Windows 11 Configuration: Privacy, Desktop Settings & Registry Hacks

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time i'm going to demonstrate various ways to configure windows 11 so if it operates well a bit more like the way some of us would like it to operate and specifically i'm going to start out by delving into the settings before moving on to some more fundamental registry hacks right here we are in a clean copy of windows 11 home with its default settings and the first thing i'm going to do both to make things easier to see in this video and because i always do it anyway is to scale up both the interface and its fonts so we'll go down to the start menu and we'll go to settings where we'll default straight into system as you can see over there and we'll go to display where i'm going to set a scale factor of 150 like that and immediately things are larger on the screen but i'd like my fonts even larger but i'm not going to do that by changing the scale factor to make it any bigger because that can interfere with the operation of some programs rather i'm going to go across to accessibility over there and we'll go to text size and i'm going to put the text size up to i think about 120 percent and there we are i'm now happy with the size of the display this said back in accessibility i'm also going to change the size of the mouse pointer over here just a little bit take it up to size two that's a little bit easier to see and having done that we'll go back here again and we'll also go into text cursor and i'm going to make this slightly thicker if we go down here we can change the thickness you'll see there's a preview over here as i slide this across it gets thicker about i think about about maybe five on that makes things easier to see so there we are we've made things easier to work with although a final thing i'm going to do which i always do on a new system is to go back into settings i was just there let's go back again and i'm going to go to personalization over there i'm going to go into themes and then if we scroll down here under themes than the whites in themes these days but it is i'm going to go to desktop icon settings where i'm going to turn on computer so we can see this pc on the desktop so we'll go okay with that and close that down there it is we now have this pc which i think should always be at the top like that there we are things are nice and neat we've gone from this to this so let's now make a few quick changes to the taskbar and start menu which by default appears in the middle here in windows 11 so we'll go down to the taskbar and right click and select taskbar settings where the first thing i'm going to do is to turn off the display of widgets and chat on my taskbar make things less cluttered down here and also if we scroll down we get to taskbar behaviors down there and in this set of settings we can do things like automatically hiding the taskbar i sometimes do that i sometimes don't but more significantly we can set the alignment to be left which i find much better because now the start menu is appearing on the left which is where i at least think it should be positioned and there's something else i want to do here which i'm going to demonstrate by plugging in a usb flash drive to the computer like that hopefully it'll appear down there it has we can select what happens with removable drives this new copy of windows for me it's going to be take no action i don't like auto play but i know many people do but obviously select what you want when that comes up but now we've got removable storage plugged into our computer how can we eject it when we're finished using it well we could go up to this pc and do it in there but i like to have an icon down on the taskbar and by default here in windows 11 we don't the icon is here in the taskbar overflow but what we can do is to grab the eject icon there it is and to drag it down to the taskbar like that so to eject the media i can just click on that and eject straight away and then it disappears like that but just to prove it worked if i remove the usb drive and plug it in again like that this time the eject icon will always be displayed right we'll now turn our attention to privacy and turning off product recommendations and even adverts that you might not want to see note that during installation i opted out of all of the data gathering aspects of windows 11 that i could so many things here are already disabled but if you didn't do this and now want to i'll point out where the relevant controls are located so let's go into settings where first of all we're going to go in system to notifications and we will scroll down right to the bottom where we find two settings for offer suggestions on how i can set up my device i do not want that and get tips and suggestions when i use windows i certainly don't want that either next we'll go across to privacy and security and go to general where we can note at the top that because of the choices i made during installation already turned off is the ability of windows to show me personalized ads using my advertising id so you might want to turn that on you probably don't i suggest you keep it off and also here i'm going to turn off show me suggested content in the settings app like that but i'll leave these two middle ones on it can make things a bit easier to use windows if it knows what you've been doing but i can totally understand you might want to turn these off as well if you don't want windows keeping any record of what you're doing next we'll go back a level and we'll go down a little bit and we'll get to diagnostics there