- Windows has a lot of problems.
It's been stuck in that good/bad, good/bad cycle
basically since its inception.
And at this point, so little fundamentally changes
that both of my grandmas know what the Start button does,
but what's this and what are these?
How did I do that?
Buckle up, dear viewer,
because we are about to get our hands dirty
with some lesser known features of Windows.
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Our first trick is on your Windows PC right now
and has been for a long while.
Group Policy Editor sounds very boring,
but it allows you to tweak
some very interesting settings under the hood,
like have you ever wanted to hide certain settings
so your less tech savvy relatives don't mess them up?
Or how about turning off
some of Windows' phone home features?
There are a seriously massive number of dials and knobs
that you can adjust in here to customize Windows.
And if you've ever used a locked down library or work PC,
I assure you that it's at least partially thanks
to group policies.
The issue though is that by default,
it doesn't come with Home Editions of Windows,
a shining example of an artificial limitation
and it is exactly the sort of thing
that Microsoft has been criticized for in the past.
Not to worry though because you can force it
by opening a command prompt as administrator
and using these commands.
It'll take about 30 seconds and once it's done,
even Home users can enjoy fuller control over their PC.
I mean, yes, you could make these adjustments yourself
if you like to role play as a registry hacker man,
but this way is far easier
and in my opinion more of a middle finger
to Microsoft anyway.
For a two-handed bird, if that method doesn't work for you,
you can grab Policy Plus instead.
It's not built into Windows, it's not for Microsoft,
but it's open source
and offers the same functionality with a similar interface.
Speaking of, have you ever had an app that runs on startup,
but has to use admin privileges,
so it asks you every single time you boot your PC?
Enter Task Scheduler.
You can create a basic task
that starts up the app when you log in,
then check this box before clicking finish.
And see that run with highest privileges button? Check that.
You should go to the Settings tab
and make sure to uncheck this box
to make sure it doesn't stop running
after the default of three days and that's it.
Done! You'll never see it again.
And there are all kinds of knobs and dials in here
to make stuff run automatically
exactly the way that you want,
like you can make things happen or not
when you're on battery,
or you can make it wait
for when there's a network connection.
If you've got multiple things you wanna run
with the same rules, just add more actions.
Wanna pop up an alert whenever Windows detects a disk error?
You got it. Just add a new trigger.
This is seriously underrated stuff.
I used to use it to crank up my speaker volume,
then play music as an alarm for school
when my clock was broken.
There are also some app suites that you can download
to further enhance your Windows experience.
If you've heard of those ones before,
you might think that the section
is going to be all about PowerToys.
You'd be wrong, but those are super cool
and we are gonna talk about those first.
PowerToys are Microsoft's own in-house extensions to Windows
and they've been around in some form or another
since the Windows 95 days.
If you were around back then and remember using TweakUI,
a tool to change the responsiveness of the Start menu,
that was a PowerToy.
Some of the PowerToys released over time
have actually made their way
into mainstream Windows as well.
Virtual desktops, window previews in the Alt-Tab menu,
and virtual CD-ROM drives are just some of them.
So in that sense, PowerToys can be seen
as kind of a playground for Microsoft engineers
to trial future features.
Today's PowerToys have a wide variety of functions,
with my favorites being FancyZones, PowerToys Run,
and Keyboard Manager.
FancyZones is basically essential for anyone with a large
or ultra-wide or otherwise non-traditional desktop layout
because it makes it super easy to quickly snap Windows
to specific portions of your screen.
It effectively replaces the standard window manager
and is just a step away from the tiling window managers
that you'd find in the Linux world,
complete with dedicated keyboard controls
for focusing Windows,
and the ability to control the sizes
and positions of your windows.
There's nothing quite like it on any other operating system.
PowerToys Run is one of those things
you would expect to be built into Windows, but is not,
so thank goodness it exists as a PowerToy.
It's basically Apple's Spotlight search
and it is thankfully not the same as the Start menu search.
Often the results will be substantially
more accurate and useful.
Like Spotlight, you can make it do calculations,
unit conversions and much more,
and it's super quick to get at
with the default key combo being Alt + Space.
Personally, I change it to Windows + Space
since that's what you'd use for it on a Mac,
and Alt + Space is already used in Windows
for window control.
Keyboard Manager, this one's super cool.
