Hands-On Windows 172 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 apps that come with Windows 11. Which are the ones you should keep, which are the ones you can ignore, which are the ones you might want to delete.
TWIT.tv [00:00:12]:
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Paul Thurrott [00:00:22]:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Ferratt and this week I'm going to take a look at at the apps that come with Windows 11. You might think of these as bloatware, crapware. We often talk about these kinds of problems with Windows 11, but there's good with the bad, right? And it's not really a good, bad, ugly kind of a thing. It's more like which are the ones you can keep, you know, which of the apps that are the keepers, the ones that are truly useful and maybe semi universally of interest, which are the apps that you might want to keep but just ignore and only use when you have to use them for whatever reason, and then which of the apps that are just complete duds and you want to just replace them with something else, third party app of some kind. So I thought to go through, this is not going to be every single app in Windows 11, but maybe the, you know, three, five, whatever number in each section, right? So for me, the apps that I value the most are first I just throw out a big list of things. There are the little utilities, things like Calculator here or the clock app or the weather app or whatever. They're just sitting there doing their thing.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:31]:
Not a big deal. You know, I would never replace the Calculator app, but I also wouldn't delete it, right? But I do need it every once in a while. It's good to have no problem there. So get that one out of the way. There are a couple of apps that have been semi controversial for whatever reason that I use all the time. One of those is Notepad. I love Notepad. Let's bring this thing up again.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:54]:
You know, it's hard to see in dark mode here, but you know, tab based interface supports markdown formatting. It's got all this built in writing help. So if you want to summarize, rewrite it, make it shorter, make it longer, change the tone. I did the demo in one episode where you can turn what you wrote into a poem, which is hilarious. I mean, all that stuff and if you don't like it, just turn it all off. You can come in here and turn, except for the tabs, you can pretty much just turn Anything off. So if there are behaviors in here you're not a fan of, just don't worry about it. But to me, this thing is better than it's ever been.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:26]:
It runs perfectly fine. It's not buggy or slow or anything. It's just nicely done. So that's, that's amazed. I use, I use this app every single day. Clip Champ is another one. We've done probably multiple episodes on this. I'm not going to beat this one to death per se, but a very powerful video editor.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:46]:
It's free, actually pay for it, you don't have to, but I do pay for this and that allows me to export in 4k etc. A couple of things, but just a really, just an excellent app. So this is just a great one. It's, it's so good that I don't feel the need to download like say a cap cut or what other, whatever other video editor I might use otherwise. So this is also very good. The Microsoft Store. You know, when you think about installing apps, especially in Windows, there's different ways to do it. Obviously you can just go to the web and download them.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:18]:
But one of the nice things about this app is that it keeps track of what's installed and if it can, it will keep them automatically updated. There are certain apps that you know have to be updated through some web based mechanism because that's what the app developer wanted or whatever. But all the Microsoft apps for the most part will just auto update. And you see there's a couple here waiting to get updated, which I will not do right now. But that's terrific. You know the other little caveat here though is Microsoft has a command line interface for something called Winget or the Windows Package Manager built in as well. And this allows you to install apps from the web and also kind of manage that. We talked about that at some point, probably last year or so.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:00]:
But you can go in here. And this is another way to keep apps up to date, including apps that were installed through the web. Right. And so I'm not going to do this here because there's a bunch of these, but I just do something like when you get it out and then silent. And then I didn't run this as an admin, which I would normally do, but it will just, just do this without. It will prompt me probably one time now. But 14 apps or some of these are not really apps, but services I guess. But they need to be installed.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:28]:
So it's good to know about this. But this stuff, to me, this Combination of Winget and the Windows Store is just, you know, to me is really, really good. And the Windows Store didn't start off great, but today it's just in great shape. So that's a, it's a good choice for most people. So in the second category there are the apps that are, they're good, you know, or they're okay, they're good enough, whatever. But you might want to keep other apps around, you know, that are, that do something similar. So the biggest one is Microsoft Edge. Now in this computer have actually removed Edge.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:59]:
So we talked at some point about win 11 debloat. I use that tool to remove Edge from this particular computer. But for the most part I would say you can just leave Edge running. You don't have to worry about that but just install the browser of your choice which could be, you know, Chrome or Brave, Opera, whatever browser you prefer. It's useful to have a couple of browsers around. So I'm using Brave right now. But is there's no reason for most people to remove anything. But in this case.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:26]:
But I did do that, I did get rid of Edge. It's kind of a radical solution. The Microsoft the Xbox app is another one. So this particular computer is Windows 11 on ARM. I'm not going to be doing a lot with gaming on this particular computer. But you can access all of the games in your library, whether that's through Xbox Game Pass. Maybe games that you get because of the subscription or you bought in the past or games you can stream through cloud gaming are all available in here. But the nice thing that's occurred here, which is available on this computer I just haven't installed it, is if you get apps from a third party store like Steam, which is the most popular one, but also Epic Games and some others, those games will appear in here as well.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:08]:
And so you can use this as a single launcher. I think we did an episode on this fairly recently. So like this is a good example. There's no reason not to have this. It's just, you know, games that are associated with your Microsoft account but you can also access your other games. Actually as I look at this now, I can see I do in fact have a game from the Epic Games Store installed. So it is actually showing me everything. So that's nice.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:31]:
So there's that and we have a few more. But first we have a quick message.
