How to Make Windows 11 Into a Desktop OS - 2024 Edition

[Music] when you're first installing Windows 11 if you want to use an offline account like I do all you have to do is just go through the first little bit name your device this can be anything you like and once you get here you're going to notice it wants you to sign in and there's no options for offline account all you need to do is click on sign in and then for your username just put user and then for your password put User it's going to say oh no something went wrong hit next and now you can start an offline account whatever name you like here and you'll put in your password and now we've got an offline account now we're in the OS I'm just going to do a few simple things that'll make this a lot better first thing I do is I manually uninstall a lot of the junk that's right here on the start uh you can keep soliter if you want I mean that's not really Bing bothering anybody turned into a TV Scottish or Irish I don't know Spotify why is this on my system so you just right click and uninstall I used to run a script that uninstalled a lot of this stuff but sometimes that did too much and removed a lot of the Windows store functionality or Microsoft Store functionality so now I just painstakingly uh unpin or uninstall these things I don't need office either so I'm going to uninstall that Outlook this is all up to you I don't need it uninstall it check all apps and just make sure there's no garbage here so that's literally the first thing I do all right so if you're one of those who has that activate Windows logo in the bottom of the screen we're going to take care of that right now with an OEM key from Hook Keys hook Keys is who I've been using for a very long time to get my windows keys and I'll tell you why and then I'm going to tell you how to use Windows 10 to unlock Windows 11 we can use Windows 10 Pro keys to unlock Windows 11 or we get the free upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 be sure if it's like a year from now to Google and make sure that Microsoft still accepts Windows 10 keys but as of now we can use these windows 10 keys and I'm going to show you but first I want to tell you why I use OEM Keys now Microsoft sells these keys for an exorbitant amount and they provide the tech support when you pay like a couple hundred bucks yeah for a fraction of that price you can get this and we can make it even cheaper so go ahead and and sign in or or join and then you can join their email uh list to get even more bonuses and and discounts but once you've signed up right here let me just show you what you do come over here and buy one of these and use a coupon code ts25 to get 25% off so go ahead and click on buy Now put on my coupon code ts25 zoom in so you can see it click apply and then check that out now $17.19 leave them a little message why don't you so once you're done it's going to redirect you over to your user Center if it does not should come up here and click on your your name and then click on user Center and then down here you'll see the different keys that you've purchased so just give it a second while it's processing if it takes a little while just refresh your page with Windows 11 Pro if you just want to buy that directly it comes down to $22.80 so there you go also got three different flavors of office 2021 2019 and 2016 so if you need to unlock those at a way lower price than retail by all means do so right let's go back and take a look there we go we can go ahead and click on view Keys and codes here to get your code then you click on get the key then you'll see your serial number right here so you can just copy that grab that copy it hit start type activate click on activate ation settings click on change your key and then you can just paste it in there hit next and you will be activated you'd have to buy that OEM key like many many many times to equal the price of one retail key so I'm totally fine with doing my own tech support and I'm fine with that OEM key being locked to the [Music] hardware now the next thing I want to talk about is something that you can really use that key for and that is if you have Windows 11 home or Windows 10 home and you want to upgrade to Pro you can do that very easily in the command line so let's go ahead all right so yeah it says we can upgrade right here click on learn to upgrade to Windows 11 it's going to take us to the Microsoft store if we want to upgrade and be like oh yeah you can definitely upgrade to Windows 11 or 10 Pro for only $199 but we just got a key for Windows 10 Pro so check this out hit start type Powershell right there it is just right click on that and run as administrator yes let's do it let's tell you what to type in here we're going to type in type in slui.exe put a space SL okay press enter now we need to change our product key and enter in that Windows 10 Pro product key which will activate Windows 11 Pro so do change pk. exe space- product key capitalize like this there we go put a space and now we're going to put the product key that we just got from Hook keys right here all right once we have that put in just press enter all right cool it's doing something it's thinking preparing for the upgrade look at that and we're good to go once this reboots it's going to come back and it's going to be Windows 11 Pro not home and it's going to be activated and one of the main reasons that I wanted to use Windows 11 Pro is because I'm running this on a VM as you can see and the VM with Windows 11 does not support remote desktop so I cannot connect to this VM via remote desktop I have to do it right here inside a VNC client updates are underway this is going to be good adding features look at that beautiful stuff hey look at that success you're