Little-known Windows Features

Dennis Snider

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With continuous updates and a culture of ongoing improvements, it’s difficult for those of us who aren’t IT professionals to keep up with all the new offerings in Windows 10. Below are a few tips that you might not have realized are available.

Resize the Start Menu
Simply by using your mouse as you would with any other window you can resize your start menu by clicking and dragging on the top or right-hand edges; you can resize vertically up to the top of the screen, and horizontally up to four columns or down to a single column. You can also increase the number of tiles Windows shows through Settings> Personalization>Start> Show more tiles on Start

Pin/Unpin Tiles
You can get rid of any tiles you don’t want from your Start Menu by simply right clicking and choosing “Unpin from Start.” To add a tile for an app to the menu, right-click an app from the list on the left-hand side of the Start menu and select “Pin to Start.”

Grouping Tiles
If you’d like to collect a group of tiles into one folder, simply drag one tile onto the top of another and they will be automatically grouped together; clicking on the folder you created will expand it and show you all the tiles within, and you can collapse the folder by clicking the arrow above it.

Control Your App List
The default Start Menu will offer you a header list of your most frequently used, recently installed, and suggested apps. If you’d rather just go straight to the alphabetical list, go to Settings> Personalization> Start and you can customize what you are shown as a header list, or indeed turn off all options.

Full-Screen Start Menu
If you’re nostalgic for the old fullscreen Start menu in Windows 8, it is still available. Just go to Settings> Personalization> Start and activate the “Use Start fullscreen” option. This will then give you a full-screen start menu whenever you ask for it.