Windows 10 File Explorer in Windows 11

I guess it turns out that some people don't like the new windows 11 file explorer so today I'm going to show you how to change it back stay tuned so in late 2022 Microsoft massively revamped Windows File Explorer one of the biggest features that they added was tabs now I personally like it but in reality it was the most basic implementation of tabs that Microsoft could have possibly done but it does work however some people like the ribbon interface that's used in the file explorer from Windows 10 there used to be a really easy registry hack that would give you back the Windows 10 file explorer in Windows 11 however when Microsoft released the new tabed file explorer they broke the ability to go back to the Windows 10 file explorer in Windows 11 so today I'm going to show you how to get it back anyway but first I got to pay some bills so check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor vipd key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under $20 stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10 also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25% discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit activate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10 now on with the video now the way we're going to be doing this is by using an app that I've covered several times on this channel that app is called Explorer Patcher the last time I covered Explorer Patcher it wasn't exactly working very well unfortunately it had a few pretty ser serious bugs but there were some workarounds that would get the program kind of working luckily it's been updated since then and it's running a lot better however you have to keep in mind that Explorer Patcher is a free and open source program that's being developed by just some dude like you and me there's not some giant company backing it helping to get updates out when Microsoft changes something in Windows that breaks it also the fact that Explorer Patcher is kind of an all one Swiss army knife for the windows 11 UI it's really easy to break when Microsoft changes the windows 11 UI so if you like this program and you like to see it updated in a timely manner then don't forget that you can donate to the developer but with that said let's jump on the system and I'll show you how to restore the Windows 10 file explorer and we'll also go through some of the other settings in Explorer Patcher you know just in case you haven't seen it before Okay so if you're on Windows 11 then you're familiar with this right here this is the file explorer from Windows 11 and as you can see one of the biggest changes in the new file explorer is the tabbed interface you know your ability to have multiple different tabs in Windows 11 and you know I kind of like it I've liked the interface but some people absolutely despise it and I can see why you know sometimes changes don't happen in the way that you want them to change and for stuff like that it's good to be able to go back to the way things used to be before and for that it's going to be really easy so we're going to go ahead and close file explorer here and we're going to jump into Chrome and we're going to go over to Explorer Patcher on GitHub now I'll go ahead and leave a link down in the description below but as you can see this program was updated right at the end of December so it's about a month old at this point so it's a much newer version than the one that we played around with last time so to download this all you got to do is go ahead and click on releases right here we'll click on latest and then scroll down and we want this executable right here and once you click there it should download relatively quickly and then from this point we're going to go ahead and open up our file explorer and we're going to install the program but first I'm going to go ahead and close the browser real quick here and then just double click on this executable and it should go ahead and install it once you give it user account control and then your screen's going to go black for a second and then it should come back and everything should look exactly the same as it did before and as you can see if you were to open up file explorer you still have the tab interface that you had before however we're going to change that by simply right clicking on the taskbar and as you'll see we got a lot of other options here that we didn't have before and what we want is to select properties and that'll open up the file explorer settings right here and to change our file explorer we want to click on file explorer from the menu right here and then we want to go over to right here where it says control interface and right by default it says Windows 11 command bar and we're going to go ahead and click on that and we're going to change it to the Windows 10 ribbon and then from there you click on this link that says restart file explorer and it should restart your Windows Explorer and once it restarts we're going to go ahead and open up our file explorer and as you can see now we have the old windows 10 file explorer and as you probably noticed while we were playing around right here you can see that you can also change this to the Windows 7 command bar as well so we're going to go ahead and restart file explorer real quick and we'll take a look at what that looks like and as you can see this looks a lot more reminiscent to Windows 7 right here so if that's what you want then that's an easy way to get it just like that so just interrupting this video really fast because I noticed there's one thing that I completely forgot to cover and that's if you change file explorer to the oldfashioned style file explorer there is still a bug in Explorer Patcher and if you only change the Explorer window and nothing else well if you go to right click you're going to crash Explorer every time and that's because for some reason if you change your file explorer to any different kind of Explorer anything other than the windows 11 command bar then you have to also disable the windows 11 context menu now I think that's a good thing because the windows 11 context menu sucks however if you don't do that you'll never be able to rightclick on anything without