While there haven’t been a ton of revolutionary improvements to the Windows Weather app since its revamp in Windows 8, it’s still a popular way for people to quickly check in with the weather from their desktop. Here’s how to configure your app’s settings, manage your favorite’s list, and set up the live tile.
Set Your Location
To add your location to the Windows 10 Weather app, start by finding the tile in your Start menu, and opening up the program.
Because my Weather app is already configured, you can see that I have Portland, Oregon automatically displaying as the hometown.
You can enter your settings configuration by clicking the small gear icon, located in the bottom-left hand corner of the window.
Though there aren’t a ton of settings available, you can choose what type of temperature the app displays in (Fahrenheit or Celsius), as well as the location that you see when the app first pops up.
The “Launch Location” setting controls what you see when the app boots up. This can be toggled to either show one city by default, or to detect your location each time you open the app.
Whichever setting you choose, it will affect both the city on the front page summary and the starting location used in the Maps and Historical Weather tabs.
The only feature unaffected by the Launch Location setting are the articles listed in the News tab, which will stay the same no matter where your city is set.
Create and Manage Your Favorites
If you’re travelling often (or just a meteorology junkie), you can set a list of favorites in the Places tab.
Here you can add favorite cities into tiles which display short summaries of the current weather there, and double as a link to that city’s homepage.
To add a favorite city, start by clicking on the tile with the plus sign in the middle, seen below:
You’ll be taken to the following screen:
Once you enter your city, find and click it in the drop-down list. It will now appear every time you open the Places tab.
Favorites can be deleted by right-clicking on the tile you want to get rid of, and selecting the option to “Remove from Favorites”.
The Live Tiles Bug
The Weather app works well enough when you open it, but there have been many complaints that the Live Tiles feature doesn’t exactly work the way it should.
Normally, this tile should display the current temperature with a snapshot of the upcoming forecast that’s updated every few minutes–as shown above.
However, users on the official Windows 10 forum have reported that sometimes, after resizing the Weather app on their Start menu, the icon stops showing live updates, even with repeated restarts. So far there have been a number of proposed fixes for the problem, but like most solutions to Windows bugs, they only seem to work for a select number of people at a time. Some include:
- Running the System File Checker tool
- Changing your display’s DPI settings to 100%, 125%, or 150%
- Killing a process in your Task Manager called “Windows RT OOP Server”
Two years have passed since people started complaining about the problem, but Microsoft still hasn’t revealed any plans about a patch in the pipeline that could resolve it. We’ll be sure to amend this article if a hotfix is ever released.
Whether or not the Live Tile is functioning the way it should, the Windows Weather app can still be a good way to keep tabs on what’s happening with sunny skies or approaching storms in your area from the comfort of your own desktop.