New Windows 11 Laptop? Do This First: Optimize, Customize, and Secure It! | 2023 Edition

so you've got a new laptop and it's probably going to be Windows 11. now you can move back to Windows 10 and I think a lot of people have but we're going to stick with Windows 11 and sort of go through several different steps the first being we're going to remove bloatware and junk and just clean up the operating system remove stuff you don't need and then we're going to secure things and then I'm going to show you how I customize my desktop and then there'll be a couple different extra credit things first let's go ahead and get your copy of Windows activated [Music] thanks to who keys for sponsoring this video you can get 25 off Windows and office with coupon code ts25 so they've got Windows 10 Pro they've got home you've got Windows 11 office 2021 2019 and this is the one I use 2016 because it still works very well putting in coupon code ds25 click apply and then watch these prices come down wonderful once you're finished all you have to do is click on your user account up here go to your user Center click on my purchase orders and then you'll see everything you've purchased right there just view Keys and codes and you can just copy and paste your key hit start type activate click on activation settings paste it in there click on next and you will be activated you know I never liked how Microsoft has different prices for different people if you're a home user you're going to pay 10 times more than an oem Builder or a corporation or something like that and that's why I like heading to places like cookies.com to get the OEM keys so I can pay a price that makes sense so thanks to them for sponsoring and now to our regularly scheduled program there's the new laptop right there it's a ThinkPad if you're lucky enough to also have a think pad you're going to find that this is a very easy process [Music] do right when you first turn on the laptop so let's let's go ahead and get started this is the screen that you're going to be greeted with when you first log in your laptop now note my screen is 16 by 10 instead of 16 by nine so excuse the black bars on the right and left we're just going to skip through most of this and I'll stop when we get to something that that matters now we have a choice to make right before you connect to a network if you want to have an online account that is connected to Microsoft and you want to use your Microsoft account to bring all your settings and everything from another computer onto this computer I won't judge you you go ahead and do that it is a convenience thing but if you want to have an offline account meaning that you know your account is not a Microsoft account it is a local account that is only on this machine the easiest way for me to do that is just to say I don't have an internet connection and then it's much easier just to skip through all the other online steps I do offline accounts if you want to do an online account you do you so I'm just going to click I don't have internet down here I'm gonna lie yep and I'm going to continue with a limited setup if you've already connected to the internet you might not be able to click on I don't have an internet connection or maybe a newer version of Windows 11 won't allow you to do this when you get to this screen here you can just click on sign in options and then you'll have the opportunity to switch to an offline account it's extremely difficult to block all of the Telemetry with Microsoft luckily a lot of that's not personal analyzed Telemetry with Microsoft they're a little more trustworthy than most but I still turn off all of this and it's much easier just to turn it off by clicking on one and then just press tab space tab space tab space tab space tab space tab tab accept now this is something that's going to be based upon your OEM if you bought a laptop from Lenovo or HP or someone sometimes they'll have a screen here that is a third-party thing this is not Microsoft this is not part of windows but if you want to sign up and sign in with the Lenovo account you can I don't want to do that [Music] okay we're greeted with this the new start menu some love it some hate it the first thing I like to do is just make sure that the specs match what I've purchased by pressing start and typing about and and then hitting enter on about your PC and now you can look do these specs match is this what you paid for did you get ryzen 7 32 gigs of RAM is that what you got and then at the end just to make sure everything is working correctly for extra credit I'll run a benchmark and we'll make sure that it's running at the correct you know like expected speed but that's extra credit this is the main thing and then I'm also going to press Windows key and and E click on this PC and just make sure yes I have a one terabyte hard drive that's what I paid for okay so that looks correct and that's a simple thing to do you don't want to get halfway you know through this list and then realize whoops they sent me the one with the I5 or the the one with the ryzen 5 instead of the ryzen 7. [Music] foreign if you have tons of bloatware you may want to just reinstall Windows and I'll make a separate video showing the best and you know fastest way to do that a lot of the OEM stuff is garbage one of the things that I really like about the Lenovo software is if there's a UEFI or a bios update it will notify you and then just download it and install it so when I first plugged this in that's what it did I lied I can't go anywhere without updating this system so I'm going to go ahead and