HOW TO Make your PC work your way

1 SELECT START OPTIONS You can bend the Start menu to your will by changing its settings in Settings > Personalisation > Start. This enables you to select which folders appear in the menu, whether it should show recently added, most used or suggested apps and whether it should open in full screen mode. You can also use Show More Tiles On Start to give you more room for your pinned apps.

2 PIN APPS TO THE START MENU If you’d rather not scroll through everything whenever you wan to run a particular app, you can pin it to the Start menu. This adds it as a tile to the main area at the right of the A-Z listening, and you can then drag things around to rearrange them. To do it, just right-click (or press and hold) on the app name and then choose Pin To Start Menu. It’ll appear at the bottom right.

3 ADJUST YOUR DISPLAY You can change your screen in several ways over and above using themes. In Settings > System > Display you can adjust the display resolution – how many pixels appear on screen at once – or scale the size of text and apps, which is handy on high-res screens. You can also adjust the settings for HDR and WGC (Wide Colour Gamut) video playback, which includes videogames.

4 ADD USER ACCOUNTS Giving everybody who uses your PC a separate user account is an excellent idea, especially for a family PC. If you’ve already set up accounts for your family members on another PC or an Xbox One you can add them in Settings > Accounts > Family & Other Users. To create a new account click on Add A Family Member. If they don’t already have an email address you can get one here.

5 SIGN THEM IN To add someone who isn’t a family member, click on Add Someone Else To This PC. This works in exactly the same way but it doesn’t add them to your family, so you won’t be able to use Windows’ family settings to control what they can and can’t do on your computer. As before, you can either tell Windows the person’s existing email address or sign them up for a new address.

6 LOGIN WITHOUT A PASSWORD In Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options you can change the way you login. Some of these are hardware dependent – you can’t use Windows Hello Face or Windows Hello Fingerprint to unlock with face or finger recognition if you don’t have a front-facing camera or fingerprint reader – but you can also set a PIN or create a swipe pattern to unlock, known as a Picture Password.

7 DRAG TO THE DESKTOP We’re big fans of desktop shortcuts: they’re a great way of accessing the things we use most often without having to delve into the Start menu every time. Creating a desktop shortcut couldn’t be easier: you can drag and drop an app to your Desktop from the Start menu, or to create a shortcut for a file or folder you can hold down [Alt] and drag the file or folder from File Explorer.

8 TWEAK YOUR TOUCH You can adjust the way the cursor responds in Settings > Ease of access > Cursor & Pointer: for example, you can make the cursor easier to see, disable visual feedback for touch or make feedback more visible. To disable the touchscreen, click Start and search for “Device Manager”. Look for Human Interface Devices, expand it and select HID-Compliant Touch Screen.

9 CHANGE DEFAULT APPS Would you prefer links to open in Chrome or videos to open in VLC? It’s easy to change the defaults for all kinds of apps: go into Settings > Apps > Default Apps. You can’t specify an app that isn’t already installed on your PC, but you can look for appropriate ones in the Store. You can also specify apps for particular file types by scrolling down to Choose Default Apps By File Type.

10 READ ALL ABOUT IT If you’re considering making changes to your PC’s hardware, it’s handy to know what you already have. You can get an overview of your CPU and RAM in Settings > System > About. For a fuller picture, click Start and type “System Information”. Click on System Information in the search results and you’ll be able to dig down to discover the details of your PC’s specification.