Hands-On Windows 126 transcript

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0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands-On Windows. It's a new year, so I thought I'd take a step back and look at my top tips for Windows 11. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows.

I'm Paul Frott and this week I thought I would take a step back and look at my top tips for Windows 11. I think it's 11 tips, if I counted correctly, in no particular order, although I did organize them by topic, I guess. So I suppose there is an order, and if you're looking at my screen now, you'll see that this is a highly customized version of Windows 11, in the sense that I'm not using any of the defaults. This is my actual sign-in and the apps. I actually use that kind of stuff, and I would just say, from a customization standpoint, as ADHD as I can be, I try not to sweat the small things, and what I mean by that, for starters, for example, is I will customize the taskbar, because that's where I primarily launch the applications that I use every day, but when I go into the start menu, I don't really customize this. So if you use the start menu more than the taskbar, you might want to do the reverse. There's certainly some customization you can do there if you want, but for me I would say tip number one is don't sweat the small stuff. Customize the things that you actually use. In my case, that's the taskbar. That's my primary UI. Number two is also related to customization, and this is with regards to the kind of look and feel of the OS right, and so this all happens under personalization themes, right, and so Windows 11 supports this new type of theme. Themes are constructed of these four elements.

Here I have this set up as kind of a colorful display. I'm using dark mode so it's not reflecting on my face while we're doing the video recording. But the point of this is mostly just for it to be colorful. I'm testing some app development stuff. I want to see the translucency effects and so forth. The big one for me is I turn off the sounds. I don't like the default Windows sounds, so I turn that to no sounds, and Microsoft just fixed the cursor issue I mentioned in previous issues. I don't have to worry about that anymore, but that was a concern for a little while. And then you can save this as a custom name, which I do, and after I get everything set up the way I want it. So I can do that however you wish. There is no way in Windows, unfortunately, to switch between light and dark mode automatically as day shifts into night and vice versa. There are third-party utilities, but I find that I, as much as that's convenient on a phone, I don't really use it as much, or I wouldn't use it as much on windows. So I switch back and forth, just as I need it as needed.

One drive, obviously, is a primary component, a core component of windows. And this is tip number three, which is to make sure that this thing is configured ideally for your use case. So you do most of that inside for your use case, so you do most of that inside here, sorry, settings. So a couple of areas here. The big one, of course, is folder backup. We've talked about this a lot. I don't personally use folder backup, so I make sure that stuff is always off. Windows fights me on that. Sometimes we go back and forth it enables it, I disable it, et cetera. But you may want to use that feature. It's certainly worth trying. So I turn all that stuff off. The other big change I make in here is notifications, and the only thing I change is actually this notify me on this day. So this is the thing where you get the notification that says hey, remember this fun day. I heard some photos from that day. I don't do that sort of thing on my PC, that's for my phone. So that's just an annoyance and turn that one off.

But the third big thing about OneDrive is Personal vault. Right, and the first time you run this you'll go through kind of a wizard process. It's gonna check with me my cameras over here so I can make sure it's me. This is the new Windows Hello sign-in experience, if you haven't seen it, and this will let me into my vault. So I strongly recommend, if you're using OneDrive, that you do use Personal Vault, and the reason is this is a secure, encrypted, protected from everybody, including Microsoft Space where you can keep private documents. So in my case it's a lot of 2FA codes and backup codes and emergency kits and things like that, so you could put credit card numbers, copies of your ID, et cetera. So this is something you can access in Windows, but you can also access on the Mac and a mobile device. Whatever Good to have that in place If you're not using OneDrive. We talked about this in a previous episode. But you could disable it or even uninstall it if you want to go to that degree. But I find that even when I use something like Google Drive which I do, by the way I still have use for OneDrive, for example, that private vault. So I keep it running, but you can also turn that off if you want.

