- The lengths people will go to keep using Windows is astonishing. But the fact of the matter is, every new version, including Windows 11, has some amazing new features that you don't wanna miss out on, at the cost of a bunch of new annoyances you'll have to get used to. Or you can get mad, and take it in your own hands, and you don't even have to be
an elite power user to do it. So let me show you how the average user can de-crapify Windows
11 and make it the way it should've been to begin with. - [Advert] War Thunder is an online military vehicle combat game that's free to play and a lot of fun. Try it for free down below today and get some special bonus
items for signing up. (upbeat music) - The task bar and start menu are arguably the biggest sources of
annoyance in Windows 11. And there's no shortage of fixes for that. By far the most comprehensive
available so far, is StartAllBack. It's just currently in its
release candidate phase. It's so comprehensive that it addresses almost every major issue many will have with Windows 11's new UI, full stop. Not only can it make the start menu less, whatever this is, by restoring it to a more
Windows seven like state, but it comes with its own search engine that doesn't rely on the Bingafied search, that Microsoft's been
using since Windows 10. The task bar itself can
be modified dramatically with this rather fetching segmented look that makes the center task
bar make a lot more sense while freeing up desktop real estate, otherwise used by a solid bar. I actually kind of like this look, although you can just go
for the classic style, if that's more your jam. That's not where the Windows seven and 10 styling stops though, because you can also use it
for the corner icons too. By default Windows 11
bundles the volume control with wifi and Bluetooth
in the new control center, which can make things a
little trickier to do quickly. But with StartAllBack, you can separate these icons
into their own functions, just like old times. In fact, you can even restore Explorer to the Windows seven or 10
layout complete with ribbon UI. and it can make the old right-click menus the default, instead of
the new simplified ones that hide your third-party extensions. Oh, and even weirdos who like to move the task bar around, can put it anywhere they
want albeit with the caveat that fly outs will still come
from the bottom right corner of the screen, unless you're using the Windows seven or 10 styles. There's more that StartAllBack can do too, but they're not the only game in town. Meet Start11 by Stardock. This does a lot of the
same stuff as StartAllBack, but some of the extended
functionality is different. Particularly when it comes to integration with the broader object desktop suite. Stardock's start menu replacement has a more accurate Windows 10 style as well as an original modern design, that's different from anything
Microsoft has done to date. Customization is also a bigger
focus overall for Start11, with custom textures,
actions and direct controls for transparency, blur and
color to dial it in just right. Unfortunately, both
StartAllBack and Start11 are paid software. But the good news is that each
only costs five bucks, once. As of right now, there aren't any officially supported free options for Windows 11. I mean, you can use Open-Shell, which is a free Start Menu
replacement for Windows 10, but it runs behind the regular Start Menu and only opens if you hit the Windows key, which is less than ideal. So, what can you get away with for free? First, you can left-align your Taskbar. This is something that
Microsoft has mercifully added an option for, which you can find in the Taskbar settings
under the Taskbar behaviors, simple and free. If you want classic, Right-click menus or to move your Taskbar
to the top of the screen, both of these can be done with a couple of simple registry tweaks without even having to install anything. I'll link those down below. Now if you really liked the concept of that centered Taskbar
dock from StartAllBack, then good news RoundedTB is
free and will do the same thing. You'll need to use Taskbar
Settings to choose the alignment, but once you dial it in,
it looks pretty snazzy, if you ask me. Unlike StartAllBack though, the menu itself is still in
the middle with this method. It's got baked in support for another app called TranslucentTB, that
allows you to customize the visual style of the bar, but there are performance
ramifications for doing this. So it's not recommended by
the developers right now. TaskbarX can do some of the same stuff, and it does a bit more with
behavior rather than appearance. If you want a more tweaky
tool for the task bar. But as cool as all this is, there's still something
missing for Windows 11, live tiles. If you grew to love them
since their introduction in Windows eight, then good news! Microsoft removed them
in Windows 11, wait, that's not good at this at all. No, no, the good news is an
intrepid developer decided to create a free program to put live tiles wherever the heck you want
on both Windows 10 and 11. Put them in the start menu, put them on the desktop as
widgets, it doesn't matter. Your app doesn't even
have to have a live tile. It can grab notifications and
use those to make it live. It's pretty sweet or
at least it's a start. What if you also happen to
hate the new rounded Windows? Well, that's a little trickier. Win11Disable or restore rounded corners, is a creatively named app that does exactly what it says on the tin. By modifying the desktop
