Important Custom Setup of Windows 10

No doubt you were excited to receive your free upgrade to Windows 10, especially if you were languishing under the idiosyncrasies of Windows 8. But now that you have the new operating system, what should you do with it? Here are a few settings you should check and set to meet with your personal preferences.

“Hey, Cortana!”

Cortana starts out as one of the Start Menu apps, so unless you immediately deleted it, you can easily navigate to your Cortana settings. What is Cortana? Your personal assistant to help you remember things, provide you with weather updates, suggest local restaurants based on your personal preferences, and so much more. The default setting, believe it or not, is for Cortana to be off. So if you want to use this feature, you will have to enable it. Be sure to turn on the “Hey, Cortana” voice activation, and set it to recognize your voice. It only takes a minute.

Avoid Surprise Reboots

Keeping your operating system up to date at all times is vital to security. That is why Windows 10 automatically updates whether you want it to or not (this is for your own good). The good news is that you can schedule restarts under the Advanced Windows Update options. Select Notify to schedule restarts to get an advance notification. After all, an unexpected reboot while you are working can be super inconvenient (although not as inconvenient as a security breach due to not updating at all).

Disable Wi-Fi Sense (unless you really want to use it)

Wi-Fi Sense automatically sends anyone in your contacts list an encrypted password to your network (and vice versa when you are in range of their network). The questions are: Do you want to trust every contact in Outlook, Skype, and Facebook with your network key? Do you trust their networks to be secure – enough so that you want to connect automatically? If you answered no to either of those questions, you will need to disable Wi-Fi Sense. It is found under Change Wi-Fi Settings>Manage Wi-Fi Settings.

Just because Windows is new, it doesn’t mean that you have to be happy with every default setting. If you did not perform a custom setup, these are a few places to start.