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Hands-On Windows 196: Reclaiming Windows 11 Pt. 2
00:28:54
Ditching the Defaults
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- [00:00]
Paul Thurrott
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at a Microsoft list, or at least Microsoft minimal Windows 11 install.
- [00:09]
Leo Laporte
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- [01:37]
Paul Thurrott
from people you trust.
- [01:40]
Leo Laporte
This is TWIT.
- [01:45]
Paul Thurrott
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Widows. I'm Paul Thurat and this is the second part of a two part series where we're clean installing Windows 11. We're not using any of the tools like Win11 Builder or Win11 DeBloat, although you can of course use those things. Just trying to see what's possible for kind of a Linux like install of Windows 11 where you minimize or eliminate as much Microsoft stuff as possible. So you could think of this as kind of an exorcism or maybe an intervention, I don't know. But what's possible. And it's actually kind of interesting because you could be super aggressive with it. So in the first part we just did the basic setup, you know, got updates going. So at this point, you know, the system is updated, the apps that are available through the store updated. We've done some minor configuration things, but some important things too around the user account, which is a local account in this case and device encryption. Okay, so the next step is apps. Now typically you could run the Microsoft Store, right? But we're trying to minimize our exposure to Microsoft. So as it turns out, Microsoft has added a really nice command line environment. Actually, there's a few of them in Windows 11 and some great command line interfaces clis for many different things, but one of those things is finding and installing and managing apps. And that thing is called Wind yet or the Windows Package Manager. Now there's a bunch of different ways to do this. I've written scripts, for example, that bulk install all the apps that I want. Those scripts were written at a time when I was actually getting many of my apps to the store. But for doing this, for just you want to download them from the web and avoid the store, I've just been doing it one at a time. The best way to do this, if you're going to just do this a bunch of apps all at once, is to run. I can't even remember if I did this when I ran this, but when you run terminal, right click and run as administrator. And this will just prevent it from putting up a bunch of UAC dialogs to approve things. And then most of the app UI during setup will not appear. There are certain apps like Discord, you can't really avoid seeing the app as it's installing, but for the most part, this will get rid of most of that. So we've, we've definitely talked about Winget in the past, but if you just type Winget you can get a list of the options that are available. What I usually do on every computer, and this would be the first thing, especially on a new system, is a Winget update just to see what apps still need to be updated. And then you can from here do. It's like it's Winget update and then all. And then silent, which I'm not going to run right now. But what this would do is install each of these apps. Now these are things mostly that I have installed since I brought this system on board. If you do this right away, you'll see a few things that are just related to the system itself. So I won't do that here, but this is something I would typically do. And then you go and find your apps, right? And so you have some list of apps that you know that you need or want. For example, I don't believe I have Google Chrome on here, but you can type this in any way you want. It's going to find it regardless. But for example, if I was looking for Google Chrome, that's great. Okay, so much for that. There you all. It didn't find anything. So you can search for just Chrome I guess. And this will come up with a bunch of stuff, I would imagine. Typically the thing you want is going to be at or near the top if you're not familiar with this system. And I don't see any of these here, you can see the source for all of these is Winget, which means it's from a web repository. So these are web based installs, these are not store based installs. Some of the apps you might look for, you're going to see store over there and instead of a name like this, you're going to have some alphanumeric code for that. But the easiest way to do this is just copy and paste and then type winget Install. And I usually just do silent just to really, just to tone it, you know, make sure there's no UI that pops up. And I'm actually not sure if I even have this app on here or not, but let's find out. No, I do not. So it will do that for me as I go. And so I basically go through this process for each of the apps I want to install. So if you look at what's on this computer here, this is Helium, which is a web browser affinity are apps I installed this way. And then if you go through the full list, unless it's something that is included with Windows or with the computer itself, like AMD software came from my PC maker, but this is a PowerToy utility. So I install PowerToys obviously image Glass, which is an image viewing application, the markdown editor, a bunch of stuff. So I just went through this whole process, right, and it's, you know, just something you could just, just do as you go. And if you want, you know, you can make a list of these, like you grab these, like I copied the name of this thing from to the clipboard, you can save it in a text file and then you could just create