Windows Doesn’t Suck! Microsoft Just Wants You To Think So…

Windows has a lot of problems it's been stuck in that good bad good bad cycle basically since its Inception and at this point so little fundamentally changes that both of my grandmas know what the start button does but what's this and what are these how did I do that buckle up dear viewer because we are about to get our hands dirty with some lesser known features of Windows and once you've joined us you will become more powerful than I can possibly imagine powerful like our sponsor War Thunder War Thunder is the free to play online vehicle combat game the one with over 2 000 different Vehicles surely there's something for everyone to Pilot check out the link below to learn more and get some extra items after signing up foreign [Music] our first trick is on your Windows PC right now and has been for a long while Group Policy editor sounds very boring but it allows you to tweak some very interesting settings under the hood like have you ever wanted to hide certain settings so you're less tech savvy relatives Don't Mess them up or how about turning off some of windows's phone home features they're a seriously massive number of dials and knobs that you can adjust in here to customize Windows and if you've ever used a lockdown library or work PC I assure you that it's at least partially thanks to group policies the issue though is that by default it doesn't come with home editions of Windows a shining example of an artificial limitation and it is exactly the sort of thing that Microsoft has been criticized for in the past not to worry though because you can force it by opening a command prompt as administrator and using these commands it'll take about 30 seconds and once it's done even home users can enjoy Fuller control over their PC I mean yes you you could make these adjustments yourself if you like to role play as a registry hacker man but this way is far easier and in my opinion more of a middle finger to Microsoft anyway for a two-handed bird if that method doesn't work for you you can grab policy Plus instead it's not built into windows it's not for Microsoft but it's open source and offers the same functionality with a similar interface speaking of have you ever had an app that runs on Startup but has to use admin privileges so it asks you every single time you boot your PC enter task scheduler you can create a basic task that starts up the app when you log in then check this box before clicking finish and you see that run with highest privileges button check that you should go to the settings tab and make sure to uncheck this box to make sure it doesn't stop running after the default of three days and that's it done you'll never see it again and there are all kinds of knobs and dials in here to make stuff run automatically exactly the way that you want like you can make things happen or not when you're on battery or you can make it wait for when there's a network connection if you've got multiple things you want to run with the same rules just add more actions want to pop up an alert whenever Windows detects a disk error you got it just add a new trigger this is seriously underrated stuff I used to use it to crank up my speaker volume then play music as an alarm for school when my clock was broken there are also some app Suites that you can download to further enhance your Windows Experience if you've heard of those ones before you might think that the section is going to be all about power toys you'd be wrong but those are super cool and we are going to talk about those first power toys are Microsoft's own in-house extensions to Windows and they've been around in some form or another since the Windows 95 days if you were around back then and remember using tweak UI a tool to change the responsiveness of the start menu that was a power toy some of the power toys released over time have actually made their way into mainstream Windows as well virtual desktops window previews in the alt tab menu and virtual CD-ROM drives are just some of them so in that sense power toys can be seen as kind of a playground for Microsoft Engineers to trial future features today's power toys have a wide variety of functions with my favorites being fancy zones power toys run and keyboard manager fancy zones is basically essential for anyone with a large or Ultra wide or otherwise non-traditional desktop layout because it makes it super easy to quickly snap Windows to specific portions of your screen it effectively replaces the standard window manager and is just a step away from the tiling window managers that you'd find in the Linux world complete with dedicated keyboard controls for focusing windows and the ability to control the sizes and positions of your windows there's nothing quite like it on any other operating system power toys run is one of those things you would expect to be built into windows but is not so thank goodness it exists as a power toy it's basically Apple's Spotlight search and it is thankfully not the same as the start menu search often the results will be substantially more accurate and useful like Spotlight you can make it do calculations unit conversions and much more and it's super quick to get at with the default key combo being alt space personally I change it to Windows space since that's what you'd use for it on a Mac and ALT space is already used in Windows for Window Control keyboard manager this one's super cool if you've ever wanted to remap a key or create macros but you don't want to use memory hungry third-party software this is for you you can map any key to any other key including combinations and what's even cooler is that you can map keyboard shortcuts on a per app basis it's not powerful enough to be able to record and play back long sequences of keystrokes but it's enough to handle a lot of common tasks enough about power toys though I promise to go deeper and I shall look how deep I'm going Microsoft has another group of utilities that are technically under their umbrella as well called CIS internals which they acquired back in two thousand 6 when it was called wind Turtles and run by Mark racinovich they're a lot like power toys but with more focused use cases often with the goal of getting under the operating system's Hood there's a massive number of these that are being updated to this day but the most broadly useful in my opinion are Auto runs process Explorer and TCP view honorable mention goes to Reg Jump by the way because it is such a useful tool to quickly open the registry Editor to a specific key just run it as administrator and paste in the path you know navigating through the little tree now we've talked about Auto runs before and for good reason Auto runs gives you the ability to see virtually every startup item service and dll that is registered for use inside of windows in the default view it hides Windows standard entries but still is probably going to be chock full of stuff that you probably won't recognize the good news is that a lot of this is normal and entirely benign even some of the things highlighted in red or completely empty it's still a super useful tool cool though especially for advanced users when they're trying to diagnose malware infections or misbehaving drivers the double-edged sword here is that its power makes it potentially dangerous for inexperienced users who don't know what they're looking for the good news is if you're inexperienced you can Simply Save the state of the system and send it over so a more experienced dies can open it up on another computer to analyze and modify via the analyze offline system function it is indispensable for troubleshooting process Explorer is like task manager but on roids in fact you can even replace task manager with it you can see the performance history of a given process see all the connections it has open see what the environment it was launched with was and so much more if you're curious what files a program has open you can show the lower Pane and click the handles tab to see and if you want to find out which process has a file open you can use the find handle or dll function to get a complete listing