I Can't Use Windows Without ExplorerPatcher (Windows 10 & 11 Tutorial)

recently I made a video about how to make Windows 11 a lot more usable and a lot more like a desktop operating system and there's one piece of software that I want to go into depth with and that's we're going to do in this video the software is called the Explorer Patcher and it works for Windows 10 and windows 11 we're going to look at Windows 11 because with Windows 11 there's a lot more that needs to be fixed and so there's more features inside the Explorer Patcher specifically for Windows 11 but I'm going to walk you through everything and at the end of this video you're going to understand exactly what you can do and how much better you can make your computer with Windows EXP L Patcher 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 it's the new year sale over on hook keys.com this is where I come to get my windows Keys 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 ex abbit an 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 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 I zoom in so you can see it click apply and then check that out now $17.19 leave him 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 all right let's go back and take a look here 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 number right here so you can just copy that grab that copy it hit start type activate click on activation 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 hardware and in the comments let me know I'm curious which one did you grab which which [Music] flavor all right so this is what we got now I've at least got my start menu put over here on the right side where it belongs um why do I not like in the middle well you got to watch the other video for that so right now when you right click on the taskar you just have taskar settings and task manager we need to do more we got to do more with this so let's go ahead and grab a copy of explor Patcher I'm just going to open up whatever web browser you have and I'm going to search for Explorer Patcher I don't even care if we're doing it through Bing so when you get to explore Patcher let's open this up make it bigger this is what you'll see this is GitHub and and if you see all this stuff might look a little bit intimidating you're looking for releases so just click on the latest release right there and then scroll down you can ignore pretty much all this stuff and then you see assets it may be like that and you're like where is it well just click on the little ticker right there and then you'll see the latest version so click on that and it's going to say oh no this is a weird program clip the ellipses right clip clip click the ellipses thing right there and just click on keep it's going to be like are you sure show more yes keep anyway it's okay it's fine I've already downloaded once um there we go and it may say like hey this is an unknown program it's weird oh know it's just working great so you may notice that the bar disappeared then reappeared some other stuff's going on just give it a second until everything reappears once everything reappears explor Patcher is installed so what changed everything looks the same well I'll tell you what's going to change we're going to be able to change a lot of the look and feel of this this is your file explorer we'll fix this up nice and then we're going to change just a lot of the functions like this thing see this rightclick contextual menu where you have to come down and click on show more options and then it shows you the one you're trying to get to in the first place yeah we'll fix that too so right click click on properties see all this new stuff here look at all this new stuff well just click on properties and now we have the Explorer Patcher if anything has an asteris beside it it means you need to click on the restart file explorer to make it take effect the first thing we'll go through is the task bar so you can pick your style Windows 10 or Windows 11 taskbar but I like the Windows 10 version because we have more options if we just do a Windows 11 taskbar I'll restart this to show you what that one's like when you come down here and click on stuff you just get this big cluster see this is like you're on a mobile phone and you click on something it's like I know I want to click on just the audio but no I've got to have the this entire thing pop up and airplane mode I'm on a desktop come on we don't need all that stuff right there it's going to be there regardless but let's just change this over to Windows 10 and then restart again and now we can come over here click on network whatever I've got everything weird right now so there we go now we've got all that set up also one thing you'll notice is that when you have the Explorer Patcher you'll notice that all of your different tabs here on the bottom all your different applications are fully visible so you can see what they all are if you like that then you're all good to go but if that's kind of confusing you could just come down here and do combine taskbar icons and you can do always or never or whatever you want it's your own happy little computer so you can change your start button style a lot of the stuff we don't need to worry about too much just to position you can go through this on your own that's pretty much all I want to do there except for one more thing at the bottom taskbar icon size look at that we can have small icons on Windows 11 I'm going to leave it large just so you can see it it's so ridiculous that this is not an option by default in Windows 11 they're giving us these big