The Action Center
If you’re looking for the best place to go for at-a-glance
information about the current state of your PC’s maintenance and
Internet security, open the Action Center (it was called the Security Center in
Windows Vista). To open it, click the tiny 
or 
on your system tray.
Here, all in one place, are all the security and maintenance messages that Windows wants you to see. Be grateful; they used to pop up as individual nag balloons on the system tray all day. Now they accumulate here.
Color coding lets you know what steps Windows thinks you should take. Messages marked with a red vertical bar are things you should fix right now, like not having a virus program installed. Items with a yellow bar are less urgent; they’re maintenance recommendations, for example.
You can read the full scoop on the Action Center on Action Center. For now, it’s enough to remember that here’s the place to check to see how your Windows Updates and PC backups are doing.
Get Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
