Well, it's finally time for the major Windows 11 2022 update.
Microsoft switched from doing two updates a year to just one in Windows 11,
and they'll be slightly bigger. And they definitely did that this year. In fact,
in terms of features, I think this is one of the biggest updates we've seen in a long time.
Now this feature update won't auto-install yet, it's gonna be rolling out over a matter of weeks,
I believe. But if you do want to manually install it, the first thing you can try is to go into the
Windows Update menu and check for updates. And it might say Windows 11 22H2 available,
and that's an optional thing you can click.
So you can do that if that shows up. But for me, it didn't quite show up. I don't know why, maybe
it didn't roll out to my computer. So another way you can do it is to manually install it,
if you go to the "Download Windows 11" page on Microsoft's website, I'll put that link in the
description, you can download the Windows 11 installation assistant, and go through that.
And that will install the latest version, 2022 H2. And that did work for me. First,
let's start off with an extremely highly requested feature that is still not quite in here yet.
It'll be added in October, which is tabbed File Explorer. There's a few updates that Microsoft is
holding off, I guess they wanna polish it off, and in October that's when they'll release it,
even though they technically say it's part of this update, but we'll have to wait for that,
and it's just a couple more weeks away. And I think I'll probably make a video about that
in itself when it comes along, just cuz it's been so long that we've been asking
for this. And then there's a couple more features that are gonna be added in October,
you can just read through these like an improved Photos app, that sort of thing.
But the rest of the features are in this new update. So one of them is the new Task Manager
design. So you can see it has a more updated modern design, and it is all the same stuff.
You have all the tabs on the left that you had before that were on the top.
Though, one thing that I noticed is it seemed really laggy. Way laggy-er than the previous one.
You can see, even in a virtual machine, the old task manager,
I can click through all the tabs really quickly, it instantly switches. In the new task manager,
I don't know if this is just for me, it takes like multiple seconds to go to the processes tab.
It's like laggy clicking around. I don't know if that's a bug, I don't know if that's just me,
but hopefully that gets worked out. Still though,
it does look a lot nicer. There's a new settings menu instead of the options that were at the top
before. There's only a few settings in here, but the one you probably want to enable is
"Always On Top." Just so it can't be hidden by anything. But yeah,
the rest of it in terms of information, it's the same as the previous one.
Next, this was also highly requested, a more customizable start menu. We have a couple things
added here. So first you can now create, start menu folders. So what you do is just drag one
icon onto the other. It can be kind of finicky, but once it does work,
you now have a folder. You can click it, expand it, and of course rename it to whatever you want.
So easier to organize shortcuts on there. If you right click on the Start menu and go to
Start Settings, you'll see a new set of options at the top for the layout of the Start menu. So now
you have the option to use the "More Pins" layout, the Default, or "More Recommendation" options. And
this is pretty self-explanatory with more pins, you just have two recommendations at the bottom,
and you have more space to put actual icons that you want to show up in the start menu.
There's no way to completely remove recommendations still,
but I guess it's better than what we had before. This next feature is pretty cool,
it's a new snap layouts bar at the top. So if you go to drag a window up towards the top of
the screen, you'll see this little bar start to peak out. And then if you drag it all the way up,
you'll see a new little bar with a bunch of different options for a layouts.
And if you drag the window over those layouts, you'll see that it kind of
highlights and lets you select where exactly in each layout you want to use,
and where you wanna put that window. While you're doing this, it'll also show on the
desktop overall, a little blurred area to show you exactly where that window is gonna show up,
so that's kind of a cool touch. Then you just simply release it to place it,
so I just put the notepad on the left. And if you have other windows,
it'll actually let you select where to put some other ones, if you want. So for example,
for each other layout spot it, then lets you choose which window that's already open
you wanna put there. So for this, I put the notepad on the left, and then the top right
I can put the Settings window, and then after I place the settings,
it'll pop up an option for the bottom right. And I can put the File Explorer down there,
for example. So this will definitely make it easier to start to manage multiple windows if
you use that commonly. As an interesting side note, if you try to drag a window up there that
can't be resized, like this virtual machine window, it just won't even show the bar at all.