Once you have Windows up and running. This is when tip number four I think we're on kicks into gear, which is you want to make sure that nothing is auto, starting with your computer when it starts up or when you sign into the computer. A couple of places for this, some old school. I still go to the old UI. The old UI is in task manager and this is where you see what Windows has tried to configure or can configure for auto run at sign in and what I have enabled or allowed and disallowed. So, for example, you can sort this by status, so enabled or disabled, and then you can go through this list of enabled apps. If you don't use Microsoft Edge we'll talk about that in a minute you could disable that here. If you're not using OneDrive, for example, you could disable that here. So I don't actually want personally for PhoneLink to come on every time I sign into windows, so I just turned that off. So the other UI I should say is inside the settings app. If you go to apps and startup, it's same basic thing. It's a little to me it's because it's bigger it's a little harder to look at, but you can do the same thing. Sort by status, you'll see that same list of apps. You can turn them on or off. This is the more All right. I think we're on step five or tip five.

Right is security. So a few episodes back I talked about signing with a local account. It is possible to do that securely. I would say that's mostly for advanced users. Most people should sign into Windows with a Microsoft account or if you have a corporate account or an account with your employer or you work for the government or you're an educational institution, a Microsoft Worker's School account and this is a bunch of stuff that goes along with that. But one of the big things you can do is protect that account with a secondary authentication with a authenticator app or your phone or whatever Super important. But when you sign into Windows you will be prompted to enter a PIN. You have to do that if using any account that has a password, but you can also go in here. You could have done this during setup, but you can always do it later and see what the sign-in options are available and then enable them as you can. So in this particular computer I don't actually have a fingerprint reader, but I do have facial recognition with Windows Hello ESS. So I have that enabled and it will look at me and notes me, sign me in securely, etc. This particular computer is a copilot plus PC, so it has Windows Hello enhanced security as well, but from a user experience standpoint it's actually the same. It's actually turned off here because today I'm using an external webcam for this video, but normally I have that enabled.

Okay, number, where are we? Six is keep your system up to date. So this system is hopefully up to date, but I'm going to look anyway. I was just doing all this before we started the show, but there's three ways to check for updates, three main ways in Windows. First, obviously, is Windows Update. You're going to get your system updates here and then you'll have optional updates, which I think is something a lot of people don't look at. This is where you're going to see a lot of driver updates from your PC maker especially, so it's good to look there. The schedule on this is going to be once every two weeks, if you've got this switch enabled, because you're going to get preview updates, or once every four weeks, every month, because you'll get those patch Tuesday primary updates.

The second place to look for updates obviously is the Microsoft store. So this is apps, but it's also system components like this type of thing here that aren't necessarily your apps that you run, but they're required for the backend and maybe they need to be updated a little more often. You can update apps through there. Interestingly, though, there's a third place and it kind of ties into both of those things, and this is we had done an episode about this, I want to say, sometime last year, but there's a utility called Winget built into Windows, a command line utility. So it's not the friendliest thing in the world, but if you do a Winget update, you will almost always find additional things. Even though I just checked the store and and that because and let's see, in both these cases I believe these were both desktop apps, so I could run those apps and then they would probably offer me the update, but I could also update them here directly. I'm not going to run this because I don't want to go through this, but the command line to do that is the basic command line is this dash, dash all. It's not going to actually update Discord in this case, because it has this message here telling me there's a little issue, but it will update these other two if I were to do that, which I will not.

And the next tip is for Microsoft Edge. So whether you're going to use Edge or not, it's important to secure and configure this browser correctly. On this PC. I actually am using Microsoft Edge, so the things that I care about the most here are the extensions. It's important on any browser to have the right security extension. So for blocking trackers and for blocking ads, actually Privacy Badger or uBlock Origin. Usually I'm kind of testing this right now I typically go with Privacy Badger and then also AdBlock Plus Plus. Ublock Origin is about to be deprecated and switched into something new because of some changes Google made to the extension engine there. But you want to have at least that sort of thing. I use a third-party password manager in my a proton pass, so I've got that configured and also pinned up here. Super useful. And then configuration is going to be, you know, per person or whatever.

