Hands-On Windows 170 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at the five best new features in Windows 11 in 2025.

TWIT.tv [00:00:10]:
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Paul Thurrott [00:00:14]:
This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. As I record this, 2025 is winding down. Microsoft tends to take most of December off. Microsoft Ignite was back in November. Bunch of stuff going on there. But after a big year of updates, really big year, I think we're finally going to get a little breathing space here. So I thought I'd take a step back and look at 5ish.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:46]:
It's actually going to be closer to 10, but 5, we'll call it 5 of the best features that Microsoft added to Windows 11 in 2025. This is a high level, I will say we entered this year. We have copilot plus PCs, which are those PCs that have powerful NPUs. Sometime back I think it was September, October, Microsoft said, hey, every Windows 11 PC is going to be an AI PC now. So we're going to do lots of new AI agentic stuff, AI native, whatever the language is coming next year. But that's, that's for the Future. We know 26H1 is coming now too, I should say. This is going to be a second generation of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:30]:
In this case X2 ARM based processes will be coming before mid year, hopefully much before mid year. And so we're going to get a 26H1 release for those PCs and then we'll do a 26H2 later in the year. But this year we got 25H2 and if you're following along, you might know that 25H2 and 24H2, the previous version, are basically the same thing. They're built in the same code base, they get all the same features, features, et cetera, et cetera. So in some ways it no longer matters what version you're on, but I will continue to refer to this as 25H2. Okay, so my, my favorite features. I'm going to start at the top. We just talked about this in a previous episode.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:13]:
I think it was just a couple episodes ago, but it's probably the big one and that is this new start menu. And this is new on a bunch of levels. I won't go through the whole thing like I did last time, but you've got the semantic search capability if you have a Copilot plus PC, which is really cool toggle here to go to make this sliver or slice for your phone based on the phone link software. If you want to toggle that off, you don't have to have it more configurable pinned and recommended sections, which is really nice. You know, you don't have those kind of stuck layouts from before and then they've moved all of the all apps list or all out to the top level. This used to be a sub display, right? So the default view is this category view, which looks a lot like that iPhone app library interface, if you're familiar with that. I like to put it on list, which is the way it used to look when it was a sub display. But you can also choose like a grid view, right? And so that that way you get each app that starts with the same letter is on the same line, or if there's more than one, it will go to two lines but different ways to kind of view the same information.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:25]:
So that's great. Also I should mention too, this is a low resolution display, relatively speaking. But if you have a big display or high resolution display, if your display scaling is not set to some enormous value, this thing will actually fill the screen better too. So as we go up in size or go up in resolution or scaling down in scaling, I guess technically this thing will get wider and bigger and we'll fill more of the screen so it's more dynamic, it's more fluid, et cetera, et cetera. So we talked about this one already, but start menu is huge. There's been a bunch of security improvements to Windows 11 this year. This is in part of the or part of the Microsoft Secure Future initiative. That was one of the big things they talked about at Ignite.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:09]:
And when you look at where Windows 11 was last year and you go think back to the crowdstrike issues we had last summer and then you look at the situation today and there are many, many improvements in here. Really, really nice. One of the ones I want to highlight that it's not necessarily a security feature per se, although I think Windows Update does fall into that security bucket, because this is how you get security updates is they've simplified the way that they're naming updates, right? And so you can see this is actually the November we used to call. Well, still in some ways do call a quality update. This is the accumulative update. So this is, this is an update that delivered, yes, security features or security improvements, but also new features. Right? And if you go back, you can find like this one from October has the old naming scheme. So you can see how much longer it is but also it's not clear what you're looking at here.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:07]:
It says you know, as the date and then cumulative Update for Windows 11. In this case it's an ARM based PC or whatever. But you know these names used to be very convoluted or just pointless like this one update for Window but the regular schedule updates. Right. And so now what we have is preview updates. We have security updates. NET is not technically part of Windows but I install. NET for the dev stuff I do.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:29]:
But they've really kind of simplified that. So I think that's kind of nice. If you're ever find yourself in Windows Update and you've got something to install, it's going to be a lot more clear what it was or what it is. I closed that and I shouldn't have. One of the other things that is in I believe is in here. Let me see. An advanced thing is what's called Quick Machine Recovery. This is not something you have to run, it's something that will run for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:00]:
Right. And so maybe you install a driver update for the display or something. It's not working quite right. It's blue screening. It's causing you to reboot. Windows will automatically run this outside of Windows interestingly. And. And it runs through the recovery environment and what it does is connects up to the cloud, sees if there's a fix for this problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:19]:
And it will just keep looking for a fix until it finds one. Right. And it's just kind of a way to stop computers from not booting into Windows Accurate, you know, correctly if they can help it. So that's kind of nice. And that's in addition to this fixed problems using Windows Update feature which also by the way was added in the past year. If we go. Actually I can just find it this way if you go into accounts and let's see, Passkeys. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