And also interestingly, if you are selecting which window to put into a layout spot, it also
won't even give you an option to place a window that can't be resized. So that does make sense,
but it's just something to be aware of. Next, we have another pretty big feature, which are
Live Captions. You can bring up this feature by pressing Win + Ctrl + L or you can find
it in the settings as well. After you enable it, at the top you're gonna see a bar appear.
And this is the area where the live captions are going to eventually show up.
And you can see the first time you run it, it'll prompt you to hit download, and that
will download, I guess whatever requirements are to process the voice locally. So it's not
like it's being sent to the cloud, everything's happening on your device, in terms of privacy.
And then after you do download it, it'll say "Ready to Caption." I'll
show it actually in action in a second, but first let me show you a couple things.
So you'll notice that this bar actually kind of reduces the usable space on the monitor. So
what I mean by that is if you go full screen in a program, apps won't cover that area,
that bar. And you can even see the snap layouts bar will now appear below the live captions bar,
so nothing's gonna interfere with that. So the live captions are always viewable. You
can also drag the bar to be bigger or smaller, and on the right you'll see a gear for options,
and you can choose the positions, whether it's at the top by default,
at the bottom. You can also just have it floating around and that will always stay on top
if it's floating. You also have the option to choose whether to filter out profanity. And
also if you want it to detect audio from your microphone. And there's also options
to customize how the text appears like the font, the font color, the background color,
font size, all sorts of stuff like that. Now how it works is after it says ready to caption,
anytime any audio is playing that it detects has some kind of voice in there,
it will just simply automatically start captioning them. And I have to say,
it does a pretty darn good job. Yes, it did have a couple occasional misses that were kind of weird.
But overall, I would say just a rough estimate, it was like 90% accurate. Though that's just off
the top of my head. I also think it seems to be smart enough to ignore any music playing.
Because I tried playing a few instrumental music tracks in the background, and it still seemed to
be able to detect my voice almost just as good. It seemed to maybe miss a little bit more frequently,
but still pretty good considering there was stuff going on simultaneously. So
overall I definitely think the live captioning feature is good.
Definitely usable, more than usable. So whether you're hard of hearing or possibly just
at a boring meeting or something, and you wanna watch some other video,
now you can just show what's being said on the screen, even if the video itself
hasn't been transcribed, so pretty cool. Alright now the next feature is Smart App Control,
this one's gonna take a little bit to explain. It basically lets you completely lock down
the computer and only allows any executable or program to run
if it is either signed by a trusted certificate, a code signing certificate, or has been vetted
and is well known to the Smart Screen, which is like Microsoft's antivirus cloud thing.
However, the big catch is if you already are using Windows,
you cannot enable this after the fact. You can only enable this on a new computer or a clean
installation of Windows. So you can see, I did a clean installation on a virtual machine. And
in here, it defaulted to what is called "Evaluation Mode." So this is basically
where it kind of tries it out, sees if you run any programs that it would interfere with.
And I think if it does, then it just goes off. But if it doesn't,
I think it'll recommend that you do enable it, or I can just enable it here manually. However,
on my main computer, it is not enabled. Actually, it doesn't show any setting, but
when I try to select to enable it, it doesn't do anything. Even after I select that and
do the UAC prompt, it still doesn't show anything afterwards. And what's important to know, is you
can turn it off at any time, but you can't turn it back on if you do. And the reason for this is,
I assume they want this Smart App Control feature to kind of be like a guaranteed secure state.
It's probably gonna be extremely effective in blocking malware, because obviously malware is
not gonna be signed by a trusted certificate, or at least you would definitely hope not.
So even if something was able to get through your antivirus, and wasn't detected, then
it's not gonna be able to run, even if it got through everything, because it's not signed.
And you can see here, I just made an empty EXE file. And if I tried to run it,
it simply says, "This app can't run on your computer." Now for 99.9% of people,
I actually think this is a pretty decent feature. Most people are not using
unsigned apps. They're usually made by like smaller developers
that can't afford a code signing certificate. Or I believe even if it's not signed, if enough people
have downloaded and run it, and it's decided to be trusted, then you'll still be able to run it.