window manager DLL to remove the rounded
corner bits entirely. That's a potential security
risk since it requires the renditions of the file to be modified. Plus you'll need to reapply the patch if the file ever gets an
update from Microsoft. But if you do break something, there's always system
restore and the upside is, you need only run the app and reboot to once again gaze upon the
glory of 90 degree corners, just like God intended. Speaking of intentions, I'm not sure you can give
Microsoft much benefit of the doubt on making
it way more difficult to change your default browser
than it was on Windows 10, thankfully, Mozilla
reverse engineered edge's one click switch method for Firefox. For those of you with more
Google centric browser, you'll still have to painstakingly make the changes yourself, but you'll notice that even if you get a different web browser
set as the default, no matter what method you use, Microsoft edge will still
launch from time to time when clicking on links or
accessing Windows help. Enter Edge Deflector, a simple little app that registers itself to handle a special hidden
Microsoft edge link type, passing it on to your default browser. After the first time
setting it as a default, you'll never see edge again, hopefully. And now for the bonus round, all the stuff that I think is useful, that's not Windows 11 specific. Starting with AltDrag, if you've used Linux you'll
know that this title refers to the ability to hold a keyboard key down and then click anywhere in
a window to drag it around. Something that can help with productivity and is particularly
useful for touch screens. It's a little old now, and doesn't directly support Aero snap, but it's got its own
snap feature built in, that kind of mimics it. Another app called sizer
can help with that though. It allows you to position and size Windows quickly and accurately. It's a fair bit faster
than dragging the window around manually even to use with snap. Twinkle Tray's an app
that people with notebooks and surface devices might appreciate. It lets you change the brightness of even external displays. And while it doesn't smoothly step through the brightness levels like modern laptops, what's really cool is you can
set minimum and maximum values for each monitor to normalize them. So you can control all
the displays at once whenever you change the brightness. Combine this with scheduled
brightness changes and another app called auto dark mode, and you've got a pretty great setup IMO, complete with time-based
desktop wallpaper switching. Twinkle tray hooks into the
onscreen display control via DDC/CI, which is supported
by most displays since the late 2000's and is a whole
rabbit hole all on its own. Finally, I would be remiss to talk about de-crapifying Windows, If I
didn't talk about PowerToys. These are small apps
developed by Microsoft for the purpose of extending
Windows for power users. And some, like virtual
desktops, have even graduated to flagship features today. Some of them like SVG preview seem like they should probably be baked into Windows without any further questions asked, but then there's others like FancyZones. That's an app that lets
you partition your displays and set up custom layouts for apps. It's something that I would
actually say is super useful for ultra wide users and
almost non-negotiable for super ultra wide users or users of big TV displays like Linus. Microsoft even made a
spotlight-esk search tool, proving that yes, they can do it properly. They just hide it away as a power toy. Get subscribed by the way, because yes, we are going to be reviewing Windows 11 in its current state, and based
on what you've seen today, we've definitely got some things to say. There's a ton of other stuff around, like alternative file managers, like One Commander file
copiers, like TeraCopy, process managers like
Prio or Process Lasso, that say priorities and CPU affinities, and many, many more tweaks. But for now let's turn it over to you. Are there any tweaks or
utilities that you use that we didn't cover? Let us know in the comments down below, and hey, maybe we can
make a regular thing out of this kind of video. Just like we make regular
things that have sponsors to segways like this book that (mumbles) - War Thunder's a free to play online military vehicle combat game that's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation four,
PlayStation five, X-Box one, and X-Box series SNX with cross play. There are more than 50
million players from all over the world and it features
an incredible arsenal of more than 2000 historically accurate playable tanks, aircraft and ships, from the 1930s to the 1990s. You can participate in
massive combined arms battles on over 80 major battlefields
from World War Two, to the end of the Cold War. And there's always active development, with free major updates
every couple of months, that add even more content. That includes vehicles, maps
and new gameplay features. So head to the link below and start playing war thunder for free. You'll also be able to get
a free bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. - Thanks for watching guys, this is kind of a different video. So maybe you go check out
our video on Windows 10 ameliorated for another
take on how to fix Windows. That project no longer exists. So think of it as a fun
little time capsule.