it is and already here i've told windows via installation settings not to send optional diagnostic data some people might want to do that i certainly don't and you can see lots of things here already turned off which i think is a good idea turn them on if you want but i will keep them turned off but finally here still activated is feedback frequency how often windows asked me for feedback i don't want to be asked for feedback i'm going to put never in that box so i can just get on with using my computer finally here we'll look at personalization where if we scroll down to device usage we can select all the ways we plan to use our device which will give us personalized tips advertisements and recommendations within microsoft experiences they even admit here they're going to send you adverts here as you can see again because of how i set things up everything is turned off my advice here would be to look through these settings to ask yourself do you need anything here turned on if you don't need it turned on just leave it turned off finally recently we've seen reports of microsoft trying to display adverts inside windows explorer so we're going to stop that happening by opening it up and going to the menu and going to options and to view and then somewhere down here i always lose it is something about sync provider notifications there it is look we'll turn off show sync provider notifications or in other words allowing microsoft and third-party providers to publish content in the file explorer and we'll click on apply and also apply to folders to apply it to all the folders on this machine and so hopefully we've now done everything we easily can to prevent microsoft from gathering data on us and using windows 11 to deliver unwanted content right let's move on from the standard windows settings to making changes to the registry and the first thing we're going to do is to make windows shut down more quickly because as you may know the windows shutdown sequence includes a wait period to allow open programs to save their data before they're forced to close however if you always close down your applications before you shut down windows this wait time can be safely reduced to make the change we need to open the registry editor which can be done in several ways but here i'm going to hold down the windows key on the keyboard and press r to run a command and then we'll type reg edit like that to go into the registry editor and confirm we want to do it and here we are in the registry editor where earlier i've gone to view and to font and i've set a slightly larger font so things are easier to see on the screen and before we proceed to make any changes i should note that making changes to the registry should be done with great care because if the registry becomes corrupt windows may not boot so changes here in the registry should always be made at your own risk this said to slightly reduce the risk we can take a copy a backup of the registry before we start if we do this we can go up to file and export like that it's set to export to our documents folder that is fine we'll give it a file name like this that seems okay i've set the export range to be the whole registry and we'll now press save and there we are it's complete so if the registry does get corrupted and windows will still boot we can always go back to file and import and bring back our backup anyway with that all done and said let's make windows shut down more quickly and to do that we need to navigate to ht local machine double click that and then we'll go to system and we'll go to current control set and we'll click on control and then over here you see we've got a value we can set for weight to kill service timeout we'll double click that where you'll see the default value is set to 5000 milliseconds or in other words five seconds so i'm going to change this to 1 1000 milliseconds or one second that should be absolutely fine and having done that we'll close down the registry editor and to implement a registry change we need to reboot the system so we'll do a quick reboot with the magic of filmmaking and here we are back again and i'm going to speed forward in time just so windows has settled so we can do a proper test of the new shutdown speed and there we are i think we'll now declare windows well and truly booted and to see the difference of before and after making the change we'll do this bring up before and after on the screen and compare the difference now in shutdown speed now earlier in the video we resized our interface by making some display scaling changes and also changes to font size because these were pretty much the only controls available to us but by making a registry change we can also take independent control of the size of the icons on the taskbar so to do that i'll again hold down the windows key and press r to run regedit like that and we'll get up back into the registry there we are and we now want to navigate back to the top of the registry so we can go somewhere else let's just close down what we're doing previously like that and this time i want to go to hq current user like that and to software and to microsoft and to windows which must be down the bottom if my alphabet is okay my head there we are there is a windows we now want to go to current version and we also want to go to explorer which is somewhere down here like that and having clicked into that we can click into advanced and then finally here we could right click and do a new and a 32-bit d-word value like that and we're going to call it task bar psi like that and enter and if we now double-click we can give