save this wallpaper which is uh from the last album I just made you can grab that on bandcamp and I'm going to change this to the dark color scheme okay now I can start doing other things I'm also going to make these a little smaller on the side by holding on the control button and scrolling down there we go and you can make the icons any size you like by holding on the control button and scrolling there's three uninstalling programs that I recommend this is the one I use on my personal machine because it's free and open source there's someone who's really nerdy and you know what you're doing then I recommend grabbing this one if not geek uninstaller is going to do most of what that will do in a tiny footprint it's a portable pack package so this is what we're going to use for this video and I'm going to grab the zip file instead of the 7-Zip because the zip file will open in Windows without having to do anything we could just double click on it and double click to open it and we don't need to install this it's a portable program you can just run it straight from the folder and this scans everything that's installed shows you what we have here the beauty of the geek on installer is it will also scan for any leftover files and folders and registry keys just like Revo uninstaller or the bulk crap uninstaller except this one is so small and convenient now since I have a Lenovo there's not a lot of garbage on here so if you've got like make trashy antivirus or Norton or something like that you're going to definitely want to uninstall that antivirus those things are just going to bog down your system and their garbage the Windows Defender is a far better antivirus and that's what we're going to use on this system so you can uninstall any garbage here just by right clicking and clicking on uninstall I do not need Microsoft Office so I'm going to uninstall that but first before I click on the uninstall let's hit start and create a restore point and there we go create restore point just type res whatever and then just create a restore point the bottom here we can click on our Drive turn on system protection set up how much space you want I'll do a little bit of space doesn't matter you can allocate as much as you like that's kind of a lot but whatever and now we can create a restore point just going to call this before uninstall so after we create the restore point we can start messing with stuff not too big of a deal but I recommend creating restore points before you do anything major or before you start uninstalling things you don't understand so uninstall office is going to go away and then we'll start thinking what's next if you do not know what something on the list is like what is clean your device it's got an L so it's probably Lenovo um if you don't know what it is before you uninstall it maybe hit start and just type whatever it is clean there it is clean your device let's open it up and see what it is so clean your device it lets you oh this is pretty cool so you can basically disable all the functionality of the computer for a minute two minutes five minutes so that you can give it a wipe down don't put any like liquid on here just like get your towel a tiny bit damp from alcohol or whatever and then clean your device so I'm going to leave clean my device on the computer I'm not going to uninstall that doesn't seem like it's going to get in the way of anything in Lenovo Vantage I'm going to leave on the computer but I'm going to set it up so that it does not start with Windows and I'll show you how to do that in just a second but for now we'll just go through uninstall any junk or bloatware or anything that you know here that you're like what is this leave some of the system stuff like the Microsoft stuff or whatever just leave that on there I don't use Microsoft OneDrive if you have a Microsoft account and you use their cloud services to back things up then keep it but I'm going to uninstall that after it installs it found some traces here in the in the you know files and folders remove those traces I do not use one note either so I'm going to uninstall that this one had a bunch of registry entries left over like the OneNote it says that their traces left this is why we created the the backup I'm going to go ahead and finish and have it remove all those registering entries just to keep the system clean but if there are any issues then we can always restore all right so we've been uninstalling desktop applications which are the old school apps there's also a Microsoft store apps click on that and look at all this stuff here so there's a bunch of stuff here do we need or do we not need this stuff do we need Dolby access I don't need that and there's going to be more stuff here glance by whatever that is we don't need that I don't know what that is do you use the mail that comes with Windows I do not you know you can uninstall everything from right here inside the geek uninstaller but if you just hit start click on all apps you can scroll through here and some of the things that were already removed are still going to show up here so I usually just like to do this manually I used to do this by running commands in the Powershell but I don't do that anymore you need to leave Edge and the store on here though because that can break a lot of things if you uninstall these two there's just too many things that are built into windows that are reliant upon these two stupid things so yeah now you may think that Mobile plans has something to do with like your Wi-Fi it does not you can uninstall it alright so we've uninstalled a bunch