I don't need all this chunky stuff on the bottom I want as I want as much desktop space as possible for the programs that I'm using let's look at this system tray here now the thing I want to take a look at the most here is down here under the when you click a system icon in the system tray open up and you got all the different options here so we got the windows 11 fly out for the network so I click on network right now and it brings up this it's got the rounded edges you know you can do Windows 10 and it's pretty much the same thing except with squared edges but let's have a little bit of fun here do Windows 8 look at this ginormous thing I think think this is actually very readable so I'm going to leave that one on why not all right and then we have our sound Windows 10 default just this it's fine but I don't know sometimes Nostalgia just gets the best of me I kind of like this one it's really this one's just easy to use it makes sense yeah I'm going to leave that one clock different ones Windows 10 big old thing uh digital clock but you know something I'm going to make the argument for the Windows 7 one let's see what the Windows 10 11 looks like real quick e h oh no oh God no I don't have any use for that let's do Windows 7 look at this ugly thing that's so useful you see this it's pretty late I got to go to bed no I I never go to bed what am I talking about I'm a vampire anyway see this this round clock right here psychologically this is much better for your brain than a digital clock you can tell the passage of time much more intuitively and this is not just me saying you know something subjective there have been objective studies that show that your brain processes the passage of time better with a clock like this so I really enjoy this I'm going to leave it like that now we're going to look at the file explorer this is going to allow us to change the look and feel of the file explorer and also the contextual menu which is the first thing I'm going to do disable the windows 11 contextual menu it's got the asteris so we got to restart and look at here just a regular old context menu isn't that wonderful why why did we even need the other one in the first place I don't know now on the top here you'll see register as a shell extension you'll only need to check that if you want to enable any of these options that have the double asteris I'm not going to check mark that on mine and the reason is that um I found that whenever I had this enabled I had a lot of Errors trying to do things on network uh hard drives whenever I opened up stuff on the network so I'm just going to leave it unchecked and not use those but you can play with those if you like now the next thing I want to talk about is we can use a different control interface now the new windows 11 command bar 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 we can change this around if you want to use like the Windows 10 ribbon let's open it up and take a look let me just pop this ribbon down right here there we go the Windows 10 ribbon is there and when you change to the Windows 10 ribbon even if uh things have updated you'll still be able to get out of here you'll still be able to drag and drop things up here to the top it'll work all right let's show you the Windows 7 command bar see if this brings back some memories there we go see we got the contextualized thing right there let me just uh I don't have anything installed on this so I just got to randomly click around I'll see whenever I click on anything different contextual options come up that's the Windows 7 command bar worked fine you know it's nice I like it and then over here we've got this as far as changing the view types and whatnot got the paint on the side right here it pains me to tell you about this all right so I'm going to leave it on that one cuz it's it's cool it works and then if you want to do the M effect or anything like that for the Windows 7 Explorer thing you'll need to register as a shell extension if you're not using any network drives I've found no problems with this whatsoever let's get over to the start menu um this one I'm going to leave on Windows 11 because Windows 11 is made for Windows 11 and doesn't like it when you change it to Windows 10 so if you're going to change it to Windows 10 just read this but I'm going to leave it on this because I'm going to replace this later anyway you I I'll replace all this nonsense later with a different piece of software called open shell but that's not for this video you need more settings this will just open up the settings app that's all that does and then I can disable the recommended stuff you can change your maximum number of frequent apps to show but like I said I'm want to replace this entirely so it's up to you now we've got our Windows switcher and this is our alt tab menu so let's get a few things open right here just so we can see the alt tab menu this ugly old thing right here yes alt tab I've got the Windows NT version right there so let's change it up to something else how about okay we got to restart for this okay here's the default which works you know it's fine alt tabbing like this it kind of gets annoying when there's multiple tabs and stuff I actually don't like this having all these tabs included you can turn that off um but you know it's probably easier just to come up here and change this to say uh Windows let's do the simple switcher style and the simple switcher style is something that you can configure a lot like and you can learn more about it right down here but I I really like this one because I you know how much you can configure