WINDOWS 10 TASKBAR AND ACCESSIBILITY

Taskbar

Taskbar is the bar appears on the bottom of your screen which is starting the ‘Start’ button on the left and continues with the ‘search field‘ and some applications that are pinned by default. And on the right, you can see the ‘Notification Area‘ which you can launch your action center from there. So just like your Start menu, you can pin and unpin your applications to your taskbar. When you run an application, you can see the logo of that application appears on the taskbar and when you close it, the logo just disappears. If you want to launch that application easily, you can pin it to your task bar. When the application logo appears on the taskbar, just right-click the logo and select the ‘Pin to Taskbar‘ option and when you want to unpin it, right-click again and select the ‘Unpin from the Taskbar‘ option. If you hover on the logo of one of the opened application, you can see the preview of it.

  • Taskbar Settings

You can resize the taskbar by clicking the top edge of the taskbar and drag it. If you right-click an empty part of the taskbar, you can see many options. You can lock it by selecting ‘Lock the taskbar‘ option when you do not want to resize or relocate it. At the bottom of that options you can see the Taskbar settings, you can lock the taskbar there either. The ‘Auto-hide‘ option gives you more space of the screen by making the taskbar disappear when you do not use it. You can select ‘Small taskbar buttons‘ if you want to pin a lot of applications. The ‘Use Peek‘ option is used to preview your desktop when you move your mouse to your right edge of your taskbar. And you can see the area which you can relocate your taskbar.

  • Notification Area

Notification area refers to the extreme right side of your taskbar. You can see some icons that provide you notifications and status. Some of the icons are hidden and some them are visible. You can click the arrow icon to expand. Some standard icons in the notification area are the network connection, battery status indicator, the time and the date, volume status indicator. The others can vary based on your installed applications. Sometimes an error or an update notification of that application may appear. If you plug a USB in, an icon will appear until you unplug it.

  • Action Center

One of the important new features of Windows 10 is Action Center which is in the notification area. It is basically divided into two sections; upper area which includes the notifications from the applications, and the lower area is called ‘Quick Actions‘. They are important settings about your device functions; brightness, airplane mode, Wi-Fi settings etc. You can take actions about the notifications like expanding to see details and then close it by clicking the ‘X’ button. If you do not want to see notifications from an application anymore; go to action center and right-click on this application and select the ‘Turn off notifications for this app’ option.


  • Notification Area and Action Center Settings

If you type ‘Notification’ to your searching area, you can launch the ‘Notification and Action Settings‘. You can choose which icons you want to see on the Taskbar, which notifications you want to receive at the Notification Area and which settings you want to see at the Action Center or you can rearrange them.

Accessibility

Accessibility or ease of access is designed to help disabled people or people who having some vision or hearing issues. To enable ease of access tools, go your ‘Settings‘ app and select ‘Ease of Access‘. There you can turn on the ‘Narrator’ and choose the voice of the speaker and speaker’s voice, pitch etc. On the ‘Magnifier‘ you can make your screen bigger to see better, on the ‘Color & High Contrast‘ you can choose special filters. ‘Closed captions‘ works with the Movies and TV app, you can manage closed captions in movies here. You can enable ‘on-screen keyboard’ or ‘sticky keys’ etc. on the ‘Keyboard‘ section. ‘Mouse‘ section provides you the manage the size and the color of the pointer and you can enable mouse key which lets you to use your number pad as a mouse pad. In ‘Other options‘ you can disable the animations, you can manage how much time a notification can be visible, or you can enable visual notifications for sound etc.

HYPER-V CREATING VIRTUAL MACHINE

How to Create a Virtual Machine?

Steps:

  1. Assign a name and location
  2. Assign virtual memory to the Virtual Machine
  3. Configure networking
  4. Connect to a virtual hard disk
  5. Define installation options for the operating system

Create a New Virtual Machine

To create a new virtual machine, click “New” which is under the “Actions” area, and select the “Virtual machine” option.

