Customizing Windows with Winaero Tweaker

I've done tons of videos lately on how to customize Windows and if you've been following the series then you already knew that but in every one of those videos I've lost track of how many people have told me that I need to try win Arrow tweaker so that's what we're doing today stay tuned [Music] so like I said in the intro we've been doing a lot of videos lately on customizing Windows we've went over programs that'll do the customization for you and I've even showed you how to manually set a lot of these settings in the registry itself but you know what in several of those videos countless people have recommended win Arrow tweaker and you know to be honest with you I've never even tried it before in fact I didn't even know it existed until you guys recommended it so if you know of any programs that I haven't covered don't hesitate to mention them in the comments below I do read the comments and I get a lot of the ideas for upcoming videos from you guys my intentions were to do a pretty full review of win Arrow tweaker but unfortunately after playing around with it this video would be a couple hours long if I actually covered the program in full there's a massive amount of settings that you can change in this program so I'm just going to be giving you a brief overview of some of the settings that jumped out to me to be noteworthy so in order to cover as much as this as I can let's get to it okay so this video is going to be in Windows 10 because to be honest with you I noticed that in this program there's a lot of appearance tweaks and they really don't work that great in Windows 11. there is a Windows 11 section and maybe I'll cover that in a different video but for this video we're just going to be looking at win Arrow tweaker from within Windows 10. just to get a better understanding of the mass amount of tweaks that this thing has available to you so the first thing that we need to do is download it so I got the website open right here and I'll go ahead and Link this in the description below but if you search Google for win Arrow tweaker you should be able to find it so just scroll down click on get win Arrow tweaker and then click again at download right here and it'll download the program and then from there we can go ahead and show it in a folder I'm going to go ahead and close Chrome now and we're going to extract this right here so we're gonna hit extract all push extract and there we go so to set this up all we got to do is double click on this application right here go ahead and click more info and run anyway hit yes to the user account control and at this point we just go through the setup like normal now you can either choose to install this as a normal program or you can set this up as a portable program and me personally if I have the opportunity to set something up as portable that's typically the way I go so that's the way I'm going to go in this one so we're going to go ahead and hit next hit accept hit next again and then this asks you where you want the portable program to actually be stored well I don't want it on the C drive so I'm going to go ahead and hit browse here we're going to click here go into users go under my name and click on desktop hit OK and then hit extract files and that's all there is to it we're going to go ahead and hit finish we can close the rest of these windows and here's the program right here so to run it all we do is open up the folder and click on the executable within the folder go ahead and agree to the license agreement hit yes to the user account control and there we go we're inside the program so I'm going to go ahead and minimize this in the background and then we can kind of go through all the different categories in this program so the first one here is just information this gives you basic system information tells you what kind of system you're currently using the processor memory your display resolution things of that nature so from there we go into recent changes and then this will actually show you different changes that you've made so if you've used this program but you can't remember which settings you changed this will show you right here so this is actually kind of neat to have this around and then going down the list we have managing bookmarks so in bookmarks if you have a tweak or something that you really like to use in here you can go ahead and set a bookmark on it just by clicking on this little star right here unfortunately I guess you can't bookmark the bookmark page but if we go down to this one right here and we click on this star it'll create a bookmark and now when we go into managing bookmarks it'll show them there and it'll show The Bookmark from within the list of bookmarks itself so it is kind of a neat feature so then going down the list this is where we're going to kind of speed through this a little bit more just to kind of make this video not as long as it could be so obviously the first one I want to take a look at is Aero light and what this one right here does is it actually enables a version of the Aero theme that you would have seen in earlier copies of Windows and this is one of the reasons I chose Windows 10 because this actually doesn't work in Windows 11 when I tried it but to enable it all you got to do is click on enable right here and it'll go ahead and take a little bit and then once it fires up then you have kind of like a Windows 7 look going on here which I don't know it looks kind of cool it also gives you some other there's some other appearance options right here that are also really useful like if we go to the alt tab you can change how the alt tab looks so if I go alt tab right here you can see an ALT tab menu that shows different applications that I currently have open and you can see the background right here see the darker background that we have well what we can do is we can actually adjust the transparency in here so if we want more transparency or if we wanted to dim the background more we can do that and you can see it kind of changes the way that the alt tab menu looks from within windows and then if we go down we can go colored tile bars too and if we enable colored tile bars it kind of cleans up the the arrow light that we actually set up before it changes the colors for different title bars for different programs that you have open and as you can see the title bars look a little bit better in my opinion so you can kind of go through the other appearance settings on your own Leisure I'm not going to go through all of them but there is a lot of really cool stuff that you