of stuff next thing I like to do is just run a Windows update by hitting start and typing update check for updates all right we are going to go ahead and do a Windows update let it reboot or whatever and then we can look one more time just to see if anything else has been installed during the Windows update let's go ahead and install all this stuff right now okay so some of the stuff didn't work but we can do a restart now and just finish up just go through the updates this could take a minute I'm gonna get another cup of coffee and I'm going to be jittery as hell okay once we've restarted I'm going to go ahead and click on start and do another update just keep doing this until all the updates are done have fun it's a good thing I love coffee another restart all the update's finally finished I'm just going to do one more thing hit start and just see if there are any new apps I want to get rid of just scroll through there may have been something installed by the updates sometimes the updates will install things that you've removed it's kind of annoying but that's one of Microsoft's things they're like hey we see you didn't have our Candy Crush advertisement we want to make sure you have that because we got paid just scroll through especially here and just see if there's anything you want to right click and and get rid of let's start installing a few things we're going to head over to ninite.com there are alternatives to denite but this one covers the basics and it's really easy to use so I still use it I grab Firefox Firefox has a really nice PDF editor built in now so you can actually edit your PDFs inside Firefox meaning we don't need a PDF editor unless you really want one again this list you just grab anything you like I grab VLC because I uninstalled the other media player and I also like the k-lite codec packs to make sure I have all the codecs installed and I'm not going to install Steam and I'll tell you why I'm also not going to install any of these but I am going to install 7-Zip and we don't need Microsoft Security Essentials because it's already built in if you want additional stuff here a vast Navy G are okay buybot's okay these are all like Okay so Malwarebytes is the one I use and I pay for the premium on that one it's good works fine but Microsoft Security Essentials is very good these days better than the junk that's usually pre-packaged with your laptop so once you've check marked everything you like just scroll down to the bottom and click get your ninite and this is going to download an installer that will install all of these programs to their default location and we can show the details here it's downloading one thing at a time and installing it into the program files or program folders now the reason I don't like to install Steam and stuff this way is because I like to put those into a specific folder I create a games folder so I want to install those separately so I can change the installation location later in the video for some extra credit I'll give you a few key Firefox security plugins that I think you should be running but that'll be later in the video part of the extra credit I like to run a VPN especially if I'm going to be doing torrenting or something like that VPN essentially protects you on the internet it makes it so that your ISP and other prying eyes cannot see what you're doing this is not sponsored I use private internet access every single day on multiple machines if you use our code and then click on get Pia VPN you can see here you can get it for two dollars and three cents a month now there's other vpns out there that a lot of people yell and scream about that you know are are very good vpns but this one is so fast I have not found a VPN that is faster for the money and they also have a perfect track record there's never been any leaks so this is the VPN I would recommend that you install especially if you're out and about you don't want anybody being able to like see what you're doing on your computer and this will encrypt and protect you from any prying eyes so just install this so I keep it on a lot of the times but you know toggle it as as needed but that's my VPN of choice next up when it comes to security if you click down here on the bottom we can click on the Windows security now it may tell you hey you need to log into our service you know sign in with Microsoft it'll give you a warning sometimes but you don't need to sign in with Microsoft you can tell it to be you know be ignored and just make sure that all your virus stuff is turned on click on manage settings make sure all that's on next up I like to mess with my user account control just type UAC change user account control I bring that all the way up now this is going to frequently pop up on the screen and be like hey this program wants to install hey this program wants to make a change is that okay yes it'll do this see this is going to happen a lot but it is a very very effective layer of protection and it's very basic and easy to set up so do that now the other thing you can do with privacy and stuff is just check your privacy settings by clicking here clicking on the Cog and then scrolling down to privacy and security now you can go through here and just make sure that everything is the way you like it and this is going to be different for you know each person who's using this we already have uh device encryption going on here but there's also something called BitLocker and I recommend you turn this on when you click on turn on BitLocker it will encrypt your drive you'll need to put in a password and that sort of