Windows 8 drivers, utilities and customizations:
Once you’ve become somewhat acclimated to the new Windows 8 landscape, it’s time to fine-tune the OS experience to your personal preferences. At the top of the list is driver management. It’s very possible that your new Windows 8 device boots up fine, but unless all your device drivers are up-to-date, you won’t get the most high-performance experience possible(and driver issues may stop some peripherals from working altogether).Diving deep into Windows 8 power tools.
In the weeks since the new OS launched, we’ve published a number of deep-dive tutorials that explore the system’s more innovative, richer features. For example, BitLocker To Go is built directly into Windows 8, and helps you quickly encrypt external storage devices like USB flash drives and portable hard drives. If you’re concerned about your data security, you should also read our how-to on activating Windows Defender, a basic anti-malware tool that’s not immediately exposed in many default installations of the OS.
Another great built-in Windows 8 feature is Storage Spaces, a tool that lets you combine all your sundry storage hardware into a single, virtual data pool—which you can then allocate more efficiently, for data redundancy and general file management. Besides explaining Storage Spaces, we also posted a great article on using Client Hyper-V, a tool that lets you virtualize older versions of Windows from within Windows 8.
Portable drives can be tapped for use in both Storage Spaces and BitLocker To Go.
Finally, it’s possible that you just installed Windows 8 on a machine from yesteryear, and your gear isn’t up to the task of running the new system in all its glory. If you find yourself in this sorry lot, read our tutorial on optimizing Windows 8 for older hardware. It explains which features to turn off, or otherwise disable.
Windows 8 apps and games to explore and download:
Windows 8 comes with a bunch of pre-installed "modern UI" apps, so you might as well familiarize yourself with the most high-profile entries. We have detailed primers on Music, Photos, Mail, Calendar, SkyDrive and People. None of these apps is perfect, though the SkyDrive cloud service is an integral part of the new Microsoft ecosystem, so you really should check out its implementation in Windows 8.
Precisely because Microsoft’s built-in apps are so lacking, you’ll want to hit up the Windows Store for Windows 8 apps to populate your new Start Screen. On the day Windows 8 launched, we published our top 10 list of the Windows 8 apps to download first, but just this week we updated the concept with a new article geared specifically to Windows 8 tablets.
New Windows 8 hardware owners should also read our suggestions of the best streaming media apps for cord cutters, the best Windows 8 casual games(our author tested a vast selection, and then chose the 15 most worthy), and best productivity apps.