Alright, the title is just a bit clickbait. I'm not saying that Windows 11 is necessarily bad,
but there's definitely room for improvement even if just out of personal preference.
But even if you're still using Windows 10, you'll find this video helpful because some
of the programs will improve on built-in features whether you're using 10 or 11,
it'll help for both. And of course, I'll put all the links in the description.
So we can start off with probably the most debatable thing about Windows 11,
the new start menu. I personally was a big fan of the Windows 10 start menu,
its customization ability, you can like create tiles, move it all around. I really liked it.
So there's actually a program called Start11 that lets you use a start menu
that is a lot like Windows 10 or a couple other options as well. And you can see I
have it configured to pretty much look exactly like it did when I was using
Windows 10. Now this program actually lets you also replace the taskbar if you want.
So you can have different functionality for the little window icons. You can have it like
full width, you can have it stacking a little bit differently. I personally don't care about that,
so I don't have it replace the taskbar, just the start menu,
but you could. And as far as the start menu, you have a lot of customization here.
So you can choose the general overall start menu style. Like there's one called modern,
there's one that's closer to the Windows 7. I just like the Windows 10 one. And you
can do stuff like customizing shortcuts on the left, whether it'll show recent apps and stuff,
or you can choose to not show that list of apps on the left at all if you want.
Also you can even add a shortcut to it that will make the default start menu pop
up if you need to access it. You can even have the program replace the entire search
functionality through the start menu, but I just have to keep it the same. But even if
you don't replace the whole taskbar, you can still add some customization to it.
So you can have the right click menu to be more like Windows 10. By default,
there's like one setting, it just says taskbar settings, kind of a waste. Whereas with this,
now you can have a few more settings show up. Now I will point out Start11 is not free,
but it's really affordable. It's only like $6. I think it's well worth it.
And you can also do a 30 day free trial if you want. All right,
next up is a program called Everything or Everything search. It's a program that
basically is way better than the built in Windows search functionality. I mean,
incredibly better. And this is going to be useful whether you're on Windows 10 or Windows 11.
And basically it just allows you to do instantly fast searches across
your entire computer. You can see that this is literally 2 million files here,
and as I'm typing, it instantly narrows it down as I'm typing with every character.
It's incredibly fast and it just puts the default search functionality in Windows
to shame. But it's extremely capable of a lot more that you might not think of.
So for example, you can see here, I have literally every single file on the computer
sorted by modified date. So I can literally see files that are being modified in real time. So
this might be good if you accidentally save a file somewhere and you're not sure where the
heck you put it. You can maybe just look in the list of modified files recently.
And that's also assuming maybe you didn't know the name of it,
otherwise you could just search for it directly. You can also view the results in different modes.
So you can have it search for details, but also in the thumbnail mode too, if you're
searching for images specifically. But it can also do a lot of advanced search techniques.
So you can search within a path obviously. So you can either right click in the context
menu and it'll open up and narrow it down to that path. Or you can just do that from the main menu,
if you like click it from the system tray. You can use wildcards if you're
not sure different parts of the file name, you can even use regex.
If you're familiar with that, it's like an entire programming language around filtering,
it's pretty crazy, you can use that. You can also create custom filters
if you find yourself searching for something really similarly often,
you can just do that and reuse it. You can also have it index the contents of a file.
So if it's a text based file and you don't know what it's called, but you know what's in it,
or you want to find all files mentioning something, you can do an advanced search
and tell it to search within those. Also in the settings, you can have it index different amounts
of data about each file. For example, you can see whether or not you want it to maybe index
the modified date of the file, the created date, the attributes, the size, all that sort of stuff.
You don't have to, and you can see it adds a little bit extra data for each file. But for me,
I'd rather just have it all there, I don't care, it's not taking up too much
extra space. But if you literally only want it to index the names of the file,
you could do that. Before we continue, I do want to thank today's sponsor,
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And with all that being said, let's continue. Alright next up we have a
program that can replace the Windows File Explorer itself. It's called Directory Opus,
I did make a video about it pretty recently, if you want to go back and
check that for a lot more details, but I'll quickly go over the benefits of it here.
It's probably overkill for most people, but it adds so much additional functionality
and customization that you can do way more than what Windows Explorer
can ever do. For example, it can do tabbed File Explorer windows,
although with the latest Windows 11 version file Explorer has that by default.
But maybe if you're using windows 10, for example. It has fully customizable
toolbars. Literally every single one of these buttons can be changed or moved or renamed or
change the icon, that sort of thing. And just a couple of feature examples,
you can create tab groups that will open a preset group of directories in different tabs.
So I have one for video production that opens all the folders I might need while
doing that. Here's a useful button that will escalate the program to admin for a
set number of minutes. So if you're doing a lot of things that require permissions,
this won't need you to ask every time. You can split the view top to bottom or side to side.