thing but this will be nice if someone were to steal your laptop they won't be able to log into it without that password and then if they take out the hard drive and put it into their own drive or put it into their own machine the drive is going to be encrypted without that password they will not be able to access the contents of the drive and also when you're selling your laptop it makes it more effectively protected because the data on the drive is always encrypted and come down to permissions and I like to make sure my location services and stuff are off I don't want you know any location tags on anything I put online just just a security feature but check through these permissions so I just come through each one of these it's a little time consuming but send data to Microsoft no thank you all right so once you're finished going through those few things you'll have a more secure operating system and I've made a video covering in more detail some things you can do to help keep yourself secure in Windows and that video is linked in the description we have a couple different office options Libra office should be the primary option for most people it is a full office suite just like Microsoft Office but if you only need a few of the applications then there's something called only office and it has better compatibility with Microsoft Office and it looks a little more familiar to Microsoft Office but it only has a few different programs like it has a spreadsheet and I believe it has a publisher application I don't use this when I use LibreOffice and then it also has a word processor but it does have deeper compatibility so make your decision and then you can you can download one of the two foreign part two for Firefox there's a couple different plugins that we can install or they call them extensions for blocking ads I prefer ad guard or ublock origin they're both very very similar in functionality do not use Adblock or Adblock Plus because they take payments from companies to allow ads through the filter which is garbage so I'm going to go ahead and install this yes I want to allow this to run everywhere and I've used it for years so I do trust them next up privacy Badger this helps to block a whole bunch of stuff that follows you around the web like cookies and stuff that follow you over all over Google and Facebook and allow all these things to run everywhere and the last thing is also from the same company the Electronic Frontier Foundation and this is https everywhere I just make sure that any website that you're going to if you just type like add-ons.mozilla it makes sure to add on https and forces you to go to https so those three are a good start and then after that you can add your own extensions and we don't need to cover all of those but that'll get you a very nice start [Music] let's take a look at the file explorer clicking on this or you can also press the Windows key and E to bring up a file explorer quickly just do a few basic things to make this more better click on the dot dot dot up here click on options now we can choose whether or not we want to come to quick access or this PC I think most power users are going to want to go to this PC right off the bat and then click on view and I always do show hidden files and folders hit apply now when we open this up again instead of going to the quick view it's going to go straight to my computer now there's something weird here see this little check box over here this feels weird to me this is um something that's been around with windows for a while but I don't like it so come over here to show and it's under View and then show and then just undo the item check boxes now also have you noticed how big everything is it's like it's made for a touch screen or something but this is a desktop operating system so I don't need this much padding in between everything luckily we can go and click on view and then click on compact View and now it's more like it used to be which is the way I like it so that's all I'm going to do for my Explorer for now this is actually very functional works just fine for this part of the extra credit that's all we're going to do now as far as customizing the taskbar you may have noticed everything's in the center like we're using a Linux distro or we're using Mac OS if you want it to be back on the left you can click on the taskbar options then click on taskbar behaviors taskbar alignment and do it on the left alright so that's good for now you may notice my icons are really big and bubbly and that is because for the ease of the video and I'll scroll down and show you I am running at 150 percent so there's a hundred percent see it's a little bit smaller it's a small screen so I have it turned up so everyone can see everything that's going on but yeah I do have to run scaling on this I'll probably realistically run it at 125 on my own but so everyone could see it I'll run it at 150 and that's why those icons are so large down there [Music] if you're happy with the way everything works now you're done but if you want a different experience with the bar down here on the bottom well we can install a more old school and more functional in my opinion floor with a new start menu and everything like that so explore Patcher is on GitHub create a restore point before you install this because it's going to mess with stuff and sometimes the new Windows updates will break this so create there we go this one create restore point there are some other options like start all back which are pretty good but they cost money this one is free and open shell or Classic