a text file that has this winget install silent and then the name on each line and we just install them all at one time if you want to do that. So there's different ways to do it, so there's that. So you can get your apps there. Avoid the story. That's great. One of the apps you are going to install is going to be a web browser. I can't remember for Helium, but I believe in this case, Helium is a Chromium based web browser. It looks a lot like Chrome, as you can see. It would have asked me at some point pretty early on, do you want to make this default? I would have said yes in this case. But you can make sure that it is the default or the right app is the default by going into the Settings app, apps default apps now and then find the app. In this case it is something called Helium and then I can set it as the default. I think it already was. If you want this same app to open PDF files, which I do, you have to do that one separately. So I can do that. And now it's the default. Right. So when I click a web link or open a PDF file, it's going to open in the browser that I want, not in Microsoft Edge. But Microsoft Edge is like a virus or a disease. And of course it's going to open up in many cases. If I go into widgets and open a story from there. If I go into a search, which actually can't see here, but if I go into search and find a result and search that's based on the web, it's going to open Edge even though I don't want it to. And so we've talked about this one before, but There is a third party utility, it's free, called MSedgerDirect that you can use to prevent those links in the OS from trying to open Edge. So you could uninstall Edge. That's a little aggressive for me. But you could just leave it on the system. There's no reason not to have it there as long as it doesn't pop up when you don't want it to. Right. So that's a great way to solve that problem. One of the other little configuration problems in Windows, especially if you have a modern computer, is the copilot key that's on your keyboard or that may be on your keyboard. If it is. If you're like me, you might want to get rid of that thing, so. Or get rid of what it does. So I would have removed Copilot or Microsoft 365 Copilot from this computer. So it's not going to be in the list of apps. But the problem is if I hit that key, it's going to bring up settings and go to a page and settings where I can configure what that key does. And none of the things that I am given as an option or what I want. And so the way to get around that is through the PowerToys, which by the way you can install with Winget and PowerToys is a collection of utilities. It's awesome. If anything, there's maybe too many of them at this point.
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- [10:06]
Paul Thurrott
style, every home, but one of the ones you can use is called Keyboard Manager. Actually, I see that I have not configured this, so let's see what happens when I hit the keyboard key. Yeah, it goes. This is where it goes. So it goes to this. And these options are useless to me. So what I typically do is go enable this, use the new editor. They've updated this. We probably did a quick overview of this in a previous episode and then create a new remapping, and then you choose the key. So I'm going to hit the copilot key, which maps to win key plus shift F23, which doesn't exist on any keyboard anywhere, which is hilarious. And then go over here. And so what I usually do here is pick the key that's to the right of the copilot key. So on this computer it happens to be a shift key or actually, no, it's a right control key, which is kind of interesting. On the laptop keyboard, it's usually a left arrow key, right? So if I hit the left arrow key, you'll see it's left arrow. If I hit the right control, it says app menu, but this is what used to be the right control key. You can also select from different keys here. But I just want it to do the thing that's next to it because I usually hit it by mistake and I just want to want it. I just don't want to be told about it. So with that done, you can just close it. And now when I hit this key, nothing happens. You can see that nothing is happening, right? Which is ideal. So that's great. All right, so there's a lot more to come, but we need to take a break. We'll be right back. There's so much more, so I'm going to have to gloss over a lot of this because we could be here for an hour or more going through every single setting. But we've talked in the past about that utility, win 11 debloat, if you want to totally disable tracking, you know, in other words, Microsoft is sending telemetry data back to itself over the Internet without telling you there's no way in Settings to fix this. You could spend a lot of time going in and out of these different areas, including that thing, which is the area for what I was just talking about. But all you can do is not send optional diagnostic data. You will be sending required diagnostic data. So win 11 Deepload is one way you can just turn this off completely. There's no way in the UI to do that. So if that's important to you, if privacy is a big thing, you might want to look into that. I installed OneDrive on our left OneDrive, actually, I should say on this particular computer, on the computers that I don't, and actually on this one as well. I usually install Synology Drive. I work off of Synology Drive most of the time. But whatever cloud service you might use, if it's Google Drive or whatever else, if there's a Windows app again through winget, install that thing, but not just install it. And I did not do this here because I'm actually not going to use OneDrive. But