Explorer crashing so go ahead and disable the windows 11 context menu restart file explorer and that should fix the problem now back to the video now as we're sitting here in windows with Explorer Patcher open there's no need to just look at the file explorer settings that's go over some of the other settings in this program and I'll show you why it's one of my favorite programs to modify the UI in Windows 11 okay so the first thing we're going to do is jump up to taskbar right here and we're just going to go down the list and kind of see some of the highlights of some of the things that I want to show you guys so the first one is as you can see our taskbar style is Windows 11 and if you look down here it looks like Windows 11 but we can change this to Windows 10 as well and then once we change that we got to go ahead and hit the restart file explorer and we're going to be hitting this link a lot but as you can see once it starts back up you can see your computer looks a lot more like Windows 10 however you click the start menu it still opens in the middle which I find kind of funny and some of the other settings that you can also change in this is if you notice right here if you have any kind of different programs open you'll see that the taskbar is currently set to never combine so if you have multiple different windows open like for instance it's open multiple File Explorer windows and as you can see they don't combine and some people really like this functionality me personally I kind of like combining them so if you want to combine it kind of like Windows typically does at default then you can go right into here where it says combine taskbar icons and you can just change this to always combined or you can also do combine when full I usually keep mine at always combined and then that'll give you more of a typical Windows 10 desktop but if you don't like them combined then don't change that setting also another big complaint with Windows 11 is that you can't move your taskbar around however with Explorer Patcher it does allow you to change the location of the taskbar so you can click top of the screen we can hit restart file explorer and as you can see now our taskbar is up at the top of the screen of course that kind of drives me crazy I like to have it down at the bottom so I'm going to put it back there but you can decide to put it anywhere you want on the screen you can even put it on the left and right if you want to and you can also disable the search and task view buttons from right here within Explorer Patcher as well however those ones you can also disable from the regular Windows settings too however another setting in here that you can do with without Explorer Patcher but it's a lot harder is the taskbar icon size now as you can see right now our taskbar icons are just a regular default size however if we change this to small you can see they get a lot tinier so if you want to save some space on your taskbar that's a good way to do it me personally I'm going to put it back to default now the next thing we'll look at is our system tray now if we go through the system tray there's a lot of different settings that you can change right here and that's essentially this little area right down here at the right hand side of the screen for instance one of the things that really drives me crazy is with the network icon if you rightclick and hit open network and internet settings it goes into your settings panel now I would really like it to go into the Network and Sharing Center but unfortunately Microsoft has pretty much disabled that from Windows 11 however if you close this right here you can change that setting right here it's choose open network and internet settings when right clicking on the network icon if you change this you can change it to Network and Sharing Center or you can just go straight to network connections and control panel so this is the one that I would change it to now if you right click on your network icon and click open network and internet settings you get your regular Network and Sharing Center and then from there you can go to the adapter settings there if you want to however I think this is a much more usable control panel than the settings menu but that's just the way I am I like control panel better than settings personally now if we close this right here some of the other things we can look at is our our system icon tray settings it's essentially all these icons down here now in Windows 11 by default no matter what icon you click on right here it gives you this right here the control center which me personally I find really annoying because if I click on the network icon or the volume icon I don't want all this other crap I just want the one thing that I clicked on and luckily with Explorer Patcher you can restore that functionality so now by clicking on the network you just get the network by clicking on the volume you just get the volume so it I think that's a lot more usable however if you like it to open up into the control center then you can always change that just like this and by changing that all you got to do now is click on it and you get the control center like the windows 11 default but me personally I'm going to leave that the way it is however you can actually set this thing to go into different things as well like you can have it go straight to the Network and Sharing Center if you want and that way when you click on your network icon it just goes straight into the Network and Sharing Center but for me I'd like it to stay with the Windows 10 flyy out but you can also do maybe even the windows 11 flyy out if you want you you know why everyone would want to do that I don't know but you have the option to do it if you want to and if for whatever reason you are just sick and tired of this whole Control Center and you want to get rid of it completely you can come up here and uncheck it just like that and then restart file explorer and the icon goes away completely and you never have to look at it again now if we go back into the file explorer menu like we were before there's a lot of other settings in here that I'd like to look at also like for instance you can also use the Legacy file transfer dialog which