can do inside of here so if we go down to our Advanced appearance settings you can change anything from the different horizontal and vertical spacing and icons to the way that the menu hides the height that's used within menus right here is you can change the scroll bars themselves you can even reset all the advanced appearance settings if you mess something up and another neat one that I liked right here is if you go down to Windows borders you can change the width and padding itself for the borders themselves so if we go ahead and do that I'm going to go ahead and change my border to let's say five and then we'll change the padding to say 10. now to be able to change these windows borders right here one of the things that you have to do is you have to make sure that you're using the aerolite theme because I got the colored title bars on which is more like a Windows 8.1 style theme instead of the Windows 10 one you have to turn arrow light on in order for them to enable so once we click that on you'll see that our borders and paddings definitely changed around the application itself right from here we're going to scroll down to the behavior settings right here and I've got quite a few settings in here that I really wanted to point out like for instance we've got ads and unwanted apps we can enable or disable different ad functions within Windows like one of the ones that I really like is this window this welcome experience right here and you know what let me explain to you why here's the thing with the welcome experience in Windows have you ever had one of those situations where you set windows up without a Microsoft account but every couple of days it's bugging you that you need to finish setting up your computer by creating a Microsoft account well that's how you stop it that setting right there is probably worth the entire program but either way that's when definitely I would change but let's go ahead and look at some of the other ones they offer okay some of the other options you have in here is like ads in file explorer which honestly that isn't even a thing but it could be a thing at some point so if it does become a thing this is how you would disable it also your start menu suggestions and even your unwanted apps being installed automatically and as you can see once I check this it asked me if I wanted to reboot some of these settings are going to require you to reboot your system and some of them aren't so keep that in mind too but if you go down here there's a lot of different things that you can change within this section right here so I'm not going to reboot now so I'm going to go ahead and click I'll do this later and then another thing that I highly recommend changing in this thing is the automatic registry backup now if you didn't know since Windows 10 1803 as it says right here Microsoft has turned off the automatic registry backup feature and you know this is a very useful feature and it doesn't really take up much resources to have it do this on a regular basis so I don't know why they disabled it but I highly recommend turning it back back on and this is a really easy way to do it another setting inside of behavior right here that really intrigued me but I have to warn you about is this one right here enable crash on control scroll lock so I just have to warn you real quick on that setting right there because when I saw it I was like oh that's neat I can call up a blue screen whenever I want so the first time I did I brick the system and you know what there was no way I could get out of it I couldn't even use a system restore point to get out of it I ended up having to restore the system from a backup copy that I had on another hard drive from an issue that I had a few weeks ago so unfortunately that right there caused me a ton of problems however once I set the system back up and I tried it again I was unable to replicate the problem that caused the system to Brick in the first place so I don't know what caused it but if you don't want a blue screen ruining your computer maybe just don't play with that setting right there I don't know that's what I would recommend okay we scroll down so some of these other ones we've got some other things here that are actually really neat too like for instance this show bsod and disable Smiley I don't remember when Microsoft actually changed the bsod screen but the old one from the Windows 7 era really showed a lot of information so if you'd like to get that one back it's easy to do you just check this right here and you can get that one back but either way I've kind of gotten used to troubleshooting a computer with the new bsod but it still might be nice to bring the old one back if you want to but you know what another really cool setting in here is this one right here where it says Windows installer in safe mode if you've ever tried to install or uninstall a program usually this is in troubleshooting cases you try to do it from within safe mode in order to have the computer in more of a clean boot setting and unfortunately the windows installer doesn't work but here's how you can get it to work so I would highly recommend enabling this I don't think there's any downside to it but who knows maybe there is and you know what there's lots of other things that you can do inside of this Behavior section right here but some of the some of them I highly recommend against like for instance don't disable Windows update I know a lot of people like to do that but it's just not worth it you need to get the latest updates for Windows they have security updates that are really important to your system so please don't disable Windows update but some of these other ones actually could come in really handy but once you get a chance to install the program go ahead and scroll through them and mention in the comments below what's your favorite settings but I'm going to scroll down to the next section which is Boot and login and honestly there was really only one setting right here that I really looked at that I liked and that was the boot option setting right here because ever since Windows 8 they've taken away your ability to select safe mode and essentially your f8 boot menu that we've had for years now this is how you can get it back right here so you can turn on the Windows 7 like boot menu or you can even always show the boot menu if you want to and I thought that was a super helpful setting right here so it's definitely one I would look at you can also kind of go through here and you can change a ton of different settings some of these settings I've shown you how to set manually