Category: Windows 8.1 with Bing

The Windows 8.1 Start Screen has a lot of customization that you can do to arrange your icons into logical groups to find things quicker on your PC or tablet.  Did you know however that you can name these groups as well?  While it isn’t required, it is another way that you can personalize your Start Screen a little bit more to your liking.  In this How To I will show you just how to do this and it is literally a single click.

Let’s start first with the basics to make sure everyone is up to speed.  To add an app to your Start Screen, go to your Apps list and the right click it (or tap and pull down) to highlight it.  You will then see the menu at the bottom of the page where one option is to Pin it to your Start screen.  Once on your Start screen you can drag and drop the apps into logical groups to your liking.

Like many of you, I use USB key drives all the time to move data around from device-to-device or to share data with a colleague.  I also use Bit Locker to Go on those drives, especially if they are going to be out of my hands (think UPS or FedEx) to that colleague.  As you may know, BitLocker is a file encryption system which allow you to protect your files by encrypting the drive those files reside on.  That can be your entire hard disk in your PC, an external disk or a USB drive.  So long as you have a Windows 7 or 8 Pro or Enterprise, it can be opened and read just like any other drive.

Paul Thurrott has an excellent overview of Bit Locker on WinSuperSite that I highly recommend reading.

Until today I just assumed that Windows 8.1 with Bing, the low cost version of Windows 8.1 for budget friendly tablets and laptops, could not deal with BitLocker encrypted drives.  I figured out however that actually BitLocker and Windows 8.1 with Bing can indeed work together.

For the sake of this article I’m not going to distinguish between BitLocker and BitLocker to Go.  The later is fundamentally the same thing as the former, only for portable drives like USB keys.