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How to upgrade to Windows 8
This tutorial will guide you through upgrading Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 to Windows 8. As Windows 8 can be temperamental when performing upgrades on older computers, it is important to make sure your computer is compatible and has the proper hardware requirements before upgrading. The easiest method to determine if your computer will have problems upgrading to Windows 8 is to use the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant. The upgrade assistant will scan your devices and applications to make sure there will not be any conflicts that will prevent you from properly upgrading to Windows 8.
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How to recover your personal files from the Windows.old folder in Windows 8
When you upgrade to Windows 8 there may be situations where your personal documents are not transferred to the new version of Windows. These reasons may include permission issues on the files or folders or because you selected the Keep Nothing option when you upgraded to the newer version of Windows. If your personal document folders are empty after an upgrade that does not mean that your data is lost. It just means that the Windows setup program had a problem transferring it over or you specified not to. As the Windows upgrade process backs up your data to the backup C:\Windows.old folder, we can use that folder to restore your data. Therefore, make sure you do not delete the C:\Windows.old folder before you confirm that all your data has been safely migrated to the new version of Windows. This guide will help you recover your missing data from the Windows.old folder using a manual method and through a utility from Microsoft.
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How to remove the Windows.old and $Windows.~BT folders after you upgrade Windows
When you upgrade your current version of Windows to a newer version, the upgrade process will create backups of important directories from your previous version of Windows. These directories include your user profiles, Windows folder, Program Files directory, and other important locations. These backups are then stored in two folders called Windows.old and $Windows.~BT, which can be used after the upgrade to recover any data that may not have been properly migrated over to the new version of Windows. These two folders, though, can use up a significant amount of hard drive space on your computer. Therefore, if you are sure you no longer need any of the files in those folders and all of your data and apps have been migrated successfully, it is a good idea to remove these two folders to reclaim that space for other programs to use.
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How to close an app in Windows 8
When you run apps from the Windows 8 Start Screen and switch to another one, the original app that you were using is not actually closed. Instead this App is left running in the background so that you can easily switch between them. When you leave apps running in the background they use resources such as memory and CPU power that could be better used by other programs on your computer. Therefore it is better to close an app when you are done using them rather than leaving them running.
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How to make Windows Media Player the default player for music in Windows 8
In Windows 8, Windows Media Player is no longer the default program to open your music files such as MP3 files. When you open a MP3 file, the Music app is used to open and play the file instead. If you wish to make it so that Windows Media Player is the default media player like it was in previous Windows versions please follow these steps.
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How to add a Start Menu to Windows 8 using Classic Shell
Windows 8 no longer includes the traditional Start Menu that Windows users have become associated with using. Instead they replaced it with a new interface called the Windows Start Screen that many people find to be not as intuitive as the traditional Start Menu. This is especially the case if you are not using a touch screen. With this in mind, a free program called Classic Shell has been updated to support the ability to add a Start Menu to Windows 8.
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How to create a start screen tile for a web site in Windows 8
In Windows 8 you are able to create a Start Screen tile, or pinned site, that is associated with a particular web site. You can then click on the pinned site tile and Internet Explorer will automatically open to that site. When launching a web site in this way, the Internet Explorer 10 Pin button may become a jump list button which contain common tasks for that web site that help you navigate the site better. This functionality, though, is dependent on the site and not all sites provide these extra menus. At BleepingComputer.com we offer a special jump list menu to help navigate the site if you would like to test out this feature.
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How to create a screenshot and automatically save it as a file in Windows 8
In the past, the built-in method to create a screenshot in Windows was to use Alt+PrintScreen or PrintScreen to copy a screenshot into the clipboard. You would then have to paste that image into another program that has the ability to save it as an image file. Though this method works, it was inconvenient, required an extra program, and was confusing for less experienced computer users. With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft included a really useful feature where you can automatically take a screen shot and save it as a file. There is only one issue with this method and that is to automatically create a file you will be taking a screenshot of the entire screen and not just a particular Window.
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How to download and create a bootable Windows 8 Upgrade DVD
If you had upgraded Windows 8 using the Windows8-Setup.exe executable, rather than through a DVD, it can be difficult to troubleshoot your computer in the event that it is not starting properly or you cannot access the Advanced Startup Options menu. This tutorial will walk you through creating a Windows 8 DVD on another computer that can be used to troubleshoot problems starting or using Windows 8. Please note that in order to create this DVD you will need to have your Windows 8 product key and access to a working computer.
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How to tell if you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows
When Windows is installed on your computer it can be installed as a 32-bit version or a 64-bit version. For most people, whether they use a 32-bit or a 64-bit version of Windows does not make a difference. It is, though, important to know whether you are running a 64-bit or 32-bit version of Windows when performing certain tasks on your computer. For example, if you install new hardware or update existing hardware drivers, then you need to know what version of Windows you are using so you can download the appropriate driver. This tutorial will explain how you can determine if you are running a 32-bit or a 64-bit version of Windows.