So Microsoft added passkey Support to Windows 11 in 24H2. So this arrived late last year, about a year ago in Windows 11, 25H2 and also 24H2. But this year they've added the ability to have a third party password manager. I don't have one installed in this computer but you can use today it's 1Password in Bit Warden but it's open. Anyone can get into this. So if you use Dashlane or Proton Pass or whatever it might be, instead of using the Windows system for saving and creating pass keys, you can use the solution of your choice. And the reason that's important isn't just that it's not tied to Microsoft or whatever, it's that those passkeys are portable, Right? Right. And so when you save a PassKey to a third party PassKey manager or Password Manager, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:38]:
That does Pass keys that will work anywhere you have that thing installed. So you can create it here on your Windows PC and then maybe you have an iPhone or an Android phone or whatever, and you want to go access that account on that device, that pass key will come up on that device because it's part of your password or Passkey Manager. So this is a really big update. You know, when they added passkey support a year ago, I was like, what is this thing? It doesn't really do much and there's not much in the way of management. But now you can have third party Passkey Manager. It's really nice. The other one, let's see if I have it on this computer, because this is brand new. I don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:14]:
So you will typically. Or you. By the time you see this, you will certainly see a new option down here called administrative protection, which I do believe we talked about previously on an earlier episode. And this is a new way of locking down your account. Right? Because if you have one account on one computer, which most people do, that thing is an admin account, and it has really high privileges. And if you get some malware in there, it could do some things with those privileges that are bad. You could lose data, you could lose your identity, et cetera, et cetera. And so what this does is it runs Windows 11 or your account as a standard user account.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:49]:
And then it does a per task elevation where you use Windows hello to authenticate yourself. So that could be a pin, it could be your face. If you have facial recognition on your computer, it could be a fingerprint reader, and then you proceed from there. When you're done with that task, everything else is still at the standard user level. So that was 4, 5, 7, I don't know number of features, but security. So I'll have the rest of this list right after this message.

Leo Laporte [00:09:15]:
Hey, everybody. Leo laporte here with a little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything, in fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me. I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us your privacy is absolutely respected.

Leo Laporte [00:09:42]:
We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows, or 75% of our audience are IT decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers. They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So, enough. Let me just ask you if you will go to TWiT TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions.

Leo Laporte [00:10:18]:
It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you. And of course, if you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if you want to help us out a little bit, twit TV survey 26, thank you so much. And now back to the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:39]:
There's also been a lot of improvements in Windows 11 to the settings app. And then this is an app that doesn't get a lot of love. It's. I use it every day, I use it all day long. I'm very familiar with it. But I feel like most people only come in here when they have to, and they're probably a little bit confused by it. There's probably thousands and thousands of options in here. So Settings has often had, or has long had this search capability.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:07]:
If you have a Copilot plus PC, you'll see this kind of blue, purple, pink AI coloring here. And that means that you get this. It's an AI agent for Settings. But a lot of these capabilities are just available to anyone. And to me, the big thing is the ability to search and get the answer in line. So instead of getting results, you can just do a natural language search. You don't know the name of the feature, maybe. So, for example, if I want to do something with the screen brightness, maybe this is too bright.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:39]:
So I want to dim the screen. You type in something like dim, and it will give you results that you can click on and that will go to a place in Settings. But it also provides interface, or in this case, two interfaces to adjust the underlying settings right here without having to go into the thing. Right. And this is a really good example of what AI is like, when it works. And what I mean by that is it's saving you time. Right. And you don't have to master this tool.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:09]:
You have to. You could do this from Search in the Start menu as well. But the, the basic idea here is that you don't have to become an expert in the Settings app. You just. I want to do this one time and I want to be done. I don't want to take a course in it. Right. And so I could, you know, I could use this to dim the screen, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:25]:
I'm not going to do that, but. And it works with whatever, you know, you. I'm. I'm in dark mode right now, but I. You might want to do something like. Well, I don't know how to do that thing. So Mark's already in it. So it's already.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:35]:
It's already there. But perhaps if I type light mode or something. Yeah, so same idea. I can change the theme to the light theme and I can choose how this mode works here. So I don't have to know where that is. I do know where it is. Right. I know exactly where to go.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:54]:
But you might not know and someone else might not know, and a lot of kind of normal mainstream users aren't going to know. And so this is a good. This is a nice little front end to something that for a lot of people I think is kind of a daunting task, frankly. So that's kind of cool. This, the fourth one is just new AI capabilities that in Notepad, Paint, Photos, also snipping tool, by the way, although I don't have that in the list. And this one, it's a little cheap because I'm talking about three different apps here. But if you think about like Paint, which was a very, very simplistic app, I did an episode this past year about kind of like a masterclass thing and it's improved since then, but it supports layers like Photoshop. It has the ability to do object selection now that's brand new.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:39]:
And then all of these AI capabilities, some of which you won't see if you don't have a Copilot plus PC. But a lot of them you will. And this is an incredible list. All of a sudden, Paint is really, really good at removing the background from an image, for example. Image creation skills capabilities, rather Copilot plus PC, you get co creator. This one's kind of neat because you can type in a prompt for what you want and then you can draw a little picture and it will do like a, well, a cartoon. 2. Photographic rendition of that little stick drawing you just made etc.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:09]:
This is an impressive app. Like this is really, really neat. And to me I just, I love this app. Photos very similar in that it's gaining all of these AI capabilities. This is more of a photo management app, but it also has those editing capabilities. So what you're seeing here is a pop up for a brand new to this computer capability for image categorization. I'm going to allow that and I believe we should be able to see what those categories are. Yeah, here they are.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
So identity, notes, receipts and screenshots. Right. And so if I just go to screenshots I don't have, it's still trying to find all my photos. So I just turn it on. But that's kind of a neat capability. But if I go back to the normal gallery and here's a picture of a hamburger. So that's exciting and I will. There's all these capabilities.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:00]:
We've talked through a bunch of this stuff. But if I go into Edit, you'll see all of the AI based editing capabilities. So these things over here just kind of, you know, your standard things adjustments and auto enhancements. The ability to kind of write it right on the picture, but generative erase where you can select things and erase things arbitrarily. So maybe I wanted to like something like this. I don't want there. Right. Because it's like a crumb on the plate there.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:24]:
All right, so that was nice background removal. It will suggest it. And then you can also do remove, replace or blur. I make it do blur here, which. Okay. Restyle. And this is. This is an amazing feature actually.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:40]:
This is now available in paint as well. So if you want to see this. Oops. Oh, is screwed up. It's usually a great feature, but you could do this as a cartoon, as a Renaissance painting, you know, whatever. So that's really cool. This one is actually my favorite. I've used this a bunch.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:57]:
This is particularly good if you're like me and you have these old scan photos that are really low res but you want them to be, you know, 4K or whatever. This is already 4K. I don't need to do this. But you could bump it up to 2x3x whatever and it. This does a terrific job. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. And then relight.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:15]:
And this one's a little complex but you're going to have three light sources and you can kind of change how this thing is lit, which is crazy. Excuse me for a 2D image, but really cool. I don't know that notepad is my favorite app in Windows, but it might be. I do use Notepad every day. In fact, I like this app so much, I'm writing my own version of it, and I've been working on that for a long time. There are new features in this app that have nothing to do with AI, like the markdown support, which is what you see here in the toolbar. But there is this kind of copilot menu here. I don't have anything loaded, so that's going to be part of that problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:54]:
So let me go find like a. I'll just find a random. The sample things that I've been working with. Yeah, like this is a markdown document that I wrote back in whatever month several months ago. And once you have something loaded now, you get all these options so you can do a summary. You can make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone. I think I must have showed you the demo where you turn it into a poem. This is unbelievable.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:20]:
It's pointless, but it's. It's really fun. I. This is a great example of. I think people saw Microsoft kind of messing around with this app. It's like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And it's like, no, they're doing it. They're doing a good job with it. If you don't want that stuff, by the way, you can just turn it off.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:36]:
It's in Settings. Just turn it off. You don't have to have it, you know, so it's. It's good for everybody. If you don't need it, you don't need it. If you want to turn off the markdown support, you can do that. That's what this is here. I leave that stuff on.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:48]:
I actually use it. I actually think this is a pretty impressive application. All right, now I got to think about how I'm going to do this. Let me bring up my website. I did want to call out some Copilot plus PC things. I know that these capabilities not available to everybody, but if you do have a Copilot plus PC, you get a kind of a growing laundry list of capabilities related to local AI. Right. Things that can run off the mpu.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:21]:
And when these first appeared about a year and a half ago, recall was the big one. That's proven to be actually a lot less interesting and also less controversial than people thought. But to me, the big one is something called Click to Do and Soup Screw. So you hold down the Windows key and you click. And what it will do is because it's highlighting other screens, you can't see it. What it normally does is highlight whatever is on screen. Let me try that again. It's weird.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:49]:
It's funny. There it goes. Okay, so before it was just doing the other screens and depending what you see here, you get a different set of capabilities. And can you capabilities keep growing over time based on whether it's text or a graphic? Right. And so these are the options for text. Obviously this is familiar. If we just went over the notepad stuff, so I can summarize and do rewriting, I could write a draft based on this paragraph of selected text using Copilot in Microsoft Word. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:19]:
Search the web, et cetera. So lots of really neat stuff going on there. This is just a. To me is a fundamental capability and the reason is it's built into the system. So you might have. Well, I do. I use this. Let me get out of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:34]:
I use this app here to write. And this app is pretty bare bones. Right. And so I'm trying to think what I can open here that would be okay. Yeah, this turned into something else. So this is just whatever text. This doesn't have any AI built into it, but with click to do, because I'm running it in Windows, I get those capabilities. Like it's just automatic.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:54]:
I, I love that. It makes everything better. So that's a cool feature. It's. It. Is it a reason to buy a new computer? I don't know. Maybe not. All right, so that's five or 12 or whatever number of.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:06]:
Of capabilities. But I also wanted to call out an honorable mention because it's not in Windows yet, but it must be coming to Windows. And that's something called the Microsoft Store Multi app install. And so if you run the Store app and you know, in other words, maybe you set up a new computer or maybe just looking for a particular app, whatever it might be like, you want this, you need like a video editor, whatever. You can run the App Store, the Store app, and look for an app you can search, etc. Etc. If you already know what you want, you can just search for that exact thing. Like.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:42]:
Well, actually I was going to search for Chrome. That's not in there. And Brave is probably. No, Brave is in there. So I already have this thing installed, but I could just go here and click it and install it. But a lot of times maybe it's a new PC or whatever it is. You. You have a list of apps that you want to install.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:56]:
And so they're adding the ability to add apps to a. It's not a shopping Cart, Exactly. But basically a shopping cart because these are free apps. So you can just kind of go down this list and say install all of these things all at one time. Right. And this is something that I do, but in a much more complex way. In fact, I'm trying to. I'm wondering if I can show this to you easily.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:21]:
But the way that I do this is I have a script, a PowerShell script. And you can see I've had multiple versions of this thing. I guess I'll just open with Notepad so you can at least see it. And you know, this is fairly complicated looking, but this installs apps from the web repository that is behind winget, which is the Windows Package Manager, or from the store, which are these ones down here. So if you have a, like the store ID of a. An app, I should be able to go into here, for example, and type that in. Should bring it up, we'll see. Yeah, that didn't work great.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:02]:
But anyway, that should work. But this is how I bulk install apps. So you can see I've got. Well, you can, you can't see it too well, but there's probably, whatever that might be, 10 or 12 apps that I just install at every new computer that I use and review, et cetera. So that's good for me. It's, you know, like, it's not the type of thing like a normal person would do, but it's, you know, it works for me. But this is a way to do that in a more visual way. Right? Because you're searching.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:24]:
You can search for apps across the store now it's on the web right now. But this feature is absolutely coming to the store app in Windows. It's just not there yet. But there's no reason you can't do this. Actually, I will, I'll just kick off. I already have that one. I'll just kick this off just to kind of show you what that looks like. So it saves this file.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:45]:
Oh, it just saves the installer in this case. So it's just. You just click on it, right. And there you go. So it. You could do multiple apps, one click, go get whatever it is. So it's a neat feature. It's just not in Windows yet.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:57]:
So it's kind of a. It's kind of a. A little preview of one of the many things we're going to get sometime next year, no doubt. So we complain a lot about all of the churn in Windows, all of the updates, all of the chaos and all that stuff. And it's that's valid and, you know, we spend time trying to fix that stuff. I talked about tiny 11 builder a few episodes ago. I believe that's a great way to kind of cut down on some of the, you know, harassment and so forth. But, you know, there's also good stuff happening in Windows and I feel like some of the, well, these features that I was just talking about are good examples of those things.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:31]:
Right? Even the ones that some people might have complained about. You know, I don't want. Why is Microsoft touching Notepad? Why are they screwing around with Paint? It's like, actually they're, they're adding some good stuff to those apps. So it's, it's nice to be able to pay attention to that stuff. But it's, it's also nice to kind of look at it and say, you know, actually this hasn't been such a horrible year for all of the just tsunami of new features. You know, a lot of it's pretty good. Windows is getting better all the time, so that's good. Hopefully you found this useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:02]:
I don't know where we. This, this will probably be pretty close to the end of the year, but, you know, there's always going to be more. There's so much more coming down the pike for sure. So we'll definitely have more next week and beyond. So thank you for watching. Thank you so much. If you're a Club Twit member, we love you. If you're not, please think about joining.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:22]:
You can find out more about Club TWiT at TWiT TV Club TWiT. You can find out more. More about this podcast, Hands on Windows at Club. I'm sorry TV H O W. We'll have a new episode every Thursday and I'll see you next week. Thank you, Sam.