it and uh we got to restart for this to work there we go now here's the simple switcher style it's not showing all the tabs there but they're still there but yeah simple switcher style is okay um if you want to get that Nostalgia going well by all means how about we just switch it up to the Windows NT now we can alt tab look at that God Nostalgia strong I'm not sure if this is uh as functional but for my brain this really works and I'm like I need to go back to Internet Explorer I need to go back to the Microsoft whatever no I never need to go back there but you know I don't know for my brain that one kind of works pretty well I'm going to leave it on that why not I leave the weather turned off down on other there's a few things I like to check box um I usually turn on the stuff like the disable the office hot keys and disable Windows F to bring up the feedback Hub because I don't care about Windows F no no no I don't care but that's up to you and then I disable the rounded Corners kill the rounded Corners go ahead and give it a restart I don't actually don't think I need to restart for that but I wanted to disable them even on this window and there we go if you like rounded edges if you like the soft feeling of that non-offensive rounded Edge that edge radius right there then leave it leave it that way it's up to you you can do it any way you like in your own little world for me I like Square because we are on a square monitor or a rectangular monitor I like squared edges cuz these edges are squared it just I don't know it feels a little bit better I think with the way Microsoft and Google have been doing lately in the last few years with their UI everything being so round and bubbly we're going to need like egg-shaped monitors pretty soon ovular monitors yes so anyway you can go through the rest of this stuff um that's pretty much the main thing that I adjust here uh right down here these are cool see these check boxes prevent the following control panel links from being redirected to the settings app so what is that what does that mean all right so let's type system and show you what comes up when you click on system you get this it's inside your settings app this is you know all this stuff here inside your settings app a lot of times when I come here I find that I end up having to click on a lot of things that I don't want to click on and it's somewhat functional it's getting better you know this is actually getting more functional but a lot of the times I end up going straight back to the control panel the old school control panel so let's try that again but check mark all these now when I go to system it goes here this is where I want to go yes you have more information and a smaller area and then we've got access straight to the device manager and everything else and this is this is the underbelly of the computer this is where I need to be as a power user I don't need to be messing around with those bubbly apps so I check mark all of those absolutely let's talk about updates because every now and then you'll see a little bubble pop up over here on the side that's like something needs an update this needs an update when when that bubble pops up on the side you check for updates and it it shows up right there see this well if you ever shows up and it says like hey an update's available just close this right click click on properties then click on updates and then right here click on update program and restart file explorer that's all you need to do and then just give it a second to install you'll probably need to do that here and there and I'll give you another tip in just a second about what to do if it ever crashes or if windows up dates and breaks something so this is Advanced this is only really for advanced users want to show the desktop build on your on your desktop make you feel like you've not activated look over there Windows Pro build right there you can it's pretty cool to have that information but makes me feel like I'm not activated so but it's it's cool to turn on if you just need to see the build information really quick whatever be sure to say thanks to all the people who have worked on the Valiant uh Explorer Patcher CU this piece of software has made Windows completely usable and I don't know what I'll do if Windows updates and this doesn't work anymore that'll really that'll ruin me as as a human I'll cry myself to sleep every night now the other thing I want to say is let say something crashes and everything disappears from the screen and you don't have access to you can't even click Start there's nothing down here what do I do what do I do well press control shift escape and that'll bring up your task manager and then after you have your task manager you're you're pretty much Home Free just click on run new task and type Explorer press enter and there we go we're back back so if it ever crashes you can do that hope you find this as useful as I do I run it on my Windows 10 machines I run it on my windows 11 machines it's not available for Linux but if it was I would run it on Linux machines even on servers that don't have a graphical user interface I would run this program on those because it's that useful yes anyway let me know if you're running this let me know which settings you prefer I'm curious do you like the Windows 7 style or do you prefer the newer rounded edges of Windows 11 I'm curious let me know in the comments I'll see you next time

Channel: Tek Syndicate

Views: 192,024

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

Id: iucq4Ec8ifM

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024