So the only apps that don't run are really apps that are not commonly downloaded and not signed at
all, which is a very small set of apps. If you're a developer, obviously you might be creating
EXE files that you would want to run and test, so that might be a problem,
you probably don't want that to be enabled. But if you're just like on a business computer, that's
definitely a feature I would want to have enabled, because if you're on a business PC, your company
is, then you're probably already gonna have a list of programs that you only wanna allow
anyway. So it'll probably protect from people accidentally downloading any kind
of virus that would be like ransomware or something. One funny thing that happened,
is I noticed when I tried to run the Terminal in this virtual machine where it is enabled,
it popped up a thing that said that it couldn't run part of the program, which is wsl.exe,
because it couldn't figure out who published it. But that's Windows Subsystem for Linux,
which is part of Windows, it's by Microsoft. So that's kind of funny. And also I'll note that
it even blocks apps if it's put into a Window Sandbox, so you can't really get around it. So
if you're on a computer that is like mission critical and you only have a certain set of
apps that you want to use, and you're not gonna be installing apps that are sort of uncommon,
then I don't see a reason not to enable this. It'll just that much more increase the security
of your PC. Of course, you'd probably have to do a clean install to enable it. Alright next
up we have Focus Sessions and Do Not Disturb. So do not disturb, it's pretty self-explanatory,
it'll just not show notification, little popups or noises.
It'll simply send the notification to the notification center and then you can look through
them after the fact. For focus sessions, it's sort of like a temporary do not disturb, you can
think of it like. So you can choose a timer, where for like the next 30 minutes or hour or whatever,
it will set do not disturb, and also enable a couple other options depending on what you want.
For example, you can have it hide any flashing Task Bar apps,
hide badges in the Task Bar, and you can run it either from the settings,
or probably the easier way is from the clock app. So if you just search that in the Start menu,
you'll have options for this focus mode. So that's kind of cool. Next is another big one,
which is Clipchamp, and it's actually a included video editor in Windows now.
So Microsoft, I believe bought that company that made Clipchamp so they could put it into Windows.
And it's actually a pretty respectable video editor I would say. It definitely seems good
enough for basic stuff, maybe even a little bit more complicated. I mean,
you have a bunch of filters you can put on video tracks, you can see on the left,
you have a bunch of different places where you can import like stock video.
You can add text of course, it has a bunch of templates.
So these are pre-made things like a title for YouTube. And actually you can see there's quite
a bit that was added to this. So seems like you can get complicated if you want. I only
played around with it for about a minute, so I can't really tell you how good it is.
But just on the surface seems to be able to do a lot of stuff. You of course have transitions,
you can adjust the clip speed, all that sort of stuff, you got quite
a bit of options. So for most people, I definitely think it's good enough worth
trying to use. Next up for Android apps, you might know that you can install the
Amazon app store on Windows 11 and then run Android apps from it. Before there was an
extremely limited list of about 1000 apps from the Amazon app store that you could install,
they've now increased that to about 20,000. So they've greatly increased
which ones are curated for Windows 11. And also I believe it looks like they rolled out
the Amazon App Store to international markets, so if you weren't able to use
this Android Sub-system feature before, try it now. Coming near the end, we got a couple more.
A major accessibility feature that was added is Voice Access.
And this basically lets you control pretty much every aspect of the computer
using simply your voice. You can see when you first run it, it'll show you a
tutorial walk-through with some examples for commands. For example,
if you want to click on something specific, you can simply have it bring up a grid and then
choose a number to say, and then it'll move that cursor to that number and then shrink the grid.
So you can focus in each time on whatever you want to click, and then eventually you say "click",
and it will. You can also obviously dictate text to type out whatever you want. And there's
a whole bunch of other commands, it'll show you right here in this tutorial thing, if you wanna
just pause the video and look through 'em. And finally, an improvement worth mentioning is now
the Auto HDR feature and Variable Refresh Rate feature will work on games that are now windowed,
they don't necessarily have to be full screen. So you can see that setting appears in the graphic
settings now. Although I can't really change it, I guess it doesn't make sense to disable it,
I don't know why you would, but you can now do that. So let me know what you think is the best
new feature and whether or not you think this makes it worth it to upgrade to Windows 11,
if you were on the fence about it before. Of course, if you guys liked this video,
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the next video I'd recommend is one where I was talking about a feature new to Windows 11
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you can click on that here. So thanks so much for watching guys and I'll see you in the next one.