Transcript
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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at the apps that come with Windows 11. Which are the ones you should keep, which are the ones you can ignore, which are the ones you might want to delete.
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Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Ferratt and this week I'm going to take a look at at the apps that come with Windows 11. You might think of these as bloatware, crapware. We often talk about these kinds of problems with Windows 11, but there's good with the bad, right? And it's not really a good, bad, ugly kind of a thing. It's more like which are the ones you can keep, which are the apps that are the keepers, the ones that are truly useful and maybe semi universally of interest, which are the apps that you might want to keep but just ignore and only use when you have to use them for whatever reason. And then which of the apps that are just complete duds and you want to just replace them with something else, third party app of some kind. So I thought to go through, this is not going to be every single app in Windows 11, but maybe the, you know, three, five, whatever number in each section, right? So for me, the apps that I value the most are first I just throw out a big list of things. There are the little utilities, things like Calculator here or the clock app or the weather app or whatever. They're just sitting there doing their thing. Not a big deal. You know, I would never replace the Calculator app, but I also wouldn't delete it, right? But I do need it every once in a while. It's good to have no problem there. So get that one out of the way. There are a couple of apps that have been semi controversial for whatever reason that I use all the time. One of those is Notepad. I love Notepad. Just bring this thing up again. You know, it's hard to see in dark mode here, but you know, tab based interface supports markdown formatting. It's got all this built in writing help. So if you want to summarize, rewrite it, make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone. I did the demo in one episode where you can turn what you wrote into a poem, which is hilarious. I mean, all that stuff and if you don't like it, just turn it all off. You can come in here and turn, except for the tabs, you can pretty much just turn anything off. So if There are behaviors in here you're not a fan of. Just don't, don't worry about it. But to me this thing is, is better than it's ever been. It runs perfectly fine. It's not buggy or slow or anything. It's just nicely done. So that's, that's amazing. I use, I use this app every single day. Clip Champ is another one. We've done probably multiple episodes on this. I'm not going to beat this one to death per se, but a very powerful video editor. It's free. I actually pay for it. You don't have to, but I do pay for this and that allows me to export in 4K, et cetera, a couple. But just a really, just an excellent app. So this is just a great one. It's so good that I don't feel the need to download like say a Cap cut or whatever other video editor I might use otherwise. So this is also very good. The Microsoft Store. You know, when you think about installing apps, especially in Windows, there's different ways to do it. Obviously you can just go to the web and download them. But one of the nice things about this app is that it keeps track of what's installed and if it can, it will keep them automatically updated. There are certain apps that you know have to be updated through some web based mechanism because that's what the app developer wanted or whatever. But all the Microsoft apps for the most part will just auto update. And you see there's a couple here waiting to get updated, which I will not do right now. But that's terrific. The, you know, the other little caveat here though is Microsoft has a command line interface for something called Winget or the Windows Package Manager built in as well. And this allows you to install apps from the web and also kind of manage that. We talked about that at some point, probably last year or so. But you can go in here and this is another way to keep apps up to date, including apps that were installed through the web. Right. And so I'm not going to do this here because there's a bunch of these, but I just do something like when you get it out and then silent and then I didn't run this as an admin, which I would normally do, but it will just, just do this without. It will prompt me probably one time now. But 14 apps or some of these are not really apps, but services I guess. But they need to be installed. So it's good to know about this. But this stuff to me, this combination of Winget and The Windows Store is just, you know, to me is really, really good. And the Windows Store didn't start off great, but today it's just in great shape. So that's a, it's a good choice for most people. So in the second category there are the apps that they're good, you know, or they're okay, they're good enough, whatever. But you might want to keep other apps around, you know, that are, that do something similar. So the biggest one is Microsoft Edge. Now in this computer I've actually removed Edge. So we talked at some point about win 11 debloat. I use that tool to remove Edge from this particular computer. But for the most part I would say you can just leave Edge running. You don't have to worry about that, but just install the browser of your choice which could be, you know, Chrome or Brave, Opera, whatever browser you prefer. It's useful to have a couple of browsers around. So I'm using Brave right now. But is. There's no reason for most people to remove anything. But in this case. But I did do that, I did get rid of Edge. It's kind of a radical solution. The Microsoft, the Xbox app is another one. So this particular computer is Windows 11 on ARM. I'm not going to be doing a lot with gaming on this particular computer, but you can access all of the games in your library, whether that's through Xbox Game Pass, maybe games that you get because of the subscription or you bought in the past or games you can stream through cloud gaming are all available in here. But the nice thing that's occurred here, which is, is available on this computer I just haven't installed it, is if you get apps from a third party store like Steam, which is the most popular one, but also Epic Games and some others, those games will appear in here as well. And so you can use this as a single launcher. I think we did an episode on this fairly recently. So like this is a good example. There's no reason not to have this. It's just, you know, games that are associated with your Microsoft account, but you can also access your other games. Actually, as I look at this now, I could see I do in fact have a game from the Epic Games Store installed. So it's, it is actually showing me everything. So that's nice. So there's that and, and we have a few more. But first we have a quick message.