The Windows 10 October 2018 Update (1809): Let's Try This Again
by Brett Howse on November 14, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Cloud Clipboard
Windows 10 1809 brings some much-needed improvements to the clipboard. First, you can access your clipboard history, and second, you can access your clipboard on multiple devices. Both of these can be configured, of course, if you prefer to not use these features. In addition, hopefully this fixes the long-standing bug with Windows 10 where it wouldn’t always copy when you do Ctrl C, especially in a UWP app, but as it’s difficult to prove a negative, all we can say is that so far after over a month with 1809, this bug hasn’t occurred.
To access your clipboard, you have to use the new keyboard shortcut of Windows Key + V. Once opened, you’ll see your most recent items in your clipboard and if you click on them it pastes that item into whatever program is open. You can also delete some or all of your history.
In the new settings feature for this app, you can set it to also sync between devices, so you’d be able to access your clipboard anywhere if needed.
Functionality wise, the new feature works as expected, although the interface could use some work. Having to open it with Win + V works, but it would be nice to be able to keep your clipboard open as an app as well, and where the clipboard opens on the display seems to be relative to what you have open at the time, so it does move around a bit. Unlike most apps you can’t drag it around either. Hopefully this gets turned into a full-fledged app you can just have open on your screen.
Also, if you have a lot of items in your clipboard, it’ll take a bit of scrolling to find what you’re after, so you may find that you need to prune it from time to time.
Screen Sketch
Working in harmony with the updated clipboard is Screen Sketch tool, which is a big improvement over previous versions. Most users know that they can do a PrintScreen to grab a capture of the whole screen, or Alt+PrintScreen to grab an active Windows in a screen capture, but Windows 10 also had a shortcut to access a screen sketch tool accessed through Windows Key + Shift + S, and this would provide much of the same functionality as the Snipping Tool from Windows 7 where you can draw a box around anything on the screen and it would be instantly copied to your clipboard.
With 1809, Screen Sketch has been improved dramatically. Opening the Screen Sketch tool lets you pick between a full screen capture, freeform capture, or the default rectangular capture, where you can draw a box around something to copy it. Once copied, it will then open the Snip & Sketch app where you can crop, annotate, save, or share the capture.
For those that do a lot of screen captures (raises hand) this new functionality speeds up the process significantly, and cuts out steps like having to paste a screen capture into paint or another program in order to save it as a file. In previous versions of Windows 10, the Win+Shift+S shortcut was already great tool, but 1809 really brings the entire process altogether into a single experience.
Finally, many people will likely not love having to use a three-key combination to launch this new tool, and with the 1809 update you can now map the Print Screen key to this new screen clipping method.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
86 Comments
View All Comments
haukionkannel - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
That is so true. But they can now play with this new toy and in two or three years from now, we may actually see ten or more games to use it! And after that some more...New trend has to be started one day. But early bird in this case may not to be the best place to bee. The second or third generation of ray tracing cards will be a heck of lot better in ray tracing than these and there will be more of them. Then we will have Nvidia, Intel and AMD competing the best ray tracing card title and also hopefully some price competition too!
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
That's true, but I'm still curious to see if Raytacing is worthwhile from a graphical point.That and if the RTX cards are crap at pumping out rays, then maybe the pricing will come back down to earth. So far the high prices are sort of justified by this big mythical feature that no one can verify.
Martijn ter Haar - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Yup. The Battlefield V is the first game where raytracing can be enabled, albeit only for reflections. There's still some bugs though. Hardware Unboxed has a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpZmH0_1gWQhoutek - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
this OS has been buggy for decades. After spending three days on the phone with HP, and reinstalling Win 10 at least twice, i'm done. I had a high end HP laptop with a unreliable OS. I wiped the hard drive, installed Ubuntu Linux, immediately got $200 in refunds on Windows support utilities, never looked back.Spunjji - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
This OS hasn't been out for decades. Next troll, please.MonkeyPaw - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Refunds for support utilities? What support utilities?PeachNCream - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
While I totally support your decision to switch to Linux and would encourage people that are interested in something other than Windows to give it a try, my experiences with Win10 haven't been like that. I use it at work on a daily basis with very few problems. I use Linux at home on a daily basis, also with very few problems. Every modern operating system will have bugs regardless of whether or not you go with something open or closed source. I've run into a variety of mostly minor issues Linux since picking up shop and moving to it so I'd hardly call it a perfect experience. Mint Tara, version 19 and the latest from the Mint team, has resolved some instability with Audacity I've been experiencing while making recordings for video production so I'm a pretty happy clam at the moment. I would argue that it runs neck-and-neck with 10 (or at least so close that there isn't a notable difference) in terms of reliability which is to say that both operating systems are quite usable and each has its own set of pros and cons.haukionkannel - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Yep. I have has much less problems with win10 than I did have with win7. Win7 was quite nice at the end of its career, but all in all win 10 has been more stable operation system to me.On worst nitpick is that win10 has to keep so much legacy support in it that many setting are too numerous places (so that old programs can also work in it...) But stability has clearly been quite good. I did reinstall win 7 4-5 times. Win 10 I have not installed it again a single time. But it is all up how lucky you get with hardware vs firmware, vs software lottery that is quite excessive in windows machines.
Targon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Talking to clueless support reps in India or wherever that only read from a script and expecting THEM to be able to help you just shows you should have checked online first for help. Windows 10 has been fairly solid for over a year now, even with the bugs that only apply to .05 percent of the user base.The big 1809 problem was due to people who redirected Documents for example to point to another directory instead of c:\users\USERNAME\Documents. If you had set up a proper JUNCTION link in the filesystem to do the job, it wouldn't have been a problem as well.
Laitainion - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Given that redirection is redirection is the only method exposed via the gui and not working across hard discs/partitions I don't think that's entirely fair. I find it quite reasonable that Microsoft check the use-cases that they expose for people to use than expect people to use a method that isn't.