all done your PC is ready to go yes there we go we're active and now we can use remote desktop remote desktop settings there we go click on that turn it on confirm and now look at this we're opening it up there we go now I have a full desktop using a remote desktop everything's activated it's beautiful no activation links in the corner everything's unlocked and now we can get to working with Windows 11 Pro or Windows 10 Pro this will work on both of those if you want to look at some like other features of the operating system you can come over here and hit control I and just go through this on your own now I'm going to go down to gaming Xbox game bar and just turn this off this is up to you if you want it you can keep it I like to turn off the notifications for a lot of things I don't really need all these notifications you just click on system and go through different things now it usually goes to balanc for desktop that doesn't make any sense I'm going to click on best performance all right so that's all we need to do here now this start menu is I don't know I don't like it you can pin stuff here I don't know it's just not for me so we're going to change that the first thing I'm going to do is just mess with some taskbar settings I don't use the task view I don't use chat I don't use the search box either so I hide that and then I come down here and click on taskbar behavior and then I put it over in the left some people like it in the center and I'll explain to you why I like it on the left you know Microsoft has the start button and that's not something you'd see on aunu or on the Mac OS there's no start button and that you know on on those systems as you add new programs the middle bar gets bigger and bigger the problem is this is always centered so the more things you open the more this stuff moves around so the start button is going to continually be moving around it's not going to be in a set spot when it's over in the left I know where it is it's always right there in that left corner and that's why I like it to be left aligned because Microsoft Windows is not like the other operating systems because it has that start button so let's put it over on the left so that the start button is not wandering all over the screen the first thing I can do to make Windows a lot better is download open shell this is going to replace the start menu and this is finally available over here on GitHub let's click on view on GitHub download the latest version of open shell there we go now I'm going to install that and I'm going to change a couple of these options and this is very important so pay attention especially if you're using the Dark theme you're going to want to do this so click to install hit next and just go through this yes yes now right here um I don't want the classic Explorer I just want open shell and the update so I'm going to click here and this entire feature will be unavailable if you do the classic Explorer it will change uh the look and feel of your Explorer and if you're wondering what what is Explorer it's not Internet Explorer this is considered Explorer right here so we don't want to change that hit next here and I'm going to go ahead and install that just give it a second it'll do some stiff now what did that do well if I click on the start button now it'll say like oh do you want to change your start button I'll leave it alone for now but I'm going to pick the Windows 7 style and that's all I'm going to change for now you can go through here and just see all the different customization options we have but now we have a start menu like this and like I said you can change the way this looks you can change a lot of the things and we can add all kinds of stuff here I'm going to uninstall some more of these things here get rid of that sometimes when you uninstall things that way the links still stay there so you have to just remove from list people uninstall and remove from list you know like you can just do this on your own and we can add things to the list later on but this is really handy because now we can just hover over control panel and come over here and get our Legacy settings for the network and all that you can come over here and get all your legacy controls panel stuff very easily say I want to mess with the mouse oh yes this is what I want it feels like I'm on Windows 7 again I can come over and do this because it's driving me nuts right now enhanced pointer Precision turn that off oh I Can Feel Again my mouse can move it was like I've been you noticed I've been missing things when I'm trying to click that's because I cannot handle that uh pointer Precision makes me feel like I'm on a Mac or something next thing I want to talk about is when you click over here it feels like we're on a mobile operating system when you click on the network or the audio thing it brings up this entire nonsense with the airplane mode and everything I'm on a desktop I'm not on a laptop and I'm most certainly not on a mobile device so Windows I'm sorry you're having an identity crisis I'm sorry you want to be some kind of bubbly mobile OS but this is a desktop and I'm I've got serious to do one thing that's nice about the older versions of Windows 11 and this also was true on Windows 10 you can click and drag files and drag them up one folder and just drag them up there on the address bar and they we go up but let's show you let's update this thing cuz you do want to be on the latest version mostly for security and stuff all right so we're going to update this thing and then come back and I'll show you that was a long update took a while all right now we're back in check this out this looks different up here on top now and look what happens when I try to move things they won't let us we