   

Then, New Machine Wizard, which will be our guide, appears with ‘Before you begin‘ section. You can click ‘Finish‘ to create a new virtual machine with default options or you can click ‘Next‘ to customize the options. We are clicking ‘Next‘ for see the options and understand them.

We can specify the name of our new virtual machine here. Name of my machine will be ‘New Test VM’. And we can change the storage location of your virtual machine by checking the box which says, ‘Store the virtual machine in a different location‘. I will continue with the default option which is: C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsHyper-V

Then we should choose the generation of our virtual machine(VM). Once we create virtual machine, we cannot change its generation.

As you can see in the table below, Generation 2 does not support any 32-bit operating system.

64-Bit Versions

Generation 1

Generation 2
Windows Server 2012 R2

Yes

Yes
Windows Server 2012

Yes

Yes
Windows Server 2008 R2

Yes

No
Windows Server 2008

Yes

No
Windows 10

Yes

Yes
Windows 8.1

Yes

Yes
Windows 8

Yes

Yes
Windows 7

Yes

No

32-Bit Versions

Generation 1

Generation 2

Windows 10

Yes

No

Windows 8.1

Yes

No

Windows 8

Yes

No

Windows 7

Yes

No

After we decide the generation, we have to assign memory to our virtual machine. It can be assigned between 32 MB and 125829 MB. It is okay if you do not know how much virtual memory it should be assigned. Application member recommends an approximate amount of memory, but it is better to allocate a little bit more memory than recommended. The memory can be static or dynamic. If we choose to use dynamic memory, it starts from the ‘Startup memory’ and expands dynamically when needed. There are some operation system and application requirements to use dynamic memory. It would be better to read about it before you click the checkbox. I prefer to use dynamic memory, so I click the checkbox then I click Next.

Then, we should configure virtual networking for connect it to network. Usually, it would be a virtual switch which has physical connection to the internet and is shared between the virtual machines. One option is ‘not connected‘ means not connected to any kind of network. The other option is; connect to default virtual switch. This virtual switch was created when Hyper-V Server was enabled. We will talk about the configuring virtual networking more detailed in another article. For now, select the default switch and click Next.

Then, we will connect a virtual hard disk to our new virtual machine. It provides us storage to operating system that we will install. We have three options; we can create a new virtual hard disk, we can use an existing virtual hard disk if we have, or we can postpone virtual disk attachment. We will create a new virtual hard disk. We can rename it from the first blank, its default name is our virtual machine’s name plus the “.vhdx” extension. Vhdx is the new virtual hard disk format. From the second blank, we can change its storage location which is C:UsersPublicDocumentsHyper-VVirtual Hard Disks by default. And we can assign a size of that hard disk. It is 127 GB by default but as it is mentioned above, it will be dynamically expanding. So, the virtual hard disk starts very small, and after we install an operating system, it will able to expand until it will reach 127 GB. We can take the default option and click Next.


Then, the Wizard presents us the installation options of operating system(OS). The first option is postponing it to another time. The second option is installing media for an OS. It can be done by using a physical CD/DVD drive, which would be on the Hyper-V Server, and then inserting a DVD. Or if an ISO (disc image file) is already downloaded, and there is no DVD, select “Image file(.iso)” and click “Browse” for upload the file that it is going to be booted from this new virtual machine. Or it can be booted from a bootable floppy disk. The last option is installing an OS from a network-based installation server. It is useful when we want to install it automated and remotely like PXE boot. I will give details about PXE Booting in another article, so let’s focus on creating a virtual machine. I am choosing the first option and click Next.

And finally, the completing page appears to show us the summarization of our choices about the new virtual machine. Everything looks okay, so I click “Finish” and my new virtual machine “New Test VM” will be created.

Our first Virtual Machine appears in “Virtual Machines” area.

That is all for now. I hope it would help you. See you on another article.