If you've ever wanted to remap a key or create macros,
but you don't wanna use memory-hungry third-party software,
this is for you.
You can map any key to any other key including combinations.
And what's even cooler
is that you can map keyboard shortcuts on a per app basis.
It's not powerful enough to be able to record
and play back long sequences of keystrokes,
but it's enough to handle a lot of common tasks.
Enough about PowerToys though.
I promised to go deeper and I shall.
Look how deep I'm going.
Microsoft has another group of utilities
that are technically under their umbrella as well
called Sysinternals, which they acquired back in 2006
when it was called Winternals and run by Mark Russinovich.
They're a lot like PowerToys,
but with more focused use cases, often with the goal
of getting under the operating system's hood.
There's a massive number of these
that are being updated to this day,
but the most broadly useful in my opinion
are Autoruns, Process Explorer, and TCPView.
Honorable mention goes to RegJump by the way
because it is such a useful tool
to quickly open the registry editor to a specific key.
Just run it as administrator and paste in the path.
No navigating through the little tree.
Now we've talked about Autoruns before and for good reason.
Autoruns gives you the ability
to see virtually every startup item, service, and DLL
that is registered for use inside of Windows.
In the default view, it hides Windows standard entries,
but still is probably gonna be chockfull of stuff
that you probably won't recognize.
The good news is that a lot of this is normal
and entirely benign, even some of the things
highlighted in red or completely empty.
It's still a super useful tool though
especially for advanced users
when they're trying to diagnose malware infections
or misbehaving drivers.
The double-edged sword here is that its power
makes it potentially dangerous for inexperienced users
who don't know what they're looking for.
The good news is if you're inexperienced,
you can simply save the state of the system
and send it over so a more experienced eyes
can open it up on another computer to analyze and modify
via the analyze offline system function.
It is indispensable for troubleshooting.
Process Explorer is like Task Manager, but on roids.
In fact, you can even replace Task Manager with it.
You can see the performance history of a given process,
see all the connections it has open,
see what the environment it was launched with was
and so much more.
If you're curious what files a program has opened,
you can show the lower pane
and click the handles tab to see.
And if you wanna find out which process has a file open,
you can use the find handle or DLL function
to get a complete listing.
Clicking on the results brings you directly to that process.
And if you're not sure what process a window is attached to,
use the crosshairs icon.
Bam!
There is so much utility in here,
including some that made it
into the official Task Manager eventually
like the search online function.
Then there's TCPView.
This looks a lot like Process Explorer,
but instead shows you all the network connections
that your computer is currently maintaining
grouped by the process that's using them.
This can be a little overwhelming to look at
while it's constantly changing around,
so you can pause it to leaf through it on your own time.
The remote address is the server
that the connection is made to,
and you can look it up right in TCPView
via the whois function to see where it is.
Not everything can be ID'ed this way though
and that doesn't indicate a security problem in itself.
So like most of these tools,
it's all about giving you the ability to peek under the hood
which can be a godsend when it comes to troubleshooting
who might be listening.
Back to some included features though.
You might be aware that Windows 11 added the ability
to run Android apps if you watched our video testing it out,
but did you know that you can also run full-blown Linux
right on top of Windows?
Windows Subsystem for Linux is available on both Windows 10
and Windows 11 and does exactly what it says on the tin.
Open a terminal as administrator,
type wsl space dash dash install.
and following a reboot, you're ready to rock.
If you're not feeling the default Ubuntu,
you can get a list of available alternatives
using this command,
then install your choice with this one.
You're not limited to just one either,
so have fun experimenting.
You can even install and run desktop apps within them
and they will appear right on your desktop.
WSL isn't just for experimentation though.
Did you know that File Explorer
can show Linux folders now too?
You can even pass through Linux-formatted drives
and access them via your WSL distro.
This is super useful not only for dual booters,
but also for system admins who might run Windows desktops
but manage Linux servers.
I mean, sure, you could spin up a Linux install
specifically for disaster recovery
or you could just use WSL.
One thing WSL can't give you
that's becoming common in Linux though
is a dropdown terminal like Guake or Yakuake.
But what if I told you you can get the same thing in Windows
even without WSL as of 2021?
Officially called Quake Mode,
this will give you exactly what you're after
with the key combo of your choice.
Just open a terminal window, go to Settings, then Actions,
click Add New, then choose Show/Hide Quake Window.