can no longer do that so with that functionality gone and this being a a mess I need to do something about this plus I really don't like these curved edges I like uh rectangular edges because we're on a rectangular screen and honestly I don't actually care about this so let's just get rid of all that with one simple thing this is the last time I'm going to be using EDG as well so let's go ahead and get Explorer Patcher explor Patcher is really how the desktop version of Windows 11 should be anyway when you get to explor Patcher just look over here releases click on that for the latest and scroll down you'll see the EP setup.exe click on that and we're just going to click on that to run it now you'll notice your Windows Explorer on the bottom here is gone now and it's going to come back and it's going to look weird now if you remember back in today this is how the functionality used to be whenever you would open stuff it would open up down here and then we would have you know like all the windows You' be able to see what they are I kind of like this but some people think it looks cluttered so there's a couple different things we can do now if we right click right here and go to properties it brings up the properties for this Explorer Patcher so I'm just going to minimize all this got my maroin background over there uh now we can set up our taskar style to be Windows 10 or Windows 11 Windows 11 gives us far fewer options so I'm going to leave it on Windows 10 and just change a few things now you can go through this on your own if you like doesn't matter what you change whatever you know just change it right here but you know I'm leaving all the search and everything off start button style I like the smaller Windows 10 start better than the windows 11 start but it's up to you plus the Windows 10 has a little bit of an angle it's that's who cares now this is the combining all the different things on the task bar you can set it to combine when the task bar is full or always combine so I'm just going to always combine mine to keep it nice and clean but you can change that however you like system tray over here check out what already happened just from installing this oh now everything is separate again like it should be on a desktop computer you know if you want everything you click on the control contr Center this all used to bring up the control center which was ridiculous so that is much better and as you can see here we have all this down here these settings uh you can change it to Windows 8 fly out if you wanted to there's all these different styles but I'm going to leave it on Windows 10 because I found that to be pretty functional but you can also have it go straight to the Network and Sharing Center so check this out put put it on the Network and Sharing Center click on this and then it brought us over here so you can have it set up to do just about anything you like but I'm going to keep it on the Windows 10 fly out this is really functional to me and if I want to get to my network sharing Center since I installed the open shell could just go over to control panel if you find out you're using this a lot just click and drag it over here and drop it you're like you know what I'm using that all the time so you can put it right there but for a lot of people just having it here will be just fine okay let's keep on going here with the file explorer I want to register this as a shell extension it'll allow me to do way more I'm also going to disable the windows 11 context menu because that was nonsense here's before you right click and you've got nothing you want more you got to show more options and oh there it is and it's a totally different style it's not coherent it's goofy so if I just check this well I got to restart file explorer let's do that real quick there we go it restarted now we right click and it takes us back to the the functional original was so much better the rest of this you can go through kind of on your own but since we're on file explorer I want to set the control interface from Windows 11 to Windows 10 and there's a reason for that now now that I've set it to Windows 10 open it back up this line is because it's not locked oh we can fix that so now that we're on Windows 10 look I can drag and drop things again so it's so much better I can drag it to a folder up now if you want to get rid of this you're just going to need to finish setting everything up and then lock your taskbar you can also try the Windows 7 command bar remember this so this one's pretty nice as well you can pick the one you like the most and also with the Windows 7 one we can drag and move things just like that as well as well so pick the one you like I'm going to keep the Windows 10 one myself there's also the windows 11 command bar that's the classic address bar that's the previous version so you have all these different options if you like the windows 11 you can keep it and just revert back to the original Windows 11 so there we go I got my Windows 10 there we go and then we right click here and lock the toolbars once we're finished and there goes that line so that's all we need close that up all right moving on down to the start menu I disabled the recommended Stu and you can change your style here I don't really care about this I like to leave it on 11 because I'm using the open shell but up here at the Top If you really need to get back to the old one you can do it that way or if you just shift click on the start it'll bring you back to the 11 menu why is this here see every time you do an update it starts reinstalling CRA I already uninstalled you thanks windows for helping me to death I didn't and see look at reinstalled office unbelievable all right we'll keep on going now windows switcher you