In Windows 7, the Show Desktop button which used to next to the Start button got relocated to the end of the Taskbar. If the taskbar is at the bottom, you have to hover over the bottom right corner to peek at the desktop or click that button to work with items on the Desktop. Let's see how to reinstate the Show Desktop button next to the Start button.
Author: Gaurav Kale
Gaurav is a software enthusiast from India and Classic Shell tester & UX consultant. He started with Windows 95 and is good at software usability testing. He firmly believes that user experience is just as important as software code quality and architecture for software to be successful.
Fix: Touchpad left click will intermittently not work in Windows 8.1
If you have a laptop with a touchpad (trackpad) and you upgraded to Windows 8.1, you may have noticed that occasionally, the left click of the touchpad does not work. For example, it may not work at startup at all until you press some key on the keyboard after which it starts working. Or you may be unable to move the mouse pointer right after you type something. Sometimes, the left also won't work unexpectedly in games. Let's see how to fix.
How to change the color of Windows 8.1 Start button when you hover over it
With Windows 8.1, Microsoft introduced a Start button (which they refer to as the Start hint). It bears the Windows 8 logo in white color but when you hover over it, it changes its color. Let's see how to customize this color if you haven't realized exactly which color to change to affect this color.
Access Android running (recent) apps list via notification area and home screen
If you have an Android device such as one from Samsung that requires you to press a hardware button to access recently opened apps, you might want to know if there is an alternative way to access this list. In this article, we will see how you can access Android's recent apps list in an alternative way so you can quickly close the background processes of these apps or switch between running apps faster.
How to disable auto arrange and full row select in Explorer and get narrow spacing in file pane
In versions of Windows after XP, there have been some changes made to Explorer which are quite different from the behavior in XP. One of them is full row selection in Details view. The other change is that items in the right pane are spaded wider apart vertically from one another than there were in Windows XP. Let us see how to revert both changes if you need them to.
How to force refresh thumbnails of images and videos in Explorer folders
Windows Explorer has an excellent feature like any other file manager to show thumbnail previews of pictures and videos in any folder. To make sure that the thumbnails show instantly every time you open a folder, it caches the thumbnails. Unfortunately, sometimes it fails to generate a thumbnail for some files, or continue to show an older thumbnail preview even if you updated the picture. Here is how you can force Explorer to refresh the thumbnail.
[Review] VistaSwitcher: Best Alt+Tab replacement that also works with Modern apps
In an earlier article, we saw that Windows Alt+Tab has bugs that make it not suitable for reliable switching. It also has issues like the icon and the text of the app not being placed next to each other to instantly identify the app. The thumbnail of the app is often smaller and isn't enough to identify exactly which window you are switching to, especially if there are multiple windows of the same app open. A free, third party Alt+Tab replacement, VistaSwitcher solves all these problems.
Tweak Windows Alt+Tab switcher to enlarge thumbnails and disable live aero peek preview
Windows has had Alt+Tab functionality to switch between running programs using the keyboard since Windows 3.0. This Alt+Tab Task Switcher remained mostly the same from Windows 95 to Windows XP but changed in Windows Vista to incorporate a glass background and thumbnails. While some users prefer the new Alt-Tab switcher, many others prefer a cleaner looking Alt-Tab without thumbnails and the glass background. Let's see how Alt+Tab can be tweaked.
StExBar: Explorer addon to let you filter files, copy paths, copy file names, open command prompt and much more
Windows Explorer is a very powerful file manager but it still lacks some important tools. In Windows 8, the Ribbon has added some of these essential commands to Explorer which were missing but the Ribbon takes a lot of space and does not let you add your own custom commands in Explorer. An extremely useful toolbar for Windows Explorer called StExBar provides killer features that should have been included in Windows.
How to see your PC system uptime live on Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7 and XP
In today's versions of Windows, you need to restart your PC for fewer activities. If you installed some driver, made some system-wide setting change, installed updates or if you uninstalled a program, Windows may need to restart. Except for these tasks, you can mostly avoid doing a full shutdown or restart and simply hibernate or sleep. Windows 8's hybrid shutdown in fact logs you out and hibernates. So if you ever need to find out how long exactly how PC is on since the last reboot or full shutdown, you can find it out easily.
