Category: How To

Windows 8 has some great personalization aspect that can make the experience feel more tuned to you.  While some (okay, most) do not like the Windows 8 Start screen, I’m actually a pretty big fan of it.  Once you get the knack of navigating around it I find it to be just as intuitive as the Start button of Windows past.  And while you can customize this with different color sets in the Settings>Personalize menu, it isn’t quite the same as having a personalized wallpaper on the Start screen just as you do on the desktop.

Buried in Windows 8.1 is a setting that will allow you to add your desktop wallpaper to the Windows 8 Start screen.  To be fair it isn’t exactly easy to find but if you are looking for a more personalized Start screen, follow these easy steps to enable this feature.

This How To assumes that you have installed the latest updates to Windows 8.1 on your PC.

One of the many things that I love about Cortana on my Windows Phone is the ability to set up quiet hours.  Quiet Hours are a designated time – planned or at the moment – where my phone will not disturb me with notifications, phone calls or the like unless someone in a group I designate (my Inner Circle) messages or calls twice in short succession.  In my move from iPhone to Windows Phone, this is one of the great features of iOS that I missed when I started back.  Windows Phone without Cortana doesn’t have quiet hours and it, if I’m honest, was one of the main reasons I updated my Lumia 1320 to Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1.  Yeah, I’m sad, I know.

Cortana Quiet Hours are great for times when you are meeting or, in my case, traveling where my phone is in the same room as me.  Setting these up are easy to do and you can do it from multiple places on your Windows Phone.  For this How To I am assuming that you have Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana in the United States or Update 1 outside of the United States (which is the only way you can get Cortana).  Right now you have to have Cortana in order for Quiet Hours to work.

The Windows Phone Calendar app is pretty power and intuitive.  You can sync multiple calendars from multiple sources including Gmail, Yahoo and yes, even iCloud.  Each calendar is represented by a different colour in the Windows Phone Calendar app and sometimes these colour choices are not exactly what you had in mind.  Fortunately there is a quick and easy way to do this in the app & I will show you how to customise this in this How To.

Like iOS and Android, Windows Phone gives you the ability to easily install applications from the device itself, not requiring that you connect it to your PC or Mac.  So in that sense, no big deal right? It is known Khaleesi.  But there is one trick that Windows Phone has that sets it apart.  You can install apps even when your Windows Phone is in another room or maybe even sitting at home while you are in the office.  And these installs are done without any intervention by you.  It is just another way that Microsoft has made Windows Phone easy but you have to make sure your Windows Phone is set up to handle these remote installs.  I’ll show you in this how to what you need to adjust to make it happen.

The ability to screen capture in Windows Phone 8.1 is easy to do and is the same process for any Nokia Lumia Windows Phone.  For those of us who blog and write about the platform, taking a screen capture is important so we can convey whatever it is we are posting about.  If you read the site or see my posts over in the Microsoft Community pages, you will see a lot of screen captures from me.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words…

Even if you don’t write reviews however, you will find taking a screen capture in Windows Phone 8.1 something handy when you are showing friends something on your phone and sharing it via a social network or email.

We all now how important backups are on our Macs or PCs and your Windows Phone is no different.  You have a lot of data on there – Apps, pictures, files, etc – that if you lost, you would be frustrated at best and heart broken at worst.  Microsoft has made it quite easy to backup your Windows Phone, leveraging your OneDrive account to have a cloud-based backup of your phone that can easily be restored.

This How To is based on Windows Phone 8.1 so the screens may look slightly different if you are running an older version.