Shell is not available yet for Windows 11 but this one does a pretty good job so explore Patcher setup now this is going to take a minute that's going to do stuff do not panic you can't see what's going on because it has to you know close down explore which would be all of the bars and everything when this shows back up it's not finished just wait see if you click on start nothing's happening because it's still installing just give it a second once all of your icons and stuff show back up then we're in business right click on this and click on properties now we can choose our task you know menu Style our taskbar style Windows 10 or 11 and at the start button it is the windows 11 style which I find to be whatever you know it works it's it's there but if you want to go back to the Windows 10 style you can do that there we go the Windows 10 Style with all this stuff pinned over here I'm just going to unpin all this nonsense you can pin other things here if you like I didn't find the Windows 10 or the Windows 11. start menu is to be that functional but I mainly only use them to hit start and then type whatever I'm looking for so there's the Windows 10 you can still type and it brings up a Windows 11 style thing so it's almost better just to keep it on Windows 11. it's kind of weird oh my God where did Disney plus come from I totally missed them why do I want Instagram and tick tock on my machine hell no that was close the apps almost got me all right click on file explorer and this is very important disable the windows 11 context menu oh there we go isn't that beautiful it's gone let me show you how how gone it really is go to program files you're just going to find some right click on it oh it's the old school menu except we still have these goofy rounded edges which don't make any sense for a desktop operating system everything's going to be so round in the future we'll just have to buy circular monitors all right so that's good if it does not work when you you know sometimes you put a check mark and you right click and it's like still the windows 11 menu just click on restart File Explorer give it a second and once it restarts it'll be okay so go through this and configure it to your liking show the weather no thank you now the other thing that's beautiful about this is it allows us to have the windows 10 style functionality over here for instance before you click on this stuff and it brings up all of this nonsense you know where you have it's like a mobile menu but we don't want that we want a separate menu for our Wi-Fi just like Windows 10 so much more functional to be able to click on one thing and have it respond so that's what I want [Music] extra credit I want to replace the Windows audio properties of the little Windows audio icon here that doesn't have much functionality it's okay I don't I want to replace it with something that's way better so click on your Microsoft store let that open up and type ear trumpet there we go ear trumpet app and get it you're gonna love this all right open it up says it offers in-app purchases but I've never seen anything if you look right here we now have an ear trumpet volume and we also have a Windows volume I want to swap these because I want the ear trumpet volume to be down here on the bar always so click and drag this over and drop it and then make sure you've grabbed the ear trumpet one by hovering over it until the the words come off and then just drag it over here you can rearrange it as you like so I always install your trumpet on my machines it's a great little application that does a lot more than just the windows version of whatever I feel like the windows thing should have all this you know installed all right Ctrl shift escape and then say yes to bring up the task manager click on more details here now here's our task manager I want to see what's starting with my computer and anything that's enabled I'm going to click on status here to see what's enabled and what's disabled okay Discord I do not need that starting with my computer unless you're someone who's always on Discord but I do want Windows security notifications alright so go through this both things are disabled that's good now if you have a you know a laptop that had all kinds of bloat and stuff on here you may notice something you're like what in the heck is that so just anything here that you don't need starting with your computer you can disable it okay the last bit of extra credit now that we've got everything installed and all that if you want to double check and make sure that your system is good has good Cooling and all that stuff we can download a benchmark program like cinebench I'm going to grab cinebench R23 all right getting the cinebench for Windows and the reason to run a benchmark is just to make sure that your system is performing as you think it should be performing I'll open it up with 7-Zip here and I'll just do a quick desktop thing all right drag and drop it into that folder there I'm going to run cinebench and you'll also be able to hear maybe your laptop gets way louder than you thought it would you know any of those type of deal breakers it's good to know that you know in the first month than the you know like three or four months down the road when you can't return the laptop anymore all right accept this multi-core single core let's do a multi-core and just see how it how it Stacks up and then we can compare it with similarly spec machines to make sure that it's performing as expected my microphone is right beside the Lenovo laptop so you're gonna hear how loud it gets with the fans on