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
and once you've joined us you will become more powerful than I can possibly
imagine powerful like our sponsor War Thunder War Thunder
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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 you're less tech savvy relatives Don't Mess them up or how
about turning off some of Windows's 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 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 you 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 want to run with the same rules just add more actions
want to 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 power toys you'd be wrong
but those are super cool and we are going to talk about those first power
toys 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 tweak UI a tool to change the responsiveness of the
start menu that was a power toy some of the power toys 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 power toys can be seen as kind of a playground for Microsoft
Engineers to trial future features today's power toys have a wide variety
of functions with my favorites being fancy zones power toys run and keyboard
manager fancy zones 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 power toys run is one of those things you would expect to be
built into Windows but is not so thank goodness it exists as a power toy 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 want to 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 power toys
though I promise 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 CIS internals which they acquired back in two thousand 6 when it was
called wind tunnels and run by Mark racinovich they're a lot like power toys
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 Auto runs process Explorer and TCP view honorable
mention goes to Reg Jump 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 Auto runs before and for good reason Auto runs 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 going to be chock full 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 cool 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 dies 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
open you can show the lower Pane and click the handles tab to see and if you
want to 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 TCP view 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 TCP view
via the who is function to see where it is not everything can be id'd 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 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
drop down terminal like wake or Yak Quake 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 quick 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 on the Microsoft store for
free and it looks a lot like oh my sh 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 in
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 using keys for SSH which you should be
some password managers like one password 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 these 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 underscore 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
it cozy up with a retro polar fleece from ltdstore.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 hotkey 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's 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 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
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check out our previous video on useful Windows software to make Windows 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