personally I like the new one and let me show you what that is so if I open up file explorer here I'm just going to jump onto my network and I'm going to copy this ISO file to our desktop so if you drag it over here you can see that this right here is the file transfer dialogue box and personally I like this I think it gives you a lot of information and I I've never had an issue with it however if you like the old one I'm going to go ahead and close this real quick and we're going to switch this and say always use the Legacy file transfer and then we're going to click click on our file explorer we're going to drag this again and as you can see this is the old style file transfer dialogue box and you know like I said this one here just doesn't have the information I like having the transfer rates and stuff like that in there and this one right here kind of sort of gives you a little bit and then if you click more details you can get more details like that so you can actually get the transfer rate and stuff but I kind of like the newer one better you know it's just me but if you don't you can change it back so we're going to go ahead and cancel again and we'll move on to the next thing and that's going to be a setting that I don't know if it's broken or not but I noticed this one right here and it kind of pequ my interest and that's this one right here where it says use classic Drive groupings in this PC and if we go over and open up this PC I'm going to click there and you can see I'm assuming what they're talking about by Drive groupings is this right here however if I go use classic Drive groupings we're going to go ahead and close this and open it up again go to this PC I don't see any changes so if you guys can tell me what that setting actually does or if it might be broken in the newest version of explor Patcher then let me know below but I don't know and the next setting we're going to go to now we're going to move on to our start menu and with the start menu by default it uses the windows 11 start menu now the funny thing about that is if you click the start menu after you change the taskar to Windows 10 your start menu opens in the middle still which honestly it it's a little unintuitive but it is it is what it is but you can can also change the start menu style from Windows 11 back to the Windows 10 start menu now there are some issues using the Windows 10 start menu in Windows 11 and if you want you can go ahead and click on this link right here and it will open it up and it will tell you what those what those problems are and most of it is about pinning to the start menu and things of that nature I'll let you guys go ahead and read that yourself however I've noticed that the functionality is pretty good and I haven't seen any issues with it so some of the downsides or some of the bugs that are currently affecting the Windows 10 start menu don't seem to affect me however if we restart file explorer and we look at the Windows 10 start menu if we click on it it still opens in the middle which is kind of funny for the Windows 10 start menu to open in the middle but you can change that right here you can change the position to at the edge of screen and then if you open it then it'll open in the proper position of where it's supposed to be but now that we're here this isn't actually the Windows 10 start menu this is just a recreation of it done by Explorer Patcher but it's a pretty good Recreation it's about a perfect Recreation of the start menu I think but what you can do is you can do a lot of tweaks to it as well so let me show you some of these for instance the corner preference you can have it not rounded which would be the default for Windows 10 or you can also do it in a rounded docked menu or a rounded floating menu so let's go ahead and look at both of them if we go to rounded Corners docked and then we open it up you can see that now all the corners are rounded on it just like kind of more similar to the windows 11 start menu however if we go to the rounded corners and the floating menu then you'll notice that this is a lot more like the windows 11 menu in fact it actually has all four corners round it and it's floating kind of above the taskbar like Windows 11 so if you wanted to use this what you could do is you could put this at the center of the screen go back to your taskbar and go back to the windows 11 taskbar we're going to go ahead and restart real quick so now when you click on your start menu you have the windows 10 start menu but it's in the middle like Windows 11 that's one of the reasons why I think Explorer Patcher is such a useful app because of some of the mods you can do you can have a pretty much hybrid version of Windows within Windows 11 now the other thing I wanted to look at if we go back over to start menu you can also change the display mode which essentially this gives you kind of the Windows 8 style start menu so if we go to full screen start go ahead and hit yes to the administrator permissions and now if we click on the start menu you have more of a Windows 8 Style full screen start menu which honestly I never liked windows8 in the first place so I wouldn't really make use of that but you also have I'm going to go ahead and change that back you can also change the way the app list is set up so the app list if you click on the start menu the app list is this list right here in the middle so if you want you could actually go to hide the app list completely and by hiding it when we open the start menu now it essentially just gives us our tiles and that's it but we can click on it right here and then we can get our applist so it kind of breaks the menu up a little bit so you have your app list and your tiles on different menus however you can actually disable the app list completely and by doing that it gives you no access whatsoever to the applist now I think this section right here when it comes to the applist would work really good on systems that have programs that you don't want people using for instance if you have a computer set up in a library or a school or somewhere in a workplace place where you don't want people to get to the app list you want them just to use specific apps this would come in really handy in