Revision: The Windows 10 October 2018 Update Provides Modest But Useful Adjustments

Clips that you save when you are logged in to your Microsoft account are also sent to the cloud, and then to the clipboard of any other device running the Windows 10 October 2018 update. So, you will have all your clips available, regardless the device you are using.

When you turn off your PC, the Clipboard is cleaned up and the clips are no longer available. However, there is a way to keep those you want permanently. When you move the cursor over an item in the list, click the small pin icon. This pin the clip to the clipboard. The clip stays there permanently until you remove it. In all pinned clips, the pin icon is turned down and to the right.

You can clean your clipboard manually, either by deleting individual clips or by deleting them all at the same time. Move your cursor over the clip you want to delete and click on the small X at the top right. To delete all clips, when you open the Clipboard, click Erase everything at the top right of the screen. Pinned clips will only be deleted if you delete them individually.

The clipboard has some limitations. It will not hold any clips larger than 4 MB. You will still be able to copy and paste larger clips into documents. You simply can not see them and manage them in the clipboard. And only clips of 100 KB or less are shared via the cloud with other devices. These are boring limitations, I hope that these will be corrected in a future version of Windows 10.

There is another problem with the clipboard. When you preview images, they are much darker and darker than the original source. As a result, you will not always be able to recognize them very well. In addition, the Clipboard displays only part of the clip, for example the first words of a text clip or a small section of a chart. It would be much more useful to see the entire clip to make sure you want to paste it into a document. I found myself sticking a clip in a document so I could see everything and then decide if I wanted to keep it. Again, these are relatively minor issues which, I hope, will be corrected in later versions.

I've also found an additional disadvantage: when I used the Windows capture tool or the new Snip & Sketch tool (more about it in a moment) to capture a part of it. a Windows 10 screen, two copies of the screen capture were sometimes used, but not always, placed in the clipboard.

All of these questions are relatively small. Overall, I found that the Clipboard was the hidden gem of this update, a seemingly small feature that can improve your productivity more than you thought. You will not be frustrated anymore because you want to paste a clip that has been replaced by a new one. And you can use the clipboard to keep text or standard graphics that you use over and over again.

I have used various third-party software to power the Windows Clipboard over the years and have abandoned them after a while, as they tend to be too complex or not useful enough. The new Clipboard combines ease of intuitive operation and richness of features. I will come back often and hope that Microsoft will fix its some minor annoyances.

A new screen capture markup tool

Another integrated Windows utility is getting a new look in this version of Windows – one of its screenshot tools. If you are using the Windows 10 Creators (version 1703) update or later, you can press the Windows + Shift + S key, and then drag the slider over part of the screen to capture it. With the October 2018 update, this basic functionality has been extended to a new tool called Snip & Sketch.

In the new version, when you press the Windows + Shift + S keys, a small toolbar appears near the top of the screen. Icons allow you to capture a rectangular portion of the screen, the entire screen, or a hand drawn part. l & # 39; screen. After the capture, you receive a notification that it has been copied to the clipboard, that you can mark it and share it with others. To do this, click on the notification.

The complete Snip & Sketch screen appears with the drawing, annotation and trimming tools. Mark the clip as you like and you can then save it to a file, copy it to the clipboard, open it in another program or share it by email, social media or by other methods.

All this is simple and straightforward, and very useful for screen annotations as well as for quick screenshots.

However, it does not have the useful functionality of another screenshot utility built into Windows, the Capture tool. One of the things that makes the capture tool is to allow you to take a screen shot after a delay of between one and five seconds. This is useful for capturing menus that disappear when a key is pressed. However, Microsoft says that the capture tool will eventually be merged into Snip & Sketch. In fact, Windows insiders inserted in the Ignore Advance ring (those who are testing the version of Windows 10 that will be released next spring) reported a similar delay. capture functionality in this version of Snip & Sketch.

I found Snip & Sketch (which I sometimes inadvertently refer to as Scratch & Sniff) as a nice upgrade from the existing Windows screen capture tool. I do not do a lot of annotations on the screens, but it's something I'll definitely use. It would have been interesting to have even more annotation features – for example, the ability to type text when annotating – but we can hope for that in a later version.

A smarter sense of storage

Windows 10 includes a useful feature called Storage Sense that automatically cleans your hard drive to free up disk space. In the Windows 10 October 2018 update, there is a new, moderately useful feature that works in concert with OneDrive to free up even more space.

Storage Sense now works with OneDrive Files On-Demand to clean files you do not use on your local PC. In OneDrive Files On-Demand, you can choose to keep some OneDrive files permanently on your PC and others in the cloud. Cloud files appear in File Explorer. So you know they are there and you can use them. When you open a cloud file, it is downloaded to your PC and you work on it.

When you do this, the file stays on your PC, even if you do not need it anymore. Storage Sense can now automatically delete files on your PC that you have marked as cloud-based and downloaded and stored locally, but that you have not used for a long time.

To do this, start by activating Storage Sense, go to Settings> System> Storage and moving the slider in the Storage Sense section to On. Then click "Change the way we automatically free up space" and scroll down to the "Locally available cloud content" section. In the OneDrive section, choose how long you want cloud files to remain unused on your PC before deleting them. You can choose Never, 1 day, 14 days, 30 days or 60 days.

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If your good size hard drive has a lot of space, this feature will not help you much. But it will be particularly useful if you have a laptop without enough storage.

Microsoft Edge still lacks an advantage

With this new version of Windows 10, Microsoft has once again tried to pump enough its Edge browser to become competitive, especially against Google Chrome. And again, it's not enough.

It's not that changes are bad – there are good ones. One of the best is that you can set permissions to automatically play sound and video on websites, site by site. To do this, click on the information icon or on the lock icon located just to the left of the address bar, then in the screen that s'. displays, click "Autoplay Media Settings". A drop-down list with three choices is displayed:

• Allow: With this setting, all media are played.
• Limit: This allows the media without sound or sound to play muted, but blocks the media with the sound enabled.
• Block: This prevents all automatic playback media, whether or not there is sound.

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Since self-reading media has turned the Web into the sound equivalent of a pinball game room, I've found this addition to be useful and welcome to Edge. An associated feature allows you to turn off the sound on a tab that already reads it. Select "This tab plays multimedia content" on the tab to turn on or off the audio.

Microsoft once again extends its love for Edge's integrated eReader to books and PDFs. You can now search the definition of a word by selecting it – the definition appears in a small window. You can also have a word read aloud. And there is a way to tag PDFs and books by using a highlighter and adding notes.

I've always been puzzled by the fact that Microsoft is putting so much energy into turning Edge into a digital player, given how far away it is from Chrome. But if you like to read books in your browser, Edge continues to do a good job.

One thing that has not changed is the small number of extensions available for Edge-115 by the time I write these lines. When I wrote my review of the Windows Update April 10, 2018, 99 of them were available and about 70 when the Windows 10 Fall Creators update was released six months ago. That's only 16 more extensions than a year and a half ago, and about 45 more than a year ago.

As I've said in all Windows 10 reviews since the introduction of Edge Extensions, the insufficient number of extensions available for Edge versus the thousands of Chrome and Firefox slots means that Microsoft's browser will never become dominant . This latest version says it again.