can change the alt tab style you can pick whichever one you like other I get rid of these office hot keys but if you're using office then you should have them and I get rid of the feedback Hub hotkey and I also disable the rounded Corners yes now when we open things they're going to have squared off corners and for for me it just looks a lot better it looks a lot cleaner and feels more like a desktop operating system but that's just subjective and then when it comes to updates these are just updates for the regular program I would not recommend getting the pre-release stuff but it's it's up to you and then these Advanced options you can go through these on your own but that's pretty much it once I'm done I always just click restart file explorer one more time for pretty much no reason just to make sure that everything's stuck oh yeah there's one more thing I almost forgot properties with our taskbar right here I almost forgot icon size we can do small finally because Windows 11 didn't allow us to do small any longer and that annoyed me to no end all right so there we've got our desk Des toop um if you want to make these things larger or smaller on your desktop hold the control button and scroll there we go let's make them about that's fine and Edge you're going to go away but before we get to Edge I'm going to customize uh my Explorer once we're in here I'm going to click on view and then I'm going to click on options now I want to start it with this PC not home and when it starts it on home let me show you what that is this is home and that's not what I want I want to go straight to my hard drive so I click on this PC and then when I open it up it goes straight to my hard drive or my hard drives whatever is installed there then on view I come over and just do display the full path in the title bar and show the hidden files folders and drives apply now you also notice that there's a huge amount of space right here between all the different stuff and that's because we're not using the compact view now I should have done this before I swapped it over to the windows you know 10 style so I'm going to have to go back to Windows 11 style for just a second so hit properties file explorer change this ribbon back to Windows 11 and let's do a restart why not now when I open it up there we go we click on view show compact view what did that just do it made all this much more compact there's not a ridiculous amount of space the reason the space is there for a lot of people who have touch screens and the extra space gives you some room but it's a mess if you're on a desktop operating system all right so there we go and that's how I run my Explorer now next thing I'm going to do is get a few programs over at Nite and then we'll be done this is just like the extra credit so I always get Firefox because it's more secure and it's not powered by Google Chrome or chromium I like these codec packs right here from kite and then I always get notepad++ we already have the windows Essentials so that's pretty much all I'm going to get for now just 7zip BLC Firefox notepad++ but this allows you to get everything in one one download Pack you click on it all right it's downloading and installing all those things saves us a lot of time now one thing I want to note is when you are actually on that website I don't generally download Steam and Gog from here but you can download Steam and all that from here the thing is is it puts it into its default folder and I like to put this into a games folder I don't want this to go into the program files folder so it's up to you if you like it installed in your regular folder you can do that if you want to get this and just have it installed on your C drive and your program files folder do that but I like to install some things in a different drive or in a different folder get the stuff that you're okay with and this is all the stuff I'm okay with going into the default directories once it's done I don't need that Firefox can live down here check that out we can drag and drop things down here again so many things have been disabled in Windows 11 and I don't know why so there you have it a much more functional version of Windows 11 it feels a lot more like Windows 10 mixed with Windows 7 now and I haven't had very many problems with it anymore if you're curious about the security there's another video I've made just talking about the security options and windows and what you should and shouldn't do so I'll put a link to that in the description be sure to check it out last thing I want to mention is we still have our 50% off sale going on I decided to extend our 50% off sale over at Epic pans.com just to make sure everybody can get everything for the holidays that they need at a good price uh these keyboards are kind of flying off the shelf I had to buy a bunch more boxes but they're here so I can ship out the keyboards we have all these mice down here with flawless infrared sensors pick the one that fits your hand the best this feels kind of like an intella Mouse this is a little more right-handed and feels more like a gaming mouse but they're all very sleek and nice I love this controller I beat uh Hollow night with this so you know it's responsive if I can beat Hollow night with this thing uh mostly because I like the analog controls on this a lot more than even the Xbox or the PlayStation so don't want to sell it too hard because it's so inexpensive right now 50% off everything until January 1st over at Epic pants.com all right everybody thanks for watching see you

Channel: Tek Syndicate

Views: 93,268

Keywords: Tek Syndicate, hardware, technology, science, games, gaming, culture, tech, computers, retro

Id: cL-RTGQ3iQk

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023