Windows 8.1

Description

Windows 8.1 is the operating system intended for home users. It provides abilities such as joining corporate domains, participating in Group Policy, allowing involvement in Work Place Join and Work Folders, encryption and more.

Windows 8.1 Features

Windows 8.1 is an evolution of the Windows 8 vision for a world where great devices are paired with a powerful collection of essential apps and cloud-based services.

This is the new Windows, and it’s designed for the way you live. It’s advanced, delivering the best of new hardware designs and technologies.
It’s personal, offering a range of choices that spans devices, and displays. You get a selection of great apps. More cloud-powered entertainment. More communication and storage options, and a better web with new browsing and search experiences.

Windows 8.1 returns the Start button to the desktop, but it isn’t the same button we have all come to know and love. Clicking the button will bring you back to your last menu, while a right-click will reveal more traditional options. From here you can easily restart or power down the computer, access things like your programs, system settings, and Device Manager, along with the Task Manager, Control Panel, File Explorer, and Search and Run functions.

This menu can also be accessed with a long press for computers with touch screens.

Users previously only had two options when it came to the size of Live Tiles in Windows 8: large or small. This is no longer the case, though. A right-click, or long press, on a specific tile will give you the ability to unpin it from the screen, uninstall the program, resize it, or turn the Live Tile off. Clicking the “Resize” option will allow you to alter the icon’s size to large, wide, medium, or small.

Windows 8.1 also gives users the option to organize apps into various groups. Live Tiles can be dragged and dropped as you please, while a right-click will give you the opportunity to name specific app groups.

Not every app is displayed in the Start screen. A complete list of installed apps can be accessed by either clicking the down arrow in the lower left-hand side of the screen, or by performing a swipe down on a touch screen. Selecting the up arrow or a swipe upward will bring you back to the home screen.

Microsoft introduced Hot Corners last year with the release of Windows 8. Each corner of the screen has a different function; the Charms menu is in the lower and upper right, the back button is in the lower left, and the running apps window is in the upper right.

Users were previously forced to look to third-party alternatives to disable this feature. In Windows 8.1, however, Microsoft built the option to disable these corners directly into the operating system.

One of the better known features of Windows 8 is the Snap action, that allows you to run two apps side-by-side. With Windows 8.1 you can also run two instances of IE11 in multiple Snapped windows. However, Snapping one instance of IE11 to one side of the screen and then attempting to open a second instance doesn’t work. You have to open multiple tabs in one window, and then press and hold or right-click one of them and select ‘Open tab in new window’. Unfortunately other apps don’t appear to offer multi-window capabilities.

Reading View strips the clutter and advertisements from the article you are reading and presents the information in a pleasant, horizontally scrolling format. To enable Reading View, just click the open-book icon on the right side of IE11’s address bar. Reading View also appears integrates with the new Reading List app in Windows 8.1, so when you bookmark an article with this app from IE11, it will display in Reading Mode later.

One of Windows 8.1 coolest features is buried deep in the new Food & Drink app, which is full of all manner of delectable recipes. However, when you’re making cake and your hands are all covered in butter and flour, it may not seem like the best moment to be using a touchscreen. Fear not, because Windows 8.1 has a hands-free mode, which lets you flip through the steps of the recipe by waving your hand in front of your device’s webcam.

Windows 8.1 For everything you do

With everything we do on our devices, wouldn’t it be great to have it all brought together? The new Windows brings together all the things we do, complete with a fantastic collection of apps for the way we live.
Connect with friends on Skype, kick back with Xbox, discover new apps in the Windows Store, and finally use the cloud to keep everything backed up.
Windows keeps pace with our life, regardless of where we are or where we go.
Best of all, everything on Windows is designed to work well together. The result is an experience that helps us be more productive, creative, and communicative.

With Windows, we can get more done and have more fun doing it.