if I go into my OneDrive and I have whatever folder organization I have, I will typically do things like pin these things to Quick Access, which puts them over here, and then let's do it one more. And then I will also right click and do whatever version of Always Keep on this device. And what this will do is sync the contents of this folder folder to this computer and keep them in sync so that when I'm offline, I can access those files. When I go back online, it will sync them back up, etc. And so I'm not going to do that here. I'm not actually going to use OneDrive on this computer, but it is here if I wanted to. And that's the way you get that done. And then from here, it's a bunch of. A lot of these are subjective, but this is a lot of things you can do. Right? So with the not Task Manager, sorry. With the taskbar, for example, the default configuration which I've already configured away is to have this search box on. Actually to have this search box on and this Task View icon. These things are actually pointless. You don't need them there because they both work with the keyboard shortcuts. So that's why I get rid of those things. If I wanted to use Task View, it's just Windows key tab, that's task view. If I wanted to search, Windows key S brings up search, right? So there's no reason, you know, to do that kind of thing. So I get rid of those. I leave widgets on because I like to have the weather. However, I don't like it to auto pop up when I mouse over it and I definitely don't want to see notifications. So I turn those off. As you can see under notifications. And then this option here, open Widgets board on hover. I turn off as well. That way when I mouse over the thing, it just doesn't just come up, you know, so that's good. There's a lot of, you know, I just showed you search highlights. If you bring up the search box, which is Windows key plus x S sorry or start typing, this is Search highlights. So these are web results. So if I click on this thing and I'm not going to, Microsoft Edge will load, which I do not want. But you can also just kind of get rid of this, right? So if you go into the Settings app, Privacy and security, somewhere in here there is a search option and you can turn up Search highlights. And when you do that, you bring this up and it still looks exactly the same. All right. Usually you will not see anything web related there, which is what I wanted. I don't know what happened there. But I'm not going to move on from that. I'm going to move on from that. I don't want to spend too much time. You can configure themes and stuff and look, this sounds really basic, but there's a couple of important things behind this. One is if you go into themes, I've already configured this and this is not really the theme I typically use. But whatever the theme is, it doesn't really matter if it's a photo or a photo slideshow or whatever. I always turn off sounds. I cannot stand the bonking stupid sounds that Windows makes all the time. So I turn that off. And this is a game I play in Windows that I cannot stand, which is called where's the mouse Cursor and there's a couple of different ways you can fix that. Meaning you can actually see this mouse cursor on the screen, even though it's tiny. One of them is this inverted taskbar because it changes the color of the thing as it moves over things. So if you have a dark mouse cursor and you're on a dark surface, you might not be able to see it. This is one way to make sure you can always see it. I like that. The other one is there's a power toy I showed you PowerToys earlier that when you double tap the. Actually, it's not enabled. Yeah, there it is. When you double tap the control key, it gives you that animation so you can see exactly where it is. I typically use that as well. It's really useful. Also from just like a. So this. I will do this. Save this thing, I give it a name, whatever. But the other thing that's really useful is another PowerToys utility that we would have talked about fairly recently because it's new, which is called. What is it called? Light. Light Switch. Yeah. I don't have it on here. So what light switch does is that thing that your phone already does, which is by default sunset to sunrise. You can have it just be in light mode during the day and then dark mode at night. Right. Smart. You can change. You can configure this to your heart's delayed. I'm not going to do this because I'm recording this during the day and I want it in dark mode because otherwise my face would be blown up by all the light. But on the computers I actually use day to day, like, this is a really nice thing to have. Of course it is, because it's a nice thing to have on a phone too. But it's nice to. That kind of augments the built in stuff. In Windows, there's a bunch of stuff related to power management and also to the display that you really should look at. Both of those are in system under settings. Display and power management are never set the way I want them to be. You should look at everything that's in here. The scaling the resolution, make sure it's on the native resolution. You should always go into advanced display. If your display supports a high refresh rate, you can configure that here. This one does not. And if you enable that, if it is available, you'll often get that dynamic refresh rate, which I always want because that will change the refresh rate based on the content, which saves battery life and makes the screen look better. It's definitely smart to do. And then in. Let me go back out the system here, power management, it's another one. It's just never. It's never going to be what Microsoft wants. But you may or