Pinning a Website to the Start Screen
If you have a website that you visit often,
you can use the Internet Explorer app to pin the website to the Start
screen. This means that you can surf to that site simply by clicking
its Start screen tile.
Follow these steps:
1. On the Start screen, click Internet Explorer.
2. Navigate to the website you want to pin.
3. Click the Pin Site icon, which is the pushpin that appears to the right of the address bar, as pointed out in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Surf to the website and then click Pin to Start.
4. Click Pin to Start.
5. Edit the website name, if needed.
6. Click Pin to Start. Windows 8 adds a tile for the website to the Start screen.
Note
To remove a tile from the Start
screen, right-click it (or, on a tablet PC, swipe down on the tile) and
then click Unpin from Start. Windows 8 removes the tile from the Start
screen.
Displaying the Administrative Tools on the Start Screen
Windows 8 comes with a set of advanced
programs and features called the administrative tools.
Some of these tools are
relatively easy to launch. For example, you can press Windows Logo+X to
display a menu that includes Event Viewer, Disk Management, Computer
Management, and a few other administrative tools (see Figure 5).
However, the rest of these tools are difficult to access in Windows 8.
For example, to run Defragment and Optimize Drives, you display the
Charms menu, click Search, click Settings, type defrag,
and then click Defragment and Optimize Your Drives in the search
results. Other administrative tools aren’t even accessible via an apps
or settings search, so instead you need to know the tool’s filename.
For example, to run the System Configuration utility, you type msconfig and then press Enter.
Figure 5. Press Windows Logo+X to display this handy menu of power user tools, which includes a few of the administrative tools.
This extra effort isn’t that big of a deal if
you only use the administrative tools once in a while. If you use them
frequently, however, all those extra steps are real productivity
killers. Instead, configure Windows 8 to display the administrative
tools as tiles on the Start screen by following these steps:
1. Display the Charms menu and then click Settings to display the Settings pane. (You can also press Windows Logo+I.)
2. Click Tiles. The Start settings pane appears.
3. Click the Show Administrative Tools switch to Yes.
4. Click the Start screen. The administrative tools appear as tiles on the Start screen, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The administrative tools displayed as Start screen tiles.