but it's a very quiet very quiet computer I'm just going to wait until it's finished let's run a few different tests it'll take about eight to ten minutes so just let it keep going the Fan's getting a little louder you can hear it maybe and maybe not it's pretty far in the background but yeah this fan is very quiet compared to a lot of laptops I've heard so I'll see you in a few minutes all right so my cinebench has finished score of 99.24 looks a little low to me I just came over here to notebookcheck.com they have a bunch of different benchmarks here here's the 6800u 60 50u 10 32 points you know that's pretty good seeing as how silent this is very similar so I think that's going to be close enough a little lower than this but that's the median score and again it's nice and quiet so we'll call that good [Music] and the last bit of extra credit we'll do is download a program made by Microsoft called power toys click on install power toys it's available on GitHub this link will be in the description here click on the releases here and scroll down a little bit and we'll see all this nonsense a little all this important stuff and I'm going to grab the x64 version right here I'm going to install this and I'll show you a few things that it does yep and agree yes yes my power toys will install down here and you can find it down here this is pretty cool if you want to like have a Color Picker it'll pick whatever color on your desktop it's pretty cool you can open it by setting a hotkey Ctrl shift C is what it is now fancy zones is my favorite thing especially if you have multiple monitors open settings of fancy zones and then you have to come down and click on layout editor and what we can do is essentially create new snapping areas so our main our main thing here we can create a new layout I like to do Canvas rather than grid because it allows us to have overlapping zones and I'm just going to call this my 16 by 10 layout because it's a 16 by 10 monitor instead of a 16x9 I'm going to create that and then just add some zones so I'm going to do a half I could do the math if I wanted to add another one oh look out put this one over here I'm doing it quickly just so you can see there we go 640 by 760 on both sides that'll just be left and right snapping and then I'm going to create one just for full screen and there we go we'll have those we can snap left right and full screen if you want to get crazy you can have more zones like we could have a Zone that's like all right this if we just want that and then have like a little something on the side why not I don't need this many zones but I'll just show you how it works save and apply there we go and you can create custom zones for different monitors now when you sometimes update Windows this will get messed up so you just have to go back into your layout editor and tell it to do it okay you have to come down here scroll down and do override Windows snap there we go and I like to do move zones across all monitors because then it'll allow me to continue to press the snap and write and it'll go from one monitor to the next if I have multiple now let's try snapping this around there we go snapping it to full screen snap it right snap it left all right so we've got the Zone set up now I put this one here and then I can grab this one and put it all the way over in the corner there we go those are the zones I set up that's power toys and fancy zones I would recommend coming into your your power toys and then scrolling down to power toys run this allows you to press the alt and space button and bring up sort of like launchy back in the day but you know the Windows key allows us to do basically the same thing so I turn this off because sometimes alt in space do other things so it's up to you but you can look through all the different things here screen roller is pretty cool so there you go you now have a more functional better version of Windows 11. and uh you know just to say thanks for watching all the way through let's go ahead and give you a discount on our mother membrane keyboard if you use the coupon code happy keyboard I'll give this to you for half price right now so the keyboard is a membrane keyboard I went to China myself to make sure I found the best membrane it feels nice and Poppy I really like the way this keyboard feels but it's also water resistant so a spill is not going to bother this keyboard and then we have several different colors you can cycle through by pressing the function key and tab to cycle through the colors no ridiculous you know color effects just very nice tasteful colors braided cable and uh yeah I'm not going to sell this too hard because the price is is too good so head over to epicpants.com the link is going to be in the description happy keyboard and get this for that's maybe a little bit too low all right half price I already said it and then last but not least if you like chiptunes and old school style dos music my new album has just come out and you can head over to bandcamp and grab that or check it out and that link is also in the description there are any really cool programs or if you have any really awesome tips for Windows 11 and new laptops let me know about those in the comments as well I'll see you there be sure to hit the Subscribe button and the stupid Bell thing because YouTube won't tell anybody about the videos unless you do that all right I'll see you in the comments [Music]

Channel: Tek Syndicate

Views: 47,680

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

Id: 6Tu43UPU6eM

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023