may not want this to be on best performance when it's plugged in, for example, or balanced when it's not. You might want it on balanced in both cases. That's up to you. I love turning this on. This is a fairly new option. Now. You get the actual battery percentage down here in the tray. If it's off, it's just the little image of it. And then I spend time in here. Typically I've not done this here, but when I'm plugged in, I don't want this thing turning off every five minutes. Right. I'm working. I reference something over here and it's like the screen is dim. It's like, what is this? I like to bump those up. And so maybe on battery, I just do whatever I do here. Microsoft has this kind of energy recommendation score up here. When you screw around with this stuff, your score goes down. But I'm not here to save the planet. I just want this thing to work. So that's the type of thing that I do. This sounds kind of obscure, but by default Windows will go into something called Energy Saver mode. When the battery life hits 30%, which I also cannot stand. So it does a lot of things, but it will decrease the power, the performance of the system. It dims the screen. Right. It's just terrible. I do not want that on at. I don't actually see the option on this computer. Everything is happening differently on this computer. Usually there's an option here to change when Energy Saver comes on, which I'm not seeing. That's curious. I changed that to 10%, by the way. I don't see it here. I don't know why, but that's, you know, whatever. This computer's been kind of strange. So I don't know what's going on there. And then I did not see it, actually, I forgot about this. But when I looked at the display, this computer, based on how screwy this is. Yeah. It doesn't have adaptive color. So if you use, you know, Apple devices use a form of adaptive color that works great. I find that often on Windows PCs when you leave that on, it just makes the screen kind of pink. It doesn't seem to work very well. So if I see that, I almost always will turn that off. There's also things like night light, you can turn on on a schedule similar to that light switch thing we talked about. You turn it on and schedule it to be on sunset to sunrise kind of thing. It's super important to go into all that stuff. Some other system settings that I think a lot of people just don't think about and may think about later as they run into the annoy of them are all in here in multitasking, right? So by default, even if you use Edge, you might not want this. It will display three tabs from Edge as if they were apps in Alt tab. And I hate that so much. So I always turn that off even if I'm using Edge. This is kind of a fun feature, which it's not really worth necessarily turning on. But if I shake this thing, it will minimize anything else that's running on screen. Of course there is nothing else running on screen, so it minimized stuff on the other display that you. You don't get to see. But kind of a fun thing. Then there are these. Where are the snap options? Yeah, you have to expand this. So I've already turned this off, but let me turn it on so you can see it. So by default you get that little thing at the top. I hate that. Hate, hate, hate it, hate it. So I turn that thing off and now when I move Windows around, nothing happens. Thank you. Or. Well, that's not totally true. You get it over here, you get it on the sides, but it doesn't give you that thing at the top. I just never understood why that was there. They've added another one of these features called Drop Tray. And the way Drop Tray works is very similar, except when you move something around, it's not actually appearing. That's fun. But if you want to share something, you can move it to the top of the screen. I guess I can't share a shortcut. And it will bring up a tray like that, which is for sharing. I turned that off too. That's ridiculous. I don't understand this. There are also a bunch of power user features that used to be buried in these developer settings and now they're buried in somewhere else. Let's see if I can find this thing. It's like they keep changing the location in Advanced. So Advanced has a bunch of things that you might want to look at, but my favorite is End Task. Maybe this says something about Windows, I'm not sure. But what that does is adds an End Task item to the right click menu that appears for any icon in the in the taskbar. And that's super useful. Because the only other way to do that, well, not the only other way, but the more standard way to do that would be to open Task Manager and then find the task. Right. And then once you find the task, you could right click on it and say end task from here. Right. And basically killing it. Right. And that works fine. I mean it's fine, but like having it right there is actually super useful. So I always enable that one personally and then some pet peeve type things. Actually these are all in system, aren't they? If you have a laptop with a trackpad, what I found, I review 20 to 25 laptops every year and I will say actually in the right place. I'm sorry, easily 75% of them. The task pad gestures are maddeningly bad. The normal one, two finger stuff is fine, but once you get up to three fingers, it's terrible. And what this will do if, in other words, I'm trying to scroll with the trackpad and what it's doing instead is bringing up this, it's kind of a task view type interface essentially. And I just turn that off, you know. So this is kind of a way for me to tell later when I'm writing a review like, oh yeah, the trackpad. I needed to adjust this. I typically do need to adjust it. Maybe you're not as sloppy