clicking on the results brings you directly to that process and if you're not sure what process a window is attached to use the crosshairs icon bam there is so much utility in here including some that made it into the official task manager eventually like the search online function then there's TCP view this looks a lot like process Explorer but instead shows you all the network connections that your computer is currently maintaining grouped by the process that's using them this can be a little overwhelming to look at while it's constantly changing around so you can pause it to Leaf through it on your own time the remote address is the server that the connection is made to and you can look it up right in TCP view via the who is function to see where it is not everything can be id'd this way though and that doesn't indicate a security problem in itself so like most of these tools it's all about giving you the ability to peek under the hood which can be a godsend when it comes to troubleshooting who might be listening back to some included features though you might be aware that Windows 11 added the ability to run Android apps if you watched our video testing it out but did you you know that you can also run full-blown Linux right on top of Windows Windows subsystem for Linux is available on both Windows 10 and windows 11 and does exactly what it says on the tin open a terminal as administrator type WSL space dash dash install and following a reboot you're ready to rock if you're not feeling the default Ubuntu you can get a list of available Alternatives using this command then install your choice with this one you're not limited to just one either so have fun experimenting you can even install and run desktop apps within them and they will appear right on your desktop WSL isn't just for experimentation though did you know that file explorer can show Linux folders now too you can even pass through Linux formatted drives and access them via your WSL distro this is super useful not only for dual booters but also for system admins who might run Windows desktops but manage Linux servers I mean sure you could spin up a Linux install specifically for Disaster Recovery or you could just use WSL one thing WSL can't give you that's becoming common in Linux though is a drop down terminal like wake or Yak Quake but what if I told you you can get the same thing in Windows even without WSL as of 2021 officially called Quake mode this will give you exactly what you're after with the key combo of your choice just open a terminal window go to settings then actions click add new then choose show hide quick window you will need to launch Windows terminal first for this to work but thankfully we've given you the tools to show you how to automatically launch it at startup right then just set it to hide in the notification area once it's minimized now you've got a terminal available to you whenever you need one and if you want more out of your terminal this one isn't built into windows but it is recommended by the official documentation you can get fancy extended functionality and custom prompts in the terminal if you use oh my Posh it's available on the Microsoft store for free and it looks a lot like oh my sh on Linux and Mac OS hence the name if all you want is to customize the theme of your terminal though you won't need anything like that and you can even go as far as to set a background image in the profile settings seriously Anthony's a Linux user and still feels that this is one of the slickest terminal interfaces out there while still remaining easy to use there's even a package manager now via winget which lets you install even desktop software directly from a terminal which means you can automate it and automate updating it seriously basically everything we searched for that has a freely available Windows version on or off the Microsoft store is in there and if it's not you can probably find it in chocolatey which you can also install through winget in that wild not only does Windows have a good terminal now it also has SSH support for remote access both as a client and as a server the client is built in and you just use it like any other SSH client it even supports port forwarding and file transfers the cherry on top is that if you're into using using keys for SSH which you should be some password managers like one password offer the ability to use what's known as an SSH agent so that your keys are available without needing to copy them to your PC when you try to connect you'll get a prompt to unlock your password manager and you're Off to the Races these the server function meanwhile needs to be installed through the optional features just click view features then search for SSH and openssh server is right there install it and you're ready to go by going to this folder and editing the sshd underscore config file you can set up private keys for better security port forwarding and more just like you would on Linux there's all kinds of little things sprinkled throughout Windows too like did you know that there are keyboard shortcuts for stuff like this that's not even close to all of them one of them does what you probably already know about if you've ever right clicked the start menu which is in itself a really useful feature that was first introduced in Windows 8 and there's also that God mode folder that makes the rounds from time to time although I don't personally think it's that useful it's basically all the options in control panel laid out in a list but hey if it's useful for you just create a folder and name it like this what I feel is more useful this has saved me lots of times are the application menu and the shutdown command the application menu is what you get if you click an apps icon in its title bar what's important here is that move command in the likely case that something weird happens and a window ends up way outside of the visible screen area or like on another monitor you can't get to and there's no way to interact with it just select it on the taskbar then use the keyboard shortcut to activate the menu alt space then hit M press an arrow key any one of them then move your mouse that window is now attached to your cursor click to set it down and breathe a sigh of relief maybe it cozy up with a retro polar fleece from ltdstore.com hey you've earned it then there's the shutdown command this one is very useful if you've ever found yourself with no video output whatsoever and the hotkey to reset the video driver isn't working but then you hit caps lock or num lock and your keyboard LEDs still function so the thing must be on you can still safely shut down and reboot hold the Windows key and hit R then type this command which is basically telling the PC to restart with no delay once you hit enter assuming you typed it right it should do exactly that if not or if you think you made a typo just hit escape and repeat the process you can do more with the shutdown command too like you can create a shortcut to reboot into your UEFI settings with this command and this command will reboot into advanced startup settings which is super useful if you need to do that without a display or without having access to windows's normal UI like say for example if you're rebooting a headless machine in another room or if there's a driver that's making it so that all of a sudden you can't see anything as soon as all of your drivers load and you have no way to get into safe mode and you can shut down other computers using a command like this where the name or IP goes right here there's a whole world of commands like shutdown that you might not know about it's worth checking out the learn article on Microsoft's website to see more if you're curious curious like you're curious about this message from 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playing War Thunder for free with some premium vehicles and boosts if you guys enjoyed this video go check out our previous video on useful Windows software to make Windows 11 feel a little more usable it's gotten better on its own since then but that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't tweak it to suit your needs

