s intended as a command line-style interface, and it pairs very well with Microsoft’s awesome Terminal text editor, pictured above, which lets you manage Linux, PowerShell, and command line tools simultaneously. Introduced in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update, Windows Sandbox makes it easy to test unknown software and websites in a safe environment. The feature basically creates a virtualized second copy of Windows within Windows where you can run untrusted tasks, firewalled from your main installation. If things go pear-shaped, just nuke the virtual PC and start anew. Easy-peasy! And if a file checks out, you can move it out of quarantine and copy it over to Windows 10 proper. The May 2020 Update adds the ability to enable networking and your PC’s GPU within Sandbox, and even a shared folder between Sandbox and your PC’s desktop, if you don’t mind the increased threat risk. The one downside to Windows Sandbox: It’s only available in Windows 10 Pro. Our Windows Sandbox guide explains everything you need to know. It’s taken endless iterations and dozens of years, but as of the October 2020 Update, Windows 10’s display settings finally let you adjust your monitor’s refresh rate. Hallelujah. Before now, you needed to adjust your frame rate by diving into the Device Manager’s arcane settings, or using software provided by Nvidia or AMD if you had a compatible graphics card. Now, you can tweak your monitor’s refresh rate in Windows 10’s Settings hub (System > Display > Advanced Display Settings). This tip mostly applies to gamers who buy monitors with above-average refresh rates. Often, high refresh rate monitors auto-configure to render images at a standard 60Hz, rather than the higher, smoother options available with such displays.
