Windows 10: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Maintenance, Speed & Troubleshooting

Your computer requires periodic checkups and preventive maintenance—pretty much like you, its human sidekick. Fortunately, Microsoft has put quite a bit of effort into equipping Windows with special tools, all dedicated to keeping your system stable and fast. Here’s a guide to keeping your PC—and its hard drive—humming.

The Action Center

If you’re looking for the best place to go for at-a-glance information about the current state of your PC’s maintenance and Internet security, open the Action Center. To open it, press +A, or click the tiny on your system tray.

Here, all in one place, are all the security and maintenance messages that Windows wants you to see. Be grateful; they used to pop up as individual nag balloons on the system tray all day. Now they accumulate here.

You can read the full scoop on the Action Center on The Quick Action Tiles. For now, it’s enough to remember that here’s the place to check to see how your Windows Updates and PC backups are doing.

Windows Update

Microsoft emphasizes that Windows 10 isn’t like other versions of Windows. There won’t be annual “service packs.” There won’t be a Windows 10.1 or 10.2.

Instead, Microsoft intends to update your copy of Windows 10 continuously and automatically, over the Internet, ...