But some of the things I know that I do all the time is go down deep, deep, deep into this menu and change this to something that is not Bing, that's up to you, but Google, duckduckgo, whatever. I turn off all the Copilot sidebar stuff in Edge because if I use Copilot I don't need it in the browser and all it's doing is taking up space up here. And then there is if we look for I think it's like search for it. Sleeping tabs is actually a useful feature for saving RAM usage primarily. I turn it off. I don't. I find that I use so many tabs and I don't like switching between them and having the weight for them to wake up, so I turn this up, I turn this off, but you know that's going to depend on the person. Also, let's see if I have it on this particular computer. I do not, but there is a. I might even be in the wrong place, but there is a new scareware protection feature in Edge you have to enable manually. It's worth enabling, actually, so it's worth looking for that as well.

If you're not going to use Microsoft Edge, you should go into that interface I described earlier and prevent it from starting in the beginning. And also go into the settings app and make sure that the browser you want to use is the default app. So that's apps, default apps. And then you know, for example, I have Chrome here, so I might have Chrome here. Let's find out. Oh, I'm in the wrong place, sorry. And then select this click. Is you know, click set as default? So you could do it that way.

We've talked a lot about the problems with this. It doesn't work 100% of the time. If you launch a story from widgets, for example, or from search highlights, it's still going to run edge. But for the most part, that does what you want it to do. Okay, so, since we're on an app that comes with Windows, the next few tips are about other apps that come with Windows.

Right, so I mentioned PhoneLink. I don't like it to run at startup, but I do use PhoneLink. And the reason you use PhoneLink? Well, there's a lot of reasons actually, but whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone, it's really nice for accessing your messages and calls while you're on the computer. We can type, right, so message comes, maybe a text message comes in. You can respond to it from here. We've talked a lot about full link. I think we're going to talk about it soon again, but the short version is that it's much more full featured on Android. It's especially full featured if you have a Samsung flagship phone and you get some basic features with the iPhone although that is getting better. So even on the iPhone you're going to get basic message and call support Super important. I think that's the greatest reason to use this. If it is running and it will stay running when I close this and I get a text message or a phone call, I'll actually get a pop-up down here and then I can respond to those things right on the computer. Super, super helpful.

One that is less obvious is the snipping tool. Snipping tool is for taking screenshots and also screen recordings, but it has some additional features built in, so I'll just load a. This is probably a good one here. Open this image with the snipping tool. It also has this really neat OCR capability. So if you click on this text actions option, you get the little AI deal and you can see it's selected, all the text that's in the image. This happens to be a screenshot, but it could be any image. It could be a picture of a storefront, whatever, copy all the text and then I can run any text editor notepad or Microsoft Word, whatever and now all of the text is available here. So this is kind of not obvious to most. People probably don't think about Snipping Tool too much, but this is kind of a cool secondary feature. It's actually the primary reason that I use Snipping Tool, so that's a pretty cool thing to know about. And then I honestly, the best let me think about that for a second.

Yeah, maybe the best app that's built into windows is clipchamp. This is the new video editor. Microsoft bought the company that made this originally. Um, now it's a part of windows. Uh, this is a web app, but it's surprisingly full featured and so I'm not going to do too much here. But, um, this is a video I made for the web channel, my, or the youtube channel my wife and have, uh, eternal Spring, and so we record videos, I edit them in Clipchamp and then export them and upload them to YouTube. So really really nice tool and kind of unexpected, because the video editing situation in Windows has been kind of lousy for a long time, but now it's actually pretty good. All right, what else we got here? So I think I'm on, all right, what else we got here? So I think I'm on.

I might be on one number 10, if I'm not mistaken and the next two are about apps. And when it comes to apps, obviously it's Windows, so you can download apps from the web, and I do do that. But I always check to see if apps are available in the Microsoft store first, and the reason I do that is because a bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is better licensing. So if it's something like a powerful app, like an Adobe Photoshop elements type thing, where if you bought it directly from Adobe you would only get one or two PCs you could use it on at the same time, the default Microsoft license is 10 PCs. It just makes it easier. If you use a bunch of different computers, like I do. Remove from computer to computer, the updating is much more seamless I should say can be much more seamless. So licensing and updating are now kind of optional features of the store. So, depending on the app, you might actually find that they have their own systems for these things, but by and large it is better.

