Windows 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 28. The Road Warrior’s Handbook

If Windows 8’s two-headed design means anything at all, it’s that Microsoft is betting on the future of mobile. Fewer and fewer computers will be tethered to desks. More and more will be carried around—and most of them will have touchscreens. Microsoft believes that so strongly, it created TileWorld to be ready.

But the touchscreen simplicity of TileWorld isn’t the only nod Windows 8 makes to easing the lives of road warriors. This chapter covers a motley collection of additional tools for anyone who travels.

Windows Mobility Center

The Windows Mobility Center is a handy, centralized hub for managing everything that makes a laptop a laptop (Figure 28-1): battery, wireless networking, external projector connection, and so on. The quickest way to get there is to choose its name from the secret Utilities menu (press +X, or right-click the lower-left corner of the screen.)

You can also open the Start screen, type mobility, and select Settings under the search box. In the search results, click Windows Mobility Center.

Here’s the list of tiles that may appear in your Mobility Center. You may not have all of them, depending on what kind of computer you’re using and what components it has. And you may have more of them, if your computer company installed its own options.

Note

Of course, many of the functions of this older control panel are now right there ...