Windows Pro edition, whether you have Windows
10 or 11, you might be wondering if it's worth the extra $100 over Home edition. If you look on
Microsoft's website, it makes it look like the difference is BitLocker and that's it, but
there's quite a few more features that are exclusive to Pro. So what I'll do is first go over
all the main differences between Pro and Home. And then at the end, I'll also go over some
free alternatives to a lot of these features because pretty much all of them do have a free
alternative. So maybe you don't need to spend all that money. And if you didn't know, you can
actually upgrade to Pro right from the Microsoft store. And interestingly here, it does show quite
a few more differences, but still not all of them. First up, we have the Group Policy Editor,
which basically lets you change a massive amount of settings behind the scenes in Windows
without having to go into the registry to change anything. I could go on all day about
the hundreds of settings in here. There's just too many to talk about. Most of them are
actually not that useful to the average person. A lot of them have to do with features that
are enabled and disabled in Windows and user permissions, because it's mostly meant
for businesses to easily set up computers for a company all in the same way. And you
can just apply a group policy. That's why it's called that. But still it covers so much
different stuff that at one point or another, you'll probably find something
you can find it useful for. Next up we have Windows Sandbox, which
is actually really cool. And it basically is a temporary virtual machine that you
pop up and then you can do whatever you want in it. And it's a regular looking Windows
installation. And then when you close the window, it's all gone and nothing you
did in there makes a difference. And more importantly, the main idea is it's
isolated from your main Windows installation. So it's good for checking out maybe suspicious
files. You're a little bit on the fence, whether you think you want to trust it, or maybe
you just want to make sure that the program does what it says it does, instead of having to install
it and then uninstall it and making a mess. Of course, if you are genuinely suspicious
about a program, it's best to just not run it at all. The sandbox is also a lot easier to
use than setting up a whole virtual machine, for example, using another feature that
I'll talk about in a second. You literally just run the Windows Sandbox, it
pops up, it's all ready to go. And then when you close it, it's ready for
the next one. It just erases everything for next time. Now speaking of virtual machines, the
next feature exclusive to Windows Pro is Hyper-V, which lets you make full-blown virtual
machines. You basically will download a ISO installer, just like you
would for a regular computer. And then you can install an operating
system onto the virtual machine. So it's definitely not as plug and play as the
Windows sandbox. Although I will point out that Microsoft does actually
host virtual machine disks that are pre-made for developers. So you can actually
download that, but that's like 30 gigabytes. Maybe you don't want to have to worry about
downloading huge files. But of course a virtual machine is a lot more versatile and can do a
lot more than just being used as a sandbox. You can run any kind of operating system like
Linux. Maybe you want to just try out Linux, or maybe you want to use some programs that
are exclusive to another operating system. Or in my case, even though I'm running Windows
11, maybe I want to show something in Windows 10 or a lower edition of Windows. So I have
multiple virtual machines that I can load into and see. And Hyper-V does have a lot of
advanced options for configuring the virtual devices and stuff like that. So you really
can do whatever you want, but if you're not what you might consider an advanced user, then you
might have some trouble figuring everything out. All right, now if you've watched me for a while, you know that I'm really obsessed with
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continue. Okay, next up we have the Local Users and Groups Management Console. This
is a really minor one, but I figured I'd mention it anyway. It basically is just
a GUI for managing user accounts in a few ways that would otherwise require using
the command prompt commands. Like enabling and disabling user accounts, changing
a password policy, that kind of thing. Up next we have BitLocker, which you may
have heard of before. It allows you to encrypt the entire OS installation drive and
any other secondary drives of your computer, so everything if you want. You
basically set up an encryption key that you want to make sure
that you store and don't lose, because without it you literally won't be able
to access your computer if you have to use it. Or you also have the option to save it
to your Microsoft account, which for most people is probably what you want to do. The
encryption and decryption is all done on the fly, so theoretically it should have no noticeable
impact on performance. And there's also a feature called BitLocker to Go, which lets you encrypt
an external drive and then it can be used on any other Windows machine, as long as it's relatively
recent enough to be able to use BitLocker. I will point out though that there is a
separate feature called device encryption, which is available to home users. It just
has a lot less options. Basically from my understanding is it simply only lets you
encrypt all or nothing, not like BitLocker where you can choose the OS drive and then
however many secondary drives, if any. The next feature is remote desktop, which
lets you remotely control an unattended computer. And unattended is a key word there.
