Ed Bott - Windows 10 Support Secrets

83 CHAPTER 6 | Taking charge of hardware This same basic feature set makes it possible for you to project your screen to wireless displays that aren’t connected to a PC. This feature, called Miracast or screen mirroring, can be set up in a living room or a conference room by using a small receiver that plugs into the HDMI port on a display or a large screen TV. Microsoft’s Surface Display Adapter is one such device, as is Amazon’s Fire TV Stick. Figure 6-6 shows a Windows 10 PC connected to a big-screen TV using the latter device. Figure 6-6: You can project the contents of one Windows 10 display to a larger screen with a Miracast or display mirroring device plugged into the TV’s HDMI port. Volume control and other audio settings Sound is, of course, a crucial part of modern computing. Movies, music, news broadcasts, and snippets of video demand audio playback hardware. Online communication via Microsoft Skype and other services also works best when you can hear the person on the other end of the connection. Modern PCs typically include at least one audio playback device. On desktop PCs, video cards often include their own sound controller, and you can use headphones (wired or wireless) to add yet another playback option. Most of the time, audio works as expected, but it’s worth helping users understand how to configure different audio devices for different occasions. Windows 10 includes a useful feature with which you can set one audio output—say, the speakers connected to your desktop PC—as the default device for playing music and system sounds, while assigning a different device, such as a set of headphones, as the default communications device. To check these settings, and adjust them if needed, right-click the speaker icon in the notification area and then choose Playback Devices. That opens the Sound Control Panel, shown in Figure 6-7.