as I am, I'm not sure. But that's one that really, really bothers me. The other one that I will do in here, I think it's under. It's in here somewhere. But I'll just look this one up because actually Search and Settings is pretty good. This is like a Print screen option where if I could type by default, when you type or hit the Print screen button on your keyboard, it will launch Snipping Tool. I don't know why it says Screen Capture, but it launches Snipping Tool, which is a fine tool. It's great. They've improved a lot. But I don't like it. I use a third party tool, so I turn that off and what this does is bring it back to the way it used to be. So if I hit Print Screen, it will take the screen and put it in the clipboard so I can paste it somewhere else. If I do Windows key plus Print Screen, it will actually save that file to my screenshots folder in pictures, right? So it's the way I want it to work and not the way that Microsoft has changed it to work. So there's probably a bunch more. I mean there's so much you can do. But There is one thing you should do when you're done with all of this, right? So you've set up your local account. You've gotten rid of the Microsoft stuff you don't want. You've installed your apps on the command line. You're not using the Store. Probably you may or may not be using things like Office or Microsoft 365, OneDrive, OneNote, maybe Microsoft Edge, if you use Win11 to bloat. But you've installed a bunch of stuff. And these things all have minds of their own. And you want to make sure that the things that are auto running every time you sign in are the things you want to auto run. In my case, there's not much that I want. So there's a couple of ways to find this. If you bring up Task Manager, right click on the taskbar. Task Manager is the quickest way. This is one interface. There is a more modern interface in the Settings app. If you go to Settings apps and then startup, it's the same basic deal you want to. The easiest way, in my mind anyway, to find the ones you want to kill is to sort by status. So in this case it's showing you all the ones that are enabled at the top. If you go over here, you can just click this status header here in the column and get the same. It's the same thing, right? So these Dynabook things, I'm not sure what these are. These are related to the laptop I'm reviewing here. They're from Dynabook, obviously. I do not care about them, I do not want them, and I am now going to kill them. And so you'll see this Radeon software is running. It does have an AMD graphics card notion. I actually do not want that running at boot time either. OneDrive is fine. I am using it right here for some reason. This is a sound driver thing. No problem. Security. Obviously you want that on. The things that you will often see enabled by default include Microsoft Edge, which is incredible. I'm sure after I run Edge, it will add it the Xbox app. Sometimes I've even seen like Windows mixed reality run by default on some computers. That's one of the things I uninstall very quickly. But go into that and just get rid of those things. I made that change. So if I go and reload this interface and then resort that by status, you'll see this has changed too because these things reflect each other. This is the same information. It's the same. It's doing the same thing. It's Just another way to do it. But you might have to look at this from time to time. There are certain apps that just are always just annoying in that they always put themselves in autostart. Discord is one notion was one you saw. There's many others. But it's something to keep on top of. So if you're doing a bunch of app installs after you finish that, that's a great time to go in here and just take a look at it. But you might find yourself needing to look at this from time to time. As well. From there you're pretty much good to go. Oops, I don't want to do it that way. I will just mention again though, we talked about this, I guess at the top of this episode that you can use Winget to install apps, but you also use Winget Win app to. Sorry, Winget to. To manage apps as well. Right. And so this is something. I think I just did this at the top show but just run a when when get upgrade, you'll see what needs to be upgraded. Actually, since we're winding down, I will actually just do this. This is what I do this a lot on different computers. And what's this? What this is going to do is just run through this list and update everything it can update every once in a while. To be an app, you actually have to manually update and to do that you just do exactly this, but then you add the name of the app, which you can see here. So if this, if one of these apps for some reason wouldn't automatically update this way you can manually update it through here regardless. So you can always get that done. So I'm going to let this thing go. Hopefully you found this interesting and useful. I do find. Like I said, I've been using this kind of configuration for weeks. It's been working out great. I feel pretty good about it. So, you know, if you were kind of on the edge with Windows a little bit and weren't so happy about the way it works, this is definitely something to consider. Is just, you know, making it work the way you want it to work. So we'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at Twit tv. H O W thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. If you are not a Club Twit member, you can find out more about that program at TWiT TV. Club TWiT. Thank you. I'll see you next week.
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Leo Laporte
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