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How to unlock the hidden Aero Lite theme in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 comes with a secret hidden visual style called Aero Lite. The Aero Lite theme is the default in Windows Server 2012. You might wonder why I called it 'hidden'? That's because you cannot apply it easily on Windows 8 since Microsoft does not ship a corresponding *.theme file with Windows 8.1 or Windows 8. However, this can be fixed easily. In this tutorial, I will show you an easy way to unlock this hidden Aero Lite theme and share with you the benefits which you can get with that theme.

How to speed up search on the Start screen in Windows 8.1

Windows Search is one of the really awesome feature of Windows. I cannot imagine how my productivity would be affected if Windows Search wasn't available. Although search has various behaviors depending on the Start screen, Explorer or the Start Menu (in Windows 7), the most useful part of search for me is to launch installed apps and Control Panel items. Today, I am going to share with you a simple trick which allows you to speed up the search in Windows 8.1 and increase your productivity.

How to enable Quick Launch in Windows 8.1

Quick Launch was a special, useful toolbar on the taskbar near the Start button. It was there since the Windows 9x era. With the release of Windows 7, Microsoft de-emphasized the Quick Launch toolbar in favor of pinning. Quick Launch however is not completely removed from Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7. It is not obvious for a novice user how to enable Quick Launch as it involves numerous steps and cannot be automated.

I was getting a number of emails from Winaero readers on how to enable Quick Launch in Windows 8 as they prefer its compact size. Even with the modern taskbar, many users consider the Quick Launch toolbar still useful. For example, even if you set pinned icons to a small size, they are still spaced too far apart from one another. Another issue is that the taskbar mixes running programs with non-running ones, whereas if you use the Quick Launch toolbar, running programs will always appear to its right.

Quick Launch has a more customizable appearance; you can easily put any shortcut or folder there without having to use tools like Winaero Taskbar Pinner or Pin to 8. You can change their icons, have multiple rows of icons if you make the taskbar larger, and save overall space on the taskbar. In this tutorial, we will look at how to enable Quick Launch in Windows 8.1.

How to enable a separate process per tab in Firefox

I always keep a watch on Firefox's latest nightly builds as all the cool new features land there first. Here is an amazing news I read about Firefox. The current nightly version of Firefox comes with a secret hidden feature which allows you to enable a separate process for each tab in Firefox! What does this mean for us average users? Well, the process-per-tab model is a very clever architectural solution to prevent crashes. It allows preventing the entire browser from crashing if something goes wrong. With multi-process tabs, only the problematic tab will crash, and try to recover, while the rest of the tabs continue to work properly. If you are familiar with Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, you might be knowing that both use a similar process-per-tab architecture. Let's look now at how to enable this separate process per tab functionality in Firefox.

How to manage wireless networks in Windows 8.1

Windows 8 has extreme UI changes for management of wireless networks. The good old user interface of Windows 7 was removed, and now, Windows 8 provides you a touch friendly network pane to connect to a wireless network, and does not provide any GUI to remove the stored network profiles.
Let's see how we can make Windows 8 forget the stored network profile.

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