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,663,205

Keywords: windows, pc, operating system, tweaks, features, programs, control, customization, productivity, work, improve, streamline, apps, tools, software, winternals, powertoys, sysinternals, microsoft, terminal, ssh, client, server, powershell, wsl, linux, windows subsystem for linux, ubuntu, recovery, tech tips

Id: 4GASGO0go5I

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/_-_-_-_____-_-_-_]

Let me just mention again that winget is amazing. It comes with Win 11 and the newer 10 builds (if not, then install it yourself), but it makes everything SO much easier and quicker. A few examples:

- winget search firefox (kinda self-explanatory?)- winget install firefox (installs firefox)- winget uninstall firefox (well, it uninstalls Firefox)

But what if:

- winget uninstall cortana (yup, that'll work just fine. Cortana is gone)

Wait a minute, what other stuff can I uninstall using winget? Well, just:

- winget list

Voila! You see that list? If you don't want it installed, then just:

- winget uninstall "package name"

If you want to install something, like say... Steam?

- winget install valve.steam

"But I don't know all the package names!!", well then just search for the app you want, and then check the package name. Like:

- winget search steam- <Steam - Valve.Steam>- winget install valve.steam

Also, you can update basically every single thingamajig on your computer via winget, even though you didn't install it with winget in the first place. Installed VLC via its website, and wanna check if there's an update? Casually just:

- winget upgrade --all

It'll check the repos of any app updates that you have installed on your computer. Even if you haven't used winget before, go ahead and just write "winget upgrade --all". Exactly.

Linux users: "b-b-b-b-but this is just like how linux works!" Yes, and as a person who uses and loves linux, this is amazing!

[u/Im_Axion]

For those that don't know, If you really like Powertoys Run you can actually change the hotkey to win+S and it takes precedence over the default search. It only pops up Run and you can use that as your exclusive search if you want without needing to use a different hotkey combination.

[u/ShinyMango]

He briefly mentioned the package managers winget and chocolatey. I would also recommend getting scoop. It works great out of the box and keeps installs clean as they are put in a scoop folder in your user folder rather than having folders created all over the place in your drive (creating their own folders in C:/ or Program Files and Program Files x86).

Of course you could probably accomplish the same with the other ones with extra flags and tinkering plus they have more packages but scoop is still nice to have.

[u/nick_nier47]

Does anyone know what oh my posh theme Anthony is using for Powershell here? It looks clean, but I can't find it among the default themes.

[u/Ggameplayer98]

I really liked the video but at the same time knew that either I was gonna be too lazy or too dumb to properly set up most of the things mentioned in the video

[u/leonderbaertige_II]

Linus complaining about the Linux Terminal not being user friendly.

Also Linus recommending people to use the Windows Command Line to access gpedit.