before like the disable lock screen setting right here this is one that I've shown you how to do in the registry before but if you kind of go through here there's tons of different settings within the boot login you can even enable control alt delete to log in for whatever reason you might want to but this is definitely something that's going to take some time to dig into so we're going to skip the boot login and we're going to go down to desktop and taskbar which is the next section right here now one of the settings in here that I thought was really neat was this one right here where it says Action Center always open Okay this may actually be kind of an annoyance to you in some cases so if I click on the action menu here you can see the action menu opens up but if I click out it goes ahead and closes again well I might want to leave that open for some reason maybe I'm trying to copy something off or maybe I'm trying to type something that it says into another program so to make it stay open go ahead and check right here and then when you click on the action center and click out onto something else it stays open for you so I thought that was kind of neat it might be a completely stupid setting that you guys don't like but I thought it was pretty cool and then the next one here is if you scroll down if you look at right here the Cortana change search bar text this one right here is neat and in order to see this you actually have to have a search bar which I typically turn off so I'm going to turn my search bar back on real quick and as you can see from the search box it has a default text inside of there so I'm going to go here I'm going to put show The Following text and I'm going to type right here this is a search box stupid and then hit restart Explorer and this is going to go ahead and restart your Explorer and there you go you change the text from within your search box now this one right here sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and it's I still think it's a kind of a neat trick But ultimately I typically hide my search box anyway so it really doesn't matter and in fact speaking of the search box text if you go down to disable web search which this actually disables searching the internet from within Cortana so if we check that it makes you sign out in order to enable it but once you enable that it messes up your custom text within the Cortana search box and then I'm going to go ahead and scroll down here a little bit more and then right here this is another one I liked here it was old volume control and if you look at your volume control in Windows 10 or Windows 11 you have this little slider bar right here that we've gotten fairly used to but do you remember with the old volume control looked like because I'm going to go ahead and check that one real quick and then click on volume again and there we go there's the Windows 7 style volume control so if you'd like to get that one back here's a setting for it and then this I didn't even know was a thing but if we scroll down here and we look at wallpaper quality apparently Windows lowers the quality of your wallpaper from within Windows to 85 percent well if you like your wallpaper to look nice and crisp then you can drag this thing all the way up to 100 and have your wallpaper set to a more high quality wallpaper so like I said I didn't even know this was a thing I never realized that Microsoft in automatically lowered the quality of your wallpaper and you know the reason I didn't know about it is because once you change the setting to 100 percent doesn't really make a difference that it looks exactly the same to me so who knows maybe you have better eyes than me and you can see the difference but 85 percent is pretty good so let's get back to it okay so the next section we're going to go into is context menu and this one I gotta say this one's gonna take a second to get through because there is so much cool stuff inside of here that it it's going to take some time unfortunately but essentially in the context menu That's this menu right here and this is the Windows 10 version if you're in Windows 11 you have that stupid new context menu but it's fairly easy to change back to this one but what you can do here is you can go through and there's tons of different programs and different tweaks that you can make to the context menu let me show you a couple like for instance let's go down to command prompt right here from the command prompt if we click add command prompt to the context menu then we're going to go ahead and right click and you can see open command window here but you know what it's even better than that let me show you here so if we open up a file explorer go into C go into Windows go into users and let's say I want to open one here I can right click hit open command window here and there we go from C users I think this is really useful right here but it doesn't just stop there if you scroll down you can actually open command prompt as administrator too so same thing as before if we right click here you can see command prompt administrator and then what it does is it actually opens one with administrator rights in the folder that you just were in so that is hugely helpful and as you can see as we scroll through here essentially all we're doing is just adding more and more stuff to the context menu like if we want control panel that's add control panel and there you go there's control panel it even allows you to list it in categories large icons or all tasks so it gives you all kinds of different ways to access the control panel and from in Windows 10 that's pretty handy since Microsoft's trying to hide it and then even better we got create a system restore point so if we add that then when we right click on the context menu we can create a restore point this would come in handy if you're doing lots of modifications like we've been doing lately but if we keep going through here we can do default apps we can add encryption and then continuing to go through here we can kill kill non-responsive tasks if we add that one there and then we right click There You Go Kill not responding tasks unfortunately they're all responding at the moment but that could come in handy in some cases but we can go to group policy editor we can open with for a batch file we can add personalization we can even say Powershell as administrator so if we were to check that not only would we have our Command Prompt but we'd also have Powershell as well but as you scroll through here you can see that there are tons and tons of different settings we've got reset permissions right