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.
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And with all that being said, let's 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.