You will need to launch Windows terminal first
for this to work, but thankfully,
we've given you the tools to show you
how to automatically launch it at startup, right?
Then just set it to hide in the notification area
once it's minimized.
Now you've got a terminal available to you
whenever you need one.
And if you want more out of your terminal,
this one isn't built into Windows,
but it is recommended by the official documentation.
You can get fancy extended functionality
and custom prompts in the terminal if you use Oh My Posh.
It's available in the Microsoft Store for free
and it looks a lot like Oh My Zsh on Linux and macOS,
hence the name.
If all you want
is to customize the theme of your terminal though,
you won't need anything like that
and you can even go as far as to set a background image
in the profile settings.
Seriously, Anthony's a Linux user
and still feels that this is one of the slickest
terminal interfaces out there,
while still remaining easy to use.
There's even a package manager now via winget
which lets you install even desktop software
directly from a terminal, which means you can automate it
and automate updating it.
Seriously, basically everything we searched for
that has a freely available Windows version
on or off the Microsoft Store is in there.
And if it's not, you can probably find it in Chocolatey,
which you can also install through winget.
Isn't that wild?
Not only does Windows have a good terminal now,
it also has SSH support for remote access
both as a client and as a server.
The client is built in
and you just use it like any other SSH client.
It even supports port forwarding and file transfers.
The cherry on top is that if you're into using keys for SSH,
which you should be, some password managers like 1Password
offer the ability to use what's known as an SSH agent
so that your keys are available
without needing to copy them to your PC.
When you try to connect,
you'll get a prompt to unlock your password manager
and you're off to the races.
The server function meanwhile needs to be installed
through the optional features.
Just click View Features, then search for SSH
and OpenSSH Server is right there.
Install it and you're ready to go.
By going to this folder and editing the sshd_config file,
you can set up private keys for better security,
port forwarding and more, just like you would on Linux.
There's all kinds of little things
sprinkled throughout Windows too,
like did you know that there are keyboard shortcuts
for stuff like this?
That's not even close to all of them.
One of them does what you probably already know about
if you've ever right-clicked the Start menu,
which is in itself a really useful feature
that was first introduced in Windows 8,
and there's also that God mode folder
that makes the rounds from time to time,
although I don't personally think it's that useful.
It's basically all the options in Control Panel
laid out in a list.
But hey, if it's useful for you,
just create a folder and name it like this.
What I feel is more useful, this has saved me lots of times,
are the application menu and the shutdown command.
The application menu is what you get
if you click an apps icon in its title bar.
What's important here is that Move command.
In the likely case that something weird happens
and a window ends up way outside of the visible screen area
or like on another monitor you can't get to
and there's no way to interact with it,
just select it on the taskbar,
then use the keyboard shortcut
to activate the menu, Alt + Space, then hit M,
press an arrow key, any one of them, then move your mouse.
That window is now attached to your cursor.
Click to set it down and breathe a sigh of relief.
Maybe cozy up with a retro polar fleece from lttstore.com.
Hey, you've earned it.
Then there's the shutdown command.
This one is very useful.
If you've ever found yourself
with no video output whatsoever
and the hot key to reset the video driver isn't working,
but then you hit caps lock or num lock
and your keyboard LEDs still function,
so the thing must be on,
you can still safely shut down and reboot.
Hold the Windows key and hit R,
then type this command
which is basically telling the PC to restart with no delay.
Once you hit Enter, assuming you typed it right,
it should do exactly that.
If not, or if you think you made a typo,
just hit Escape and repeat the process.
You can do more with the shutdown command too,
like you can create a shortcut
to reboot into your UEFI settings with this command,
and this command will reboot into advanced startup settings
which is super useful if you need to do that
without a display
or without having access to Windows' normal UI,
like say, for example, if you're rebooting
a headless machine in another room,
or if there's a driver that's making it
so that all of a sudden you can't see anything
as soon as all of your drivers load
and you have no way to get into safe mode, aah!
And you can shut down other computers
using a command like this
where the name or IP goes right here.
There's a whole world of commands like shutdown
that you might not know about.
It's worth checking out the Learn Article
on Microsoft's website to see more if you're curious.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out our previous video
on useful Windows Software
to make Windows 11 feel a little more usable.
It's gotten better on its own since then,
but that doesn't mean that you can't
or shouldn't tweak it to suit your needs.