I can't get into this in too much detail, but I did mention Wing get earlier. Um, when get has a feature search, right. So I could search for Chrome and I can see if, uh, you know where this is available, right. And so Google Chrome here. The second one, uh, this is available for when get, but not from the store, and that means that I this is an app I cannot download from the store. So we did an episode about winget a million years ago, feels like, but a long time ago.

But I recommended this tool on the web called winstall. This was made originally by my friend Mahedy, and winstallapp is the url. So if you come in here, for example, I could search for chrome, like I just did, and what you can do is add these things. This is just the install script, which is fun, but you can also create like a full script with this tool and then you can run that to batch install all the apps you want. So it's kind of it's not a horrible idea to come here, find all the apps that you want and then construct a script, and I do that.

Let me see if I can find this easily. I think I just looked at it. Nope, here we go. So here's the latest version of my install script. Someone else customized this for me. I didn't do this. This is pretty nicely done, but it separates it into apps that are downloaded from the web and then apps that are downloaded from the store. I update this from time to time time. So this is version seven. I'm on now, but these are the apps that I try to install every time. Well, I do install every time I bring up a new computer, so it's kind of a neat thing to have. Like this will just automatically occur for me. So I a little more advanced maybe than most people are used to, but a a cool capability for sure.

And then the final thing I want to talk about is power toys. This has come up for me a lot lately. I I don't want to say I ignored power toys for a while, but there was probably a year or more there where I wasn't using it, and then over the past six months or more, I've been using it a lot more. So if you look down in here, you see a bunch of things related to power toys in here, at least three icons. So this is that power toys awake tool, which I mentioned in a recent episode, where you can keep your screen awake for a certain amount of time optionally. Keep the I'm sorry your PC awake for a certain amount of time. Keep your screen on optionally, if that's what you want. I got to turn that off actually. Oh no, that's off, sorry. So that was on for some reason. That's fun, I use this a lot actually. That's one.

And then a new entry which we might talk about in more detail in a future episode is ZoomIt. So ZoomIt this was created in 1996, originally by Mark Rezinovich, the guy who reverse engineered the NT kernel back in the day. He works for Microsoft now and this tool has been updated over the years and the way it's configured by default. So I should bring up something so you can kind of see what that looks like is you hit Control-1, and it zooms into wherever the mouse cursor is. So this is particularly good for people who are giving presentations, for example. I should probably be using it on this podcast. So if I wanted to zoom in to here like that, I can do that, and then you hit Control-1 to get back out. It does a lot more than that and it's not necessarily an accessibility tool. Obviously, microsoft or Windows has the magnifier tool built in for that purpose. But super useful and really neat that now that it's built into PowerTize, but I'm getting notified here about the personal vault that I left open, so we can also let me bring this thing up.

Just look at the other tools that are available in PowerToys, so I use a bunch of these, as you can see. So these are all the modules I have enabled. I would say Awake is probably the one I use the most. I use this is it's find my mouse right, so I hit control key twice and it zooms on in the mouse. I'm always losing the mouse cursor. This became a huge problem late last year and into this month, in January 2025, because Microsoft had a bug in 24 H2 where it actually made the mouse cursor disappear. They've actually fixed this, but it's still super useful. So control, I love it, you know. So it's worth looking through this whole list of utilities.

There's a lot going on in PowerToys and I think there's something in there for everyone, including some things that will definitely be added to Windows in the future, so it's kind of a preview of what could be coming in Windows as well. All righty, well, that is a lot of stuff. It's not everything I mean. That is a lot of stuff. It's not everything I mean there's a lot more that goes into you know, configuring Windows the way you want it, but I wanted to give kind of just a quick overview. You know, new year it's kind of a reminder of where we're at with this kind of stuff. So I hope you found this useful. I hope you find it slightly entertaining. Anyway, we will have a new episode of Hands-On Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash how.

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