here adding a reset permissions to the context menu could be huge because then if you're in a folder somewhere like let's go back into their C drive right click on users we can go over to here and click on reset permissions and we can reset permissions for the folder only or the folder and subfolders so this is a hugely helpful setting in here and the more you go through here we can even restart Explorer so if we check that one and we right click and we click on restart Explorer then there you go we can restart Explorer that's another helpful one so you don't have to open your task manager every time you want to restart it but there is so much stuff in here that you're just gonna have to go through it we can even have the shutdown menu from within the context menu we can even do it shut down instantly without a warning but we're not going to do that now otherwise it's going to mess up my screen recording but you know what this one here is best just to go through because like as you can see there are tons and tons of different things that you can add from within the context menu and everybody's preferences on this topic are going to be completely different so the next one we're going to go into is settings and control panel and this one here has a couple of really cool settings like for instance we can add personalization we can add the classic personalization settings from previous versions of Windows and also this is one that was a really hard habit for me to break for a long time but right here is Windows update and if you come into control panel which I'm going to right click here and go to our control panel link that we just did go into CAD categories you used to be able to go into systems and security and there used to be a Windows update setting in here unfortunately it took me a while to break that habit of wanting to go to Windows update through the control panel but now you can go here you can click here and now when we go back into control panel go back into categories go into systems and security and there's Windows update now of course it jumps into the windows setting version of Windows update but that's okay at least it's an easy way to get to it so the next one I'm going to go into is file explorer and this is another one that has tons of different settings and I'm not going to be able to look at them all but we're going to look at a couple of them real quick for instance if you go down here you can see customize quick access items and this one right here is definitely just something for looks but if you come down here and open up file explorer you can see your quick access right here with the little star so I'm going to go ahead and close this and we're going to change this we're going to say stuff I like and then we're going to browse for a new icon and you know what that's used let's use the ram chip and we'll hit okay go ahead and hit apply changes and it's going to want to restart Explorer and then once Explorer is restarted we can go ahead and open our file explorer again and as you can see now it says stuff I like with a little Ram chip on it so yes this is a stupid and useless setting but I think it comes in kind of Handy and even better is if we come in here we can customize this PC folders too and we can customize not only the location but also the different settings from within are different folders for customizing the this PC section that's essentially all of these right here because if you clip on this PC these are all your pictures your music your downloads your documents things of that nature and then another one that I thought was really neat is right here this default drag and drop option typically there is a system default for instance if you are moving a file or if you're dragging a file and essentially all that is is if you had a file in one folder and you grab it and drag it over to another folder it typically will move the item if it's on the same hard drive but if it's on a different hard drive then it will copy it but here you can change that to you want it to move all the time or you want it just to copy all the time or you can even have it set to just create the shortcut to the original file now the create shortcut one would drive me insane but at least it's an option and then another thing is we can come down here we can go to file explorer starting folder now typically it opens to home or quick access so if you open File Explorer it opens up to the home page like this it's or it's called stuff I like now because we changed it but if we change that we can actually go to this PC if we want and now if we open up file explorer it goes to this PC instead but even better and this is a setting that I didn't realize was possible but you can also have it just go straight to downloads so then if you open this it goes right to your downloads folder so that's definitely a useful setting I typically keep mine on this PC but this is one that you can also so change from within file explorer the only problem is you only have the choice of this PC or home you don't have the choice to downloads so if you want to use downloads you have to do it through this program or through the registry directly and then another thing is hide hard drives do you ever have a hard drive that you just don't want people to have access to well you could hide it if you want so we're going to go ahead and click on C right here hit restart Explorer and now when we open up our file explorer go into this PC we have no hard drive you know this might come in really handy if you have a computer that you really don't want people messing around with the hard drives just hide the drive but for us we're going to definitely get our C drive back so let's go ahead and do that real quick all right so as we scroll down here let's go into the networking section and from networking there's tons of different networking things that you can do from within here you can change the way the administrative shares function you can change the way the computer's firewall works or you can do stuff like change the RDP Port which might be a good idea if you're using remote desktop and you know another really cool setting here and it's a setting that I've had to do manually in the past so it's really nice to know that there's a way to do this without doing it manually is right here it's network drives over UAC and you may not realize how important this is but there are certain circumstances where you really want elevated accounts to be able to access your map network drives so the next category is different user account controls so one thing is like for