And there's also a filtering box down here. It's kind of similar to Everything search,
although it just is for one directory. And like before, as you're typing, it will filter
for that directory, incredibly useful. And there are more preferences on the back end
than you can really ever imagine. I don't think I could go through every single one of these.
I'll also point out, though, that Directory Opus also is not free. It's 89 Australian Dollars.
So you'll have to do the conversion into your currency. But in my opinion, as a power user,
as I like to think of myself, it's more than worth it in my case. But for a lot of people,
it might be overkill. Although I will point out that there are a lot of other
File Explorer replacement options that are free.
And if you go to the other video where I talked about Directory Opus, there are plenty
of comments from people talking about their particular File Explorer free alternative.
So maybe go check those out, too. All right next up, we have a program WinAero Tweaker.
And like the name suggests, it lets you do a lot of different various tweaks with Windows
11 or Windows 10 that usually you have to go and dig around the registry to change.
There are some Windows 11 specific ones and a couple notable ones, in my opinion. For example,
you can restore the classic full context menu by default. So you probably know
Windows 11 has this new context menu. But if you want to see all the options,
you have to click show more, whereas this will just bring up the show more all the time.
Another one I'm a fan of is this taskbar tray icon row number. Basically,
this makes Windows 11 show two rows of system tray icons instead of the default one. In Windows 10,
I was just used to having two there, so now I can have it look like that. But there's also plenty of
other general tweaks that are not just for Windows 11, but also Windows 10 you might want to look at.
Here's a couple examples. Automatic Registry Backup. So I didn't actually
know that Windows 11 and 10 no longer automatically backup the registry,
it used to, with this it will. And that will go into the system32/config/RegBack
directory. And apparently this will take a couple days. The frequency is not clear.
For example, I just did it yesterday and it still shows these files is empty. But at least it'll be
there eventually, and it'll be a little bit of piece of mind. Here's another useful one,
the Take Ownership context menu option. Sometimes for whatever reason, you come across a file
that's not a system file, but for whatever reason, your user account can't access it.
You can now take ownership of it so your account is now the owner of it. All right,
here's one that I'm a huge fan of, Navigation Pane Custom Items. So you might know on the left
hand side, you can enable the navigation pane in file explorer. And there are a
few default items that'll show up that can be expanded to show different directories.
You can add stuff to the quick items thing, like Home. But beyond that, you can't add more. Now
some programs will add their own, like Dropbox, OneDrive, but there's no way to add your very
own shortcuts or folders there. Well, now you can with this. So for example, I added a couple
for YouTube shortcuts and ones for like coding, things that I'm going to access really frequently.
And I want to have a shortcut right there in the navigation pane. Now
you can add stuff like that. But you should look through this yourself,
there's plenty of other tweaks. I mean, you can even set it so windows doesn't add "-shortcut"
when you create a shortcut. So I personally prefer it doesn't, so I changed that too.
Okay, moving on to the next program, we have O&O ShutUp10++. Now even though it says 10,
it also applies to windows 11. That's what the plus plus is for,
it's a programming reference. Anyway, it lets you disable a lot of annoyances
in windows and tracking settings and privacy stuff really easily.
For example, I have it disable Cortana, I've never used that. App suggestions, definitely don't want
automatic installation of windows store apps, that sort of thing. Now it will show whether a setting
is recommended to change or not. Although I would definitely just go through everything
yourself. There are plenty of recommended settings that I don't necessarily care about,
and I don't want to change. And also take note that there's two different
tabs for applying settings to either the current user or the entire machine,
and there are a couple of differences there. All right now finally, we have Microsoft PowerToys.
This is a set of tools published by Microsoft and they're adding to it pretty much all the time.
Two of my absolute favorite ones are File Locksmith. This will let you right click
any file if you can't delete it for whatever reason, it says it's in use,
but it won't tell you what's using it. You can [click] "What's Using This File"
and it will literally tell you. So obviously that's extremely useful.
Another cool one is Text Extractor. This lets you highlight any area of the screen and it'll use
optical character recognition to extract the text. Like if you want to copy something that you can't
directly highlight, like if it's in a picture or something, so that'll definitely come in
handy. And there's plenty of other tools and you don't need to have them all enabled necessarily.
I mostly just have a couple enabled and the other ones disabled and some of them,
if I do ever need to use it, I could just go and enable it, use it, and then disable it
if I want. Cause there are some other cool ones like this Color Picker is pretty neat,
or Always On Top lets you set a program to be always on top, stuff like that.
And so that pretty much covers it. Let me know what you guys think is
your favorite tool or maybe there's something that I never talked about,
you can mention it down in the comments. Also thanks again to Private Internet Access for
sponsoring. Be sure to click the link in the description so you can get that special deal.
If you want to keep watching, I'll put a couple links here. One is for
the Directory Opus video I mentioned and the other one for where I went into a lot more
detail about the different PowerToys that I just talked about. So you can just click on
one of those if you want. So thanks so much for watching guys and I'll see you in the next one.