it a value and the value here can be zero one or two with zero being small icons on the taskbar one being medium size and two being large and if you're wondering before we've added this windows default to medium the equivalent to a value of one here so if we entered a value one here there's no point doing this at all but if you want smaller taskbar icons you could leave a value of zero but i want a larger taskbar icon there so i'll put in the value of two and ok like that and again we'll close down the registry and again to implement the change we need to do a reboot of the system so we'll just rapidly do that and here we are coming back again and by jingo we've got a much larger taskbar now massively larger taskbar icons which have forced a larger taskbar i think that's too big even for me but the great thing is we can use this setting in combination with the settings we had previously so let's go back into display scaling and we'll now make that say a scalar one two five which will still leave us a nice larger taskbar but i'm not going to go back and also change my fonts and accessibility i think maybe most slightly larger now they were 120 let's go to about say 150 i think and we'll apply that and i also want to go into accessibility and my mouse cursor is a bit smaller because the scale's less if you see what i mean so we'll make that a little bit bigger like that and yes i think that's an improvement we've still got a decent sized taskbar we've got everything else roughly the same size but we've got bigger icons here on the taskbar and indeed more space to work with when we're running up lots of programs here in windows so there we are that's just another setting you might want to play with and if you're wondering how would you get rid of it once you've done that you just go back into the registry editor like that and like that we go back to where we were it's kept opposition and the taskbar size down there and if you wanted to get rid of this you could either click that and set the value to one which gives you the windows default or you could right click and go to a delete but i'm going to leave that there but i thought it only proper to indicate how you would reverse a registry change now one of the things that really annoys me and many other people here in windows 11 is that if you go to the file explorer and you right click a file or a folder like that you don't get a full context menu rather you get a reduced set of choices and one of the choices is to show more options which brings up the full context menu which should have appeared in the first place now fortunately there is a registry hack which will sort this out but it's a bit more involved than the hacks we've been looking at so far and not least it involves pasting in a rather long new registry key name and so what i've done is to create a little file here in notepad which has got all information in it including that rather long new registry key name we're going to have to put in and i'll put this information into the video description and i'll also give you a link to this file in case you want to do this and you want to paste this value across so let's open up the registry editor in the way we've been doing so far in the video like that and here we need to go to hkey current user and we need to go to software and to classes and then we need to scroll down a very very long way to find cl sid which is somewhere down here a's and the b's and the c's cls id is there and what we now need to do is to right-click cls id and to do a new and key and there it is down there we need to give it that very long name we've seen previously so we'll just out tab back across to a notepad and do an edit and a copy and then go back into the registry editor it's taken us out of edit hasn't it so we can now just rename that and paste in the name and make sure you get the whole thing including the brackets on either end and there we are and we now need to right click this in turn and do another new key like that and this key is going to be called in proc server 32 and of course you could paste that in if you wanted to as well next with this new key selected we need to go across to the right plane and double click on default like that to bring up this edit string window and we don't have to do anything here other than clicking on ok but if you don't do that this hack won't work but hopefully it will work and so we'll just close down the registry editor and a notepad as well which is leaping around the screen and we will do our standard reboot to implement our registry change and here we are back again and if we've got a fair wind behind us we can now go down to the file explorer we can right click and yes windows 11 now has a context menu that works the way it should like it or loathe it windows 11 is the future of windows and in that context i hope that some of the things i've demonstrated in this video will help you adjust windows 11 and use windows 11 most effectively but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 108,240

Keywords: Windows 11 settings, Windows 11 text size, Windows 11 context menu, Windows 11 hacks, Windows 11 registry hacks, Windows 11 fast shutdown, Windows 11 privacy, Windows 11 privacy settings, Windows 11 turn off ads, turn off ads, turn off adverts, Windows 11, Windows11, Windows 11 registry settings, edit Windows registry, Windows registry editor, registry backup, export Windows registry, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Windows 11 taskbar, Windows 11 start menu, start menu

Id: QqLbk-PmX2Q

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022