Tip o’ the Week 429 – Windows 10 April 2018 Update

Somewhat predictably, this week’s tip concerns the slightly-delayed but at least now officially-named, Windows 10 April 2018 Update. April gave way to May before the update began rolling out widely: if you haven’t seen it show up in Windows Update, check here.

As an alternative, get the Media Creation Tool and use it to download an appropriate ISO disc image; useful if you fancy doing a clean install of Windows and all it contains, by wiping your current PC and starting from scratch.
Proceed down this road with caution, however – back away if you’re not sure.

Windows watchers have been talking about this April update for months, as there are many notable updates within, some covered only recently in ToW (425 and 428).

As well as Timeline, the Nearby Sharing feature is pretty cool – use it to send a link from within Edge browser by clicking the Share icon on the toolbar, and as long as your nearby PCs have Nearby Sharing enabled within Settings. To check, press WindowsKey and type nearby then click on Change shared experience settings.

You can also right-click on files in Windows Explorer to Share them the same way, and it’s likely to appear in the Share experience of other apps too.

The next-to-useless Windows 10 option previously known as Quiet Hours (as per ToW 414), has been given a revamp and a rename, now known as Focus Assist.

The intent is not only to silence your machine at times when you don’t need to know stuff (who’s ever been woken at 6am to be reminded that it’s some random LinkedIn person’s birthday, or that there’s an all-day event in your calendar?), but also to control the blizzard of “toast” notifications that modern apps may otherwise throw at you.

Note – traditional apps, like Outlook, can still throw up notifications, but if your machine is in a Focus assist mode, at least the notifications can be silenced. To check the current status, or to switch on Priority only or Alarms only manually, look in the Action Center on the taskbar, or press WindowsKey+A to show.

For a full breakdown of everything else that’s new in the April update, see here.