After you’ve added your email and social networking accounts to the People app, you may find that your list of contacts is getting a bit unruly. Even sorted by name and including pictures may not be enough to help you find the person you need quickly. Luckily, the Windows 8 People app has a number of built-in ways to help filter, sort and search through your list which makes finding the person you need simple and fast, regardless of how many contacts you have.

Essentially, the Windows 8 People app is an all-inclusive contact list. You add your various accounts and the app stores contact information for everyone you know, regardless of whether they’re an email contact or a Facebook friend. While that is useful enough on its own, the People app doesn’t end there. It’s also a window into your social networking life allowing you to view notifications, follow friends and even post updates. There’s a lot going on in this seemingly basic application. Read on and you’ll find that its a whole lot more than a simple contact list.

From time to time, I stumble upon applications that are hard to remove. Sometimes their Add/Remove Programs entry disappears for whatever reason or they don’t have a handy Uninstall shortcut available, etc. The problems vary from case to case. That’s why I decided to make a roundup of all the methods that can be used to remove programs and apps, both in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

When working with the Windows 8 People app, your contacts will typically be entered in bulk lists by adding your social networking accounts and email accounts. There information will all be added automatically, you’ll only have to type your usernames and passwords. However, times will arise when you’ll need to manually add, alter or combine entries to keep things organized. Perhaps you have a new acquaintance, or a current contacts moves, maybe you even have two separate entries for the same person. Any of these situations can lead to annoyances. If you need to get in there and fix things, read on and I’ll tell you what you need to know.

The Windows 8 People app is a tool for aggregating all of your contacts from all around the Internet. You can pull contact information from email accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking accounts as well. Having to add each contact individually would most likely be a monumental task, but People takes care of that for you. All you have to do is sync your various accounts with the app and wait a few minutes for all of your friends, family and coworkers to show up on screen. It couldn’t be easier.

Knowing the weather is essential to planning anything from an upcoming weekend away to which route to drive to work. While many users watch the news for their weather information and others might check the Internet, Windows 8 provides a great alternative with its bundled Weather app. Once configured, this app provides extended forecasts, hourly forecasts, weather maps and even historical data. This is a very useful app whether you want to know if your company picnic will be canceled for rain or even what sort of coat to put on in the morning. Read on to learn all you’ll need to know about it.

If you are using any of the applications included in Windows Live Essentials, you will have encountered the term SkyDrive. The same if you are using Windows 8 or Microsoft Office 2013. Ever wondered what SkyDrive is and what you can do with it? This article will explain in detail.

Life can be hectic. As your individual worlds of work, play and family come together you can be left with a jumbled schedule of overlapping appointments, parties and events that can be impossible to keep track of without help. Windows 8 offers you the help you’ll need with the bundled app named Calendar. This new app gives you the ability to keep track of all of your various engagements and will even provide you with alerts and emails to remind you of what’s to come. Take a few moments to acquaint yourself with this app, you’ll find it’s well worth your time.

For those of you who’ve had a chance to try out the new Mail app in Windows 8, you’ll know that it’s a convenient tool for aggregating all of your emails into a single location, that is, unless you have a POP3 email account. While most email providers have updated to the IMAP protocol, some major ISP’s, including Comcast and Verizon, still use POP3. If you are one of the millions of users with such an address, you won’t be able to simply add your account to Windows 8 Mail. But, you can use Microsoft’s Outlook.com free email service to pull emails from your POP3 account(s) and then use that account in the Mail app. This guide will show how.

When you add an email account into Mail, the app automatically configures the name of the account to match the account provider. That means you’re likely to see accounts named Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or others such as that. While that makes perfect sense and will work quite well for most people, this system falls apart in a few key situations. What happens for an individual with two Gmail accounts? What about a person using Outlook to funnel in mail from an ISP’s POP3 account? You don’t have to live with the default names for your Mail accounts. You can jump into the account settings and name them whatever you want.

Once you get your hands on a copy of Windows 8, you’ll notice it comes packaged with a few useful apps to get you started. These apps aren’t the standard Desktop applications you’re used to, they’re Windows 8 apps, and they’re nothing like anything Windows has offered before.

The first of these apps that we’ll take a look at is Mail. After a short setup, this app can take the place of any mail client you’ve used in the past. You can pull all of your emails, from all of your various accounts into one place, and I’ll show how.

Have you ever had an appointment that you remembered about 15 minutes after it was past? Have you ever had an important email message that sat in your inbox far longer than it should have? If you’ve known these annoyances in the past, you don’t have to repeat the experience. Windows 8 has a very handy system of notifications from important apps such as Mail and Calendar that let you know when you’ve got important things to do.

To get these notifications you’ll need to do a bit of configuration to make sure your settings are in order. Read on to learn everything you’ll need to know.