Leo Laporte [00:06:36]:
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Leo Laporte [00:08:18]:
Thanks Canary. And thank you, Paul. Now back to hands on Windows.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:23]:
So some of the apps that I use the most in Windows, oddly are apps that I also use other apps for the same things, right? So there's Paint and Photos, which are both image editing in some way, or image viewing in Photos case, but I use different apps for image viewing and editing while also using paint and photos for very specific things. So basically I keep them there. So paint, we've talked about a bunch. This has gotten a bunch of AI functionality, including this object selection stuff. All of these lists in the Copilot menu now, which is much longer if you have a Copilot PC, which I do, it does layers, you know, it's turning into A really powerful tool. So that's good for certain kinds of image edits. I use it to make my Christmas card like when we did that episode sometime in the past year. If I go into images and just.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:16]:
Or into pictures rather and open one of these with photos, you know you could use this for photo management, you can use it for photo editing and I usually don't but I do use it for a couple of things. And so this is really good for that background blur removal replace stuff. If you have a copilot PC, the image restyle stuff is really fun. You can make an image look like a fantasy image, anime, you know, cyberpunk, impressionist, etc. But the thing I actually use the most, and this is something I'm going to keep doing over time is super resolution because like 2x, 3x whatever, bump the resolution up for an image. And this is awesome. For those old scanned in photos that are really low res, you want to get them up to maybe somewhere in the 4K space. So if you have a copilot PC, this is just free.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:59]:
It's just there. It's like why not use it? It's really good. But I don't use them day to day. So for image viewing I actually use this lightweight utility called Image Class 9 and I believe you actually have to pay for it now. It used to be free, but in the store I think it's $5. But the way I have this configured is if I an image like this, it opens full screen and there's no ui, so there's no toolbar, there's no gallery at the bottom, there's nothing like that. I can use the arrow keys just to kind of navigate between each of the images in that folder and I can escape just to get out of there. So it's lightweight.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:35]:
It's not, you know, it's nice. And so we. When you want to go quickly through that, it's really, really nice. There's also a PowerToys tool which I've actually just. I actually just turned off PowerToys. Let me bring that guy back up. But this thing has a. And I just changed my.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:52]:
Yeah, everything. The light mode. Because one of the power toys now will do automatic light and dark mode and it's day but I'm going to put this back on dark mode so it doesn't blow your eyeballs out. And what you can do here is hit control space on an image or a document by the way and it will do a quick preview. So it's kind of an it's very much like this is a Mac utility or something built in. The Mac does the same thing. I can use the arrow keys to go around. It's in a window, not full screen and I can hit Escape to get out of it.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:19]:
I think you can also do control. Yeah, Control space to bring it up, Control space to close. So free. It's an awesome little utility, very helpful, especially if you have a big folder full of files you don't want. You're not really sure exactly which one you want. And then for image editing, I use something called Affinity on this computer. It's the old version, Affinity Photo 2, but the new version is just called Affinity. It's free and it's basically a Photoshop level application depending on your needs.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:45]:
And it's wonderful. So I use that thing every single day. So I kind of rotate between those four apps. But there are other apps, obviously the Gimp you could get or paint.net, all kinds of different apps. The other one that falls into the same category is the Snipping Tool. And the Snipping Tool is wonderful. We've talked about it a lot. It's been updated a lot.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:05]:
The only reason I don't use it full time is that I need to capture the mouse pointer. So if you're making a screen recording, it will capture the mouse pointer. Of course you move the thing around. But if you're taking a screenshot, it won't. There's no way to enable that. So I use a third party tool called Greenshot, which is free. I think it's in the store, but if not, it's on the web for sure. And then I know that a lot of other people prefer something called sharex.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:27]:
I find that one to be a little complicated, frankly. But it's, it's there if you want it. And I believe sharex is also free. And if Snipping Tool doesn't mean needs for screen recording, we're using something called Obs Studio to do this screen recording. It's. That's a powerful tool. It's like anything else like this. It takes a little while to get used to it.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:45]:
Once you do, you know, it starts making sense and you're fine. So if you need something more than what's available in Snipping Tool, for some reason, there are certainly choices there. Now, at the bottom of the list are the irredeemable apps. You know, these are the duds, the apps that I always remove or usually remove from PCs. Some of them are innocuous. There is an app that it's one of the first things I install. I just don't understand the point of it. There's a Microsoft News app and this is just a standalone app that you can read the news in.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:23]:
And it's like, yeah, I don't need an app for that. I have the web for that. So I use web browsers I read elsewhere. I don't need it, so I just delete it. It doesn't hurt anything to have it there. I just don't like it, don't need it. The other app that's like that is Media Player. There's nothing wrong with it.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:36]:
It's actually a good looking app. But I don't need it. I don't want it. I use other apps. If you're listening to music, chances are pretty good you know exactly what to use. You might be in Apple, Music, Spotify, whatever it is. There are lots of apps for that. I wouldn't use Media Player even if I was listening to local files.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:53]:
I also wouldn't use it just to manage, you know, videos, right? But I have a video collection that's on my NAS and I use an app called VLC Media Player. And there's a lot of reasons to use this app instead of anything else frankly. But the big one is just that it plays everything right. This thing is so compatible with so many different file types and so forth. So I have this old file that is up on my thing up on my mass here that I can run. But hit F to go full screen, hit F to go out of full screen. You don't have to listen to that. But this is so versatile.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:31]:
This is so great. Such a great app. You can do, it can convert video or take a strip the audio out of video. You just want the audio files. It does all this stuff, but it's a much more complete app than what Microsoft has in Media Player. Okay, now there's the controversial ones. The first one, oddly I don't actually uninstall this for some reason. I just never run it.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:53]:
I hate this app. Most people do. This is the new Outlook. It is a web based app, which is not a big deal, but it just doesn't do everything that the old Outlook did, which is a problem for people have to use it for work and if you don't need it for work, you shouldn't use it anyway. You should be using whatever. I would just use I do and I recommend people use just Web clients, Gmail, Outlook.com, whatever it might be, or look into third party clients. Like ProtonMail or whatever. I wouldn't touch Outlook with someone else's computer.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:24]:
Frankly, I really dislike this app. I always have, or have for at least 25 years anyway. But the two really bad ones to me are Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot. I don't know why there are two. I don't know why they're both installed. I don't know why one of them is assigned to a key on a keyboard. We can't get rid of either. The whole thing is a mess.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:45]:
I feel like most people who are using AI are either doing it inside of an app, maybe inside of a web browser. If they are using a standalone app for some reason, it's probably going to be chatgpt, which you can install. It might be Gemini. Now, Gemini is available in a web tab, but those seem like more common sense to me. You can remove them, which I have on this computer. The problem is that when you hit that key, it's going to prompt you like, okay, Copilot's not here. What do you want to do? And the only choice is to run the search app and it searches the, you know, the, you know, the search pane that you get if I don't have the search box down here. But like Windows Key plus s will bring that up.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:29]:
And that's no good to me either because when I'm typing and I'm getting sloppy and I'm making mistakes, I'm hitting the Copilot key. And I don't want this to come up either. I'm trying to get some work done. So I use a utility inside of PowerToys called Keyboard Manager. And I remap that key to be the left arrow key, because the left arrow key is the one that's right next to it on a laptop keyboard. And that's usually the key I meant to hit when I'm, you know, typing like an ape. And it just works better for that. So that's.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:56]:
I've gotten rid of it. So I can sit here and hit this copilot key on the keyboard. It's never going to launch. Thank God I never have to worry about it again. So this is something I don't like. Look, these lists are subjective. You may love some of the apps I can't stand, you may not care for some of the apps I love, right? And so it's going to be different for everyone. But there are third party alternatives to just about everything.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:15]:
So if there's some app that you just can't deal with and you want something else, it's going to be out there. But. But I would look at some of these apps. I mean, they're not all bad. And there are some really good apps that are built into Windows 11, and I use some of those apps literally every single day. So hopefully you found this useful. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at Twitter TV How.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:38]:
Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. You're not a member Club Twit. Please check out the club. You can learn more about that at Twit tv. Club Twit. I'll see you next week.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:50]:
Thank. You.
