Over the years, the Windows 10 operating system has accumulated a good number of internals. The number of them has increased as the software grows and gains in veteran.
Some have been accompanying us for several decades and versions of Windows, others are more current and largely unknown. With everything and with this, the set of functions to which we refer make this the most used desktop operating system in the world. As we told you, we currently have at our disposal some functions that we use every day, while others we do not even know that they exist.
It is for all this that in these same lines we will talk about a Windows feature that is not very well known but that is very useful. Specifically, we will show you how to customize it to the maximum to get more out of it, or simply deactivate it. To give you an idea of what we are talking about, we refer to the TimeLine function or Timeline.
What is the Windows 10 TimeLine feature
First of all, the first thing that has to be clear to us is what this Timeline or TimeLine function really is in Windows 10 . Well, as its name allows us to glimpse, here we are talking about a functionality that is responsible for collecting everything that we are doing in the system over the last few days. Therefore, in the event that we need to recover a document that we were editing, a website that we visited a few days ago, or return to a certain application, it will be easier. And it is that thanks to this characteristic of the Redmond system , we will be able to travel to what we have done in the past to recover it.
Therefore we could say that what this function that we mentioned really does is automatically collect all the applications and documents that we use. In this way, it saves the record of our activity in the form of a history with the last 30 days of use of the system. The advantages of all this are obvious, since we can easily recover everything we were doing a few days ago or even weeks ago without problem. It is worth mentioning that for all this, at first we only have to use the Win + Tab key combination.
Similarly, we have quick access to this timeline that the system itself presents us by default on the taskbar. Therefore, next to the Windows search box, we find a button that we can click to access this section. Another section that we must take into account is that the commented function is compatible with its use through various devices. In this way, what we achieve is to synchronize in all of them in order to recover what we were doing from any computer with Windows 10.
Advantages and disadvantages of the Windows Timeline
Of course, this will be possible as long as we use the same Microsoft account in all of them. We also have the possibility of specifying the teams that we want to keep the history we have told you about. Thus, as we mentioned, this is something that for many users can be very useful on a day-to-day basis with Windows . More often than not, we need to take up certain jobs that we left halfway through in the previous days. In addition, being able to use this same thing on several devices is an important advantage when it comes to synchronizing all this information.
But on the contrary, for many others, the Timeline function can become a violation of our privacy. Keep in mind that it exposes to anyone who sits at the PC, what we did in previous days. At the same time, in order to synchronize all this, this information is sent and stored on the servers of the Redmond-based firm, which is not liked by everyone. That is why Microsoft allows us to configure this function, as we will see below.
How to configure and customize TimeLine or Timeline
Thus, for this that we are discussing, the first thing we will do is go to the Windows Settings application. This is something that we achieve directly through the Win + I key combination.
Next we have to locate the entry called Privacy, where we can see, in the right part of the window, the section that interests us here. This is none other than the so-called Activity History, which refers to the Timeline that we have been talking about.
At first, the first thing that we are going to find here is with two selectors that we can activate, or not. They allow us, on the one hand, to store our activity locally on the device, and on the other to send it to Microsoft. It is evident that this shipment can be produced so that we can synchronize the data saved in our account and thus access them from other computers. Then, a little further down in the same window, we find the user accounts registered on this PC .
This will allow us to configure those in which we want the data corresponding to our activity to be saved, or those in which we do not want to save anything. What’s more, for greater security and speed, even here we have a button to instantly delete everything stored so far.
Customize activity clearing in Windows
But it may also be the case that we want to go a step further in regard to the configuration of the saved personal activity data . To do this, just click on the link that reads Manage my Microsoft account activity data. This will lead us to a default browser window where we can log in to the Microsoft account.
In this way and directly, we will have greater control over the data collected by Windows and stored. Thus, we will have the possibility to erase the browsing history, search history, location activity, voice, multimedia, etc.