instance the built-in administrator if you want you can enable the administrator account from here you can even disable UAC which probably isn't a great idea but I do lower the UAC settings on my test systems here just to make it better because if you open up the UAC settings typically this is the default I drop it down one so it doesn't block the screen when I have to hit yes to a user account control prompt and the reason I do that is because if I don't then my screen capture only captures a black screen you can't actually really see the pop-up so that's the reason why I do it but if you'd like to disable it you can do that right here or if you want you can even enable UAC for the built-in administrator account which to be honest with you to me is kind of a contradiction because if you're already the administrator why would you need administrator permission I don't know okay so in the next section we've got Windows Defender and honestly some of these settings I don't recommend changing like for instance I don't recommend disabling Windows Defender but if you'd really like to you can do it from within here you can even disable the Windows security tray icon if you want to but remember you really need to have an antivirus so if you're not using Windows Defender then go ahead and disable it if you want but Windows does automatically disable Windows Defender when you install another antivirus so these ones right here honestly there's not a whole lot of changes I would do in this section now the next one is right here where it says Windows apps and there's a lot of different things in here that would come in really handy like for instance the auto update store apps this right here disallows windows from automatically updating apps that were downloaded from the App Store and you know I don't install any apps from the App Store so this is definitely one I'd like to disable and also you can even disable Cortana from within here as well as many other different settings like disabling Windows ink you can even change the edge download folder from within here or you can stop Edge from pre-launching Windows and you know if you don't use Edge this one right here actually would be a really really good one to set because who wants Edge running in the background if you don't use Edge as a browser right but from there we're going to go ahead and move on down here to privacy and in privacy you got a couple of settings here like disable password reveal button you can also disable Telemetry which honestly I don't really know exactly what this setting does I'm assuming this just disables the Telemetry service but I might be wrong on that one so if you want to play around with it go ahead and play around with it and then let me know in the comments and then moving on if we go down to shortcuts this is a really cool section in fact this is probably one of my favorite sections but this allows you to create shortcuts for a numerous amount of different things like for instance if we want a classic shutdown shortcut we can go ahead and set it here click create shortcut and there we go it creates a shortcut on your desktop for your shutdown or you can even come down here and if you'd like you can disable the text that says Dash shortcut or you can even disable the arrows that are on shortcuts you can either go to the classic Arrow or no Arrow so as you can see right here we have a little arrow right here for our shutdown if we click restart Explorer there we go there's no more arrow and you know what it's not just shutdown either because there's lots of different things you can do here if you go into this shutdown right here you can even have restart so if we create a shortcut there's a shortcut for restart so there's lots of different things you can do in here you can even have a shortcut just for safe mode specifically so right there I'm going to go ahead and start a safe mode shortcut we can have safe mode or normal mode and now moving on here if we go down into tools there's a couple of really cool things you can do in here too like for instance you can change your OEM information if you want if you have a Dell or an HP or something like that it's going to be all Dills or hp's information in here you can either reset it or you can change it to whatever you want but other than that there's tons of different Tools in here that you can go through and play with anything down from system restore to local Group Policy editor and then from there we're going to scroll down to the next section which is getting Classic Apps and this gives you several really cool options like for instance activating Windows photo viewer this is the old style Windows photo viewer or you can even come down you can get the classic games for Windows 7. so if you like the old Solitaire better than the new one this is the way to do it right here you can get sticky notes you can even get desktop gadgets if you want to from the Windows Vista days so as you can see this program is absolutely huge in regards to the amount of things you can change at least there are several things like I mentioned before that I highly recommend against changing namely some of them are the security features and absolutely Windows update don't disable Windows update it's not worth it just because you have the ability to do something doesn't mean you should but you know what make sure you mention in the comments below what settings are your favorite from this program personally my favorite is the ability to add utilities to the windows context menu and you know with that said I think one of the coolest features of this program is the ability to research how each setting can be changed manually I really like the amount of time that they have taken into writing articles showing exactly what each setting does this truly is going up and above what you see on most customization programs like like this one in fact I can't recall a single time I've ever seen this done before but you know one of the downsides to this program is that unlike other programs I've covered recently this one is not open source now you know what even though it is freeware it would be nice to be able to dig through the code and see how it works but with all that said if you like customizing windows then don't forget to check out this playlist here where I have all the videos from this series and a few videos that I've done in the past on this subject you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 88,678

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Id: EY6YGeJj6DQ

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022