Home Edition users can still act as a client for a remote desktop connection, meaning
they can be the one accessing the remote machine, but the one being the server
basically, being accessed must be pro. And the reason I emphasized remote desktop
can be for unattended computers is because Home Edition Windows actually does have a
really cool feature called Quick Assist, where you can remotely control another
device, like to help someone out, but they need to be there to accept the
connection. And you also have to enter a code, so it's not like you can use that to just
remotely connect to a computer whenever you want. I believe Quick Assist should be pre-installed,
but you can also get it from the Microsoft store if necessary. And the final ones before we get
to the free alternatives are mostly having to do with business stuff. So most people
are not going to be interested in this, but for example, you can join an
Active Directory or a company domain. So these are going to be for computers that
are managed by a company. As well as you're able to access a private catalog of your
company's software on the Microsoft Store if they have one. So a few business oriented
features there. All right. Now like I said, there's actually free alternatives
to basically all of these features. So you don't necessarily have to get pro if
you don't want to have the native feature version. First, a free alternative to Windows
Sandbox is a program called Sandboxie Plus. And it's really cool because unlike a full
virtual machine or even Windows Sandbox, the idea is you run individual programs
isolated within their own sandbox. So basically you right click a program and
hit run sandboxed, and then it isolates it into a sandbox and prevents it from making
permanent changes to your computer. And you could tell it's sandboxed by a yellow border
when you move your cursor near the top. So say you run your browser sandboxed like here with
Chrome and you download a picture somewhere. To Chrome, it'll show up there, but it won't
actually show up there to anything else outside the sandbox. But Chrome still thinks it was
saved there. And even if you open the photo, the photo viewer will pop up also in the sandbox,
separate from the system still. And if you hit to show the folder through Chrome, it opens up
Explore in a sandbox and still shows it there, even though running Explore outside
the sandbox, it doesn't show up. So there's a bunch of features and this
makes it really useful in addition to Windows Sandbox actually, because it can
do cool stuff like even forcing certain programs to always open in a sandbox if
you want it to be secure. And I could probably make a whole video about the
uses for this program, but pretty cool, just check it out. Now, if you do want to use a
full blown virtual machine, a free alternative to Hyper-V is VirtualBox, which is free and open
source, and it's actually owned by Oracle. So there's a big company behind it and it has
a lot of professional features. And one cool feature is you can actually select an ISO and do
a unattended install of certain operating systems. Like with this one for Windows 10, you just set
a few initial settings and then it will go do the whole thing automatically. So for most people,
this will definitely be more than enough. Next, as an alternative to Group Policy Editor,
there's actually a program called PolicyPlus. I made a whole separate video about it,
so I'd recommend really watching that. But basically it has a very similar
interface to Group Policy Editor, but you can run it on any edition
of Windows. Keep in mind, even though I believe it will show all the same
policy options as the Group Policy Editor, there are quite a few where even if you change
and enable it or disable it, it won't actually activate behind the scenes because whatever
that feature is truly requires the Pro edition. So just be aware of that. To get some of
the stuff, you really do actually need to have Pro. As an alternative to BitLocker,
like I mentioned, there's the Windows Device Encryption feature, which should be in the
settings and you can search encryption and it should come up. For me, it just goes to
BitLocker because I do have Pro or higher. But if you just want to simply encrypt your
whole device, then this is probably the way to go. Though if you're looking for something
more advanced, there's also another free open source program called VeraCrypt, which not only
will let you encrypt an entire computer or drive, but also create encrypted containers that
you simply store on the computer like a file and it's encrypted until you decrypt
it, in one of whatever ways you set. There's a lot of advanced stuff here, so not
exactly user-friendly if you're not familiar with that kind of stuff, but good to know about.
Finally, as an alternative to Remote Desktop, there's a lot of options actually.
The first one, like I mentioned is Quick Assist. It's built into Windows and
basically it's good for helping friends. The person doing the connecting just has
to sign into a Microsoft account and then you type in a code and you can access that
person's computer. It's just not built for continuous connections. So once you close
it out, that's it. It's not like you can keep reconnecting to someone. Unless they initiate
the connection separately every time with a code. Though of course, if you do want
something closer to Remote Desktop, there's several options out there. So one
of them is TeamViewer, which is free for personal use and you'll pretty much get a
lot of the features in there. And there's another technology called VNC. So there
are several of these that are VNC programs, but probably the main one that I would recommend
that seems the most polished is called RealVNC. And it's a paid app, but they do have a free
lite version. It's called VNC Connect Lite, and I'm pretty sure that does all the
basics that you would probably need to do anyway. That's free for personal use.
So that's one to check out. Basically what you do is you host a VNC server on
the computer you want to connect to, and then you'll use the VNC client
to connect from another computer. And then you can remote in, see the
screen, that sort of thing. So I think those are the most significant
differences for the average person. Let me know what you think down in the
comments. Do you think it's worth it to get Windows Pro just for those native features,
or are you fine using open source stuff? And thanks again to DeleteMe for sponsoring this
video. Again, if you want to get your personal information removed from data brokers, go
to JoinDeleteMe.com/ThioJoe and use the promo code ThioJoe for a nice discount. If you
want to keep watching, the next video I'll put right here is that one that I talked about for
PolicyPlus, the Group Policy Editor alternative. If you want to see a lot more details
about that, you can just click on that right there. So thanks so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one.