fact I may use this at some point okay so the next thing I want to look at right here is the windows switcher and essentially what the windows switcher is is just your alt tab to be able to switch between different programs and things of that nature now there's really only one setting in here and you can switch the windows switcher to different versions of the windows switcher from different versions of Windows now we can go back to the Windows 10 so if we set it back to window Windows 10 restart file explorer and then we'll go ahead and look at what that one looks like this one's essentially oh it closed our file explorers let's get a couple applications open here so we can actually see what it does so if we hit alt tab now you can see this is the Windows 10 Windows switcher now you can also go to the Windows NT style which if you guys were around during Windows NT it was kind of basic compared to the way it is now but if we open some apps up right there and we hit alt tab you can see this is the classic windows switcher that we had for years with Windows NT Windows 98 and different programs like that now you can also go to a simple Windows switcher and this gives you tons of different settings right here and this one's more of a custom windows switcher so I'm going to go ahead and hit restart file explorer and I'll I'll let show you what this one looks like just in its somewhat default form but if we hit alt tab now it gives you one that looks kind of similar to the windows 11 one however it has tons of different settings that you can change to change kind of the usability or the different ways that it functions but I'll let you go through that yourself now the next one I want to look at requires us to switch the taskbar back to the Windows 10 Styles so I'm going to go ahead and do that and I'm also going to go to the start menu and I'm going to set it over to the edge of the screen so I'm going to go ahead and hit restart file explorer get us back to our Windows 10 and as you notice there's a link here called weather that doesn't show up unless you're in the Windows 10 taskbar now this is not Windows weather this is not the typical weather icon that you get in window windows but I'm going to go ahead and turn it on right here and as you can see you have essentially this little weather icon right here that looks a lot like the Microsoft one but it's really not this is a a completely custom version of the weather icon that I think is actually usable so if you click on it it gives you your weekly forecast and also gives you tons of information right here however you can go through and you can change a lot of the settings on this thing you can change the temperature units you can change even the size of the actual widget itself you can have it say automatically fit or you can have it fixed you can also even change the icon pack from Microsoft to Google and as you can see it will change all the icons to the more Google looking icons but for me I kind of like the Microsoft icons I don't know if there's a way that you can add different icon packs to it but if there is then let me know down in the comments below so if you go right here right it by default goes to the right bottom but you can click right here and you can have it go to the left top and that essentially sends it that's not really the left top that's the left bottom I would think but if you yeah I I don't know so either way you can have it on this side or you can flip it over to that side over there and you can also change the size of the widget as well so you can make it go all the way down to 25% so if you click on it it gives you this itty bitty little weather icon but you can also go to 200% and it gives you this really giant weather widget so I think this is a very useful weather icon and when you click on it it doesn't give you a bunch of news articles that you really don't want to see and if you just Mouse over it it doesn't open a stupid menu that you really didn't want because you were trying to go for the network icon and not Microsoft's propaganda and another thing I wanted to look at right here real quick before we went is if you click over into other right down here at the bottom there's some useful settings right here this says prevent the following control panel links from being redirected to the settings app now this is a huge thing right right here and it allows you to choose which ones you want and which ones you don't want however let me let me show you what this actually means if we click on the start button and we search for control panel and we open this up right here and we were to click on let's just say we want to click on system in security and we want to go into system well if you click on that it reroutes you to the settings app well say you want the original system link so if we close that we're going to go ahead and check this right here and now if we click on system it opens system just like you want it to I think just these settings right here make this program worthwhile by themselves not even counting all the other cool stuff you can do with it so one of the reasons that I really like this program is not only because well it's free but it does really a really good job of bringing the Windows 10 UI into Windows 11 now I don't use Windows 11 on a daily basis all of my systems are still running Windows 10 but there's coming a day that's not too long away that windowss 10 is going to lose support when that day comes we'll have no other choice than to upgrade to Windows 11 or Windows 12 depending on how good that release is going to be so when that day comes I like the fact that I'll still be able to enjoy a lot of the things that I've came to like about Windows 10 but with all that said if you like customizing the UI of windows then check out this playlist where I show you how to turn windows 11 into pretty much any previous version of Windows available um I'm missing a few but not many as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 40,157

Keywords: File explorer, windows 11 file explorer, Windows 10 file explorer, Explorer patcher, change windows 11 file explorer

Id: uNmCgi6lsQU

Length: 22min 39sec (1359 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024