Hands-On Windows 185 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at several new features for Windows 11. We're still in the first half of 2026 and things are starting to get interesting. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Throt and this is this week we're going to look at some new features in Windows 11. That's not that surprising, I guess, but this is going to be an interesting year for Windows. Back in January we had some good events and some bad events.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:37]:
On the bad end we had the January patch. Tuesday went out. Microsoft had to ship two emergency fixes to fix problems that it created, which is always great. And then Windows lead Pavan Davaluri came out and said, you know, we're going to focus in 2026 on the pain points in Windows. These are things like the fundamentals, reliability, security, performance, etc. And I had already seen some indication of some positive change very late last year. And then as each month has gone by this year I've seen other improvements. You see lots of low level things, you know, quick machine recovery, smart app control, etc.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:17]:
Occurring, which a nice, you know, just non flashy features, but actually improve the system pretty much for everybody. And I've also watched closely, as I always do, all the new features that they release every month. So there's a monthly security update, they call it now, but there's always new features. And by and large what we've seen so far has been pretty minor and that's continued for the next couple of months. So we did a show some time ago, I probably would have focused on features that came in January and then in February and this episode it's mostly March and April. It's not April when I record this yet, but we can already see what's coming down the pike. So I can show you some of that stuff as well. And I have to say this is, this is mostly pretty good news because none of this is major and in that sense I guess it's, you know, not great for demoing or whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:03]:
But it's also not like these major features that are changing everything all the time, which I think is a big problem that we have in Windows. All right, so in March 2026, some of the features we got include such things as a network speed test. They describe this as network speed test in the taskbar. That's not exactly right, but if you go up to wi fi settings, you'll see this new icon down here and it will say test Internet speed. We'll see what browser. Of course it went up in the other screen. So I'll bring that over here. And all this does is bring up the speed test, the Internet speed test that's on Bing.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:42]:
I tested this earlier today and it told me that my Download speed was 48 Mbps, which is not good. But now it's back where it should be because I really have. It's a gigabit down and then about 600 megabits up. And okay, this is taking longer than I wanted, but it's really going to town testing that thing. And you can see this thing will probably get up close, high 500 somewhere, whatever. But you know, just kind of a handy thing to have off the corner of the screen there. So get rid of that little guy and get rid of that. Okay, so network speed test.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:13]:
If you have a camera that supports tilt and zoom. Tilt. No, that's not right. Pan and tilt. You can control those things from the Settings app. So it's weird to me that Sound settings, by the way, is in System, but Camera Settings is in Bluetooth devices. But that's the system we have. I will go to the integrated camera, which is going to be off to my side.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
So it's going to be kind of a weird view because there I am. But you can see those settings here. And I don't. It's weird because this thing actually has those settings and I'm not sure that it's changing those things. But anyway, it's another. It's a nice advanced setting to kind of have. And again, just to be clear, nothing dramatic there. If you are a power user or a system administrator, you might be familiar with Sysmon.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:06]:
Sysmon is another Mark Russinovich sysinternals tool. This has always been available just from an external download. Now it's in Windows, but not enabled by default. If you go down to optional features, more Windows features, to bring up this Windows feature control panel, you can install it. I've already done that. So you can see here it's checked off. So that's installed. You don't have to reboot or anything.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:29]:
And then you bring up an admin console or a terminal window. And when you do, I've already done this, but if I type Sysmon, type I, that will install it. It's already running. And so what this thing is doing is it's monitoring all of my event logs and then you can use it to parse them and find out what runs. So if you have a system meltdown and you bring up the system Event Viewer would be the typical way to do it. It's very hard to read. This actually helps you find those things from the command line. So again, it's a power user feature.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:59]:
I'm not going to dive too deep into that. But it's just available in Windows and that's, you know, again, that's nice. It's not a consumer fun feature, but it's something really useful for the people that need it. So it's really neat that they've added that. I usually go to, by the way. I just clicked on Advanced Options and then Recovery, but really you can see it's in System Recovery. So I don't know why they have it in two different locations, but I'm so used to the other way. One of the great new features they've added in the past year here is Quick Machine Recovery.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:32]:
And the way this worked initially was you don't really do too much with it. It's auto enabled now. I don't think it always was, but it is now. And the way this worked initially was that if something was wrong with your computer where it couldn't boot correctly, Quick Machine Recovery would cause it to look for a fix to that problem because they could compare the problem you're having with the problems other people are having out in the world. And if it existed, it would download the fix and then you'd get into Windows. Normally the problem is it used to just sit there and look for solutions until it could find one. Which meant you could get into a never boot solution situation where you just checking for fixes, never finding them, never getting into Windows. It doesn't do that anymore.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:14]:
It will automatically check for solutions still, it will check once now by default. But you can configure this now to different settings. I honestly think having it just do it once is enough, at least in my experience. But at least now you have this ability to configure that. Let me bring up this is. I know this will be exciting to everyone because it's certainly exciting to me. But as you probably know, you can type emojis like whatever, whatever emojis. And the way you do that in Windows is Windows Key plus period brings up this emoji and more dialogue.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:52]:
Now in Windows 11 they support emoji 16.0. And so actually I've already brought up some of these. So among them are the face with bag under eyes, the Root Vegetable and Splat among others. Right. So There's a bunch of. If you love emojis, you have a bunch of new emojis. I'm not gonna spend too much time on that one, but that's whatever. And you also have the ability now to add a webpage background image.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:18]:
Right. And so trying to think how I can find a webp image here. Let's go to webp. And I don't have any, so that's not going to work. But if there was a webp image, right click, you know, turn it into the background, it would just work. So that works great. So good. Okay, so the features I looked at before were in the March patch, Tuesday update.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:40]:
Right. The month, the monthly security update that we, you know, that we get every month. Right. So the features we're going to look at now are from April 2026. Some of these are not on the system yet. That's the nature of things. I am in the Insider program and so I get early access to this stuff. But I can definitely show you some of these.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:59]:
If you go into the Windows security app, you might be familiar with smart app control, which is under app and browser here. And yeah, you can see. So I've not gotten the update. This is the way it's worked before. So normally you bring up a new Windows 11 install, goes into evaluation mode. It observes your behavior downloading apps. If it sees you downloading malicious or untrusted apps based on heuristics or probably what they would call AI now, it will leave smart control on and help you block those things automatically. I mentioned this before in the context of developers.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:34]:
If you're a developer, you're going to want to leave this off. This wrecks havoc if you're developing apps. But for, for most people, it's a good thing to have on. The problem is if it doesn't find anything screwy, or you could just come in here and turn it off. Once you turn it off, it's just off. And the only way to change that without doing a Registry hack of some kind would be to reinstall Windows. Right. And so in the April Update for Windows 11, what they're going to do is allow you just to toggle this thing on and off.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:59]:
Right. So again, small quality of life thing, but important because in many cases it just turns off on its own. And really this is a feature I think most people are going to want to have on. Like you're going to want to turn it on and leave it on because it actually does work. It's good. One of the features I Cannot stand. In fact, I had to re enable it so I could show this to you. Is something called the drag tray.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:20]:
Right. And so the idea here is that you start moving a thing around. A thing, I'm sorry, a file. And you get this drop down panel here. And when you bring it up to this, what you get is a way to share this thing which is basically the same options you see in the share panel, including a more options thing. I hate it because I don't like things like that. It just comes up. I'm just moving things around.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:43]:
What is that? The alternative, of course, is to just do it this way. Right. It will give you the same options. It's a different way of doing it. The change in April is that they're renaming it from drag tray to drop tray. It's like, okay, and now I will tell you how to turn it off because I hate it so much. So if you go into do, maybe they've already. It's funny, they've changed the language in here.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:09]:
Yeah, Drag and drop content to share, move or more or whatever. That said. So system nearby sharing. Not really sure why it's part of the nearby sharing and not sharing, but you can turn it off here. That's what I usually do. And now when I move files around, nothing happens, which is exactly what I want. But. But you may think differently.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:26]:
All right, so this change is actually really cool depending on your needs or who you are or whatever. But if you're familiar with Windows setup and I'll just bring up the shot of setup here, there's this phase here in the out of box experience where you can optionally give your PC a name. If you do give it a name and click Next, it will reboot and then you'll come back to this part. Well, you come back to the next step and set up. But now they've added this or they're about to add this new show user folder name. And so when you, if you click that, it looks like this. And what this allows you to do is give a unique name. It still has to match whatever file naming rules that Microsoft has that goes under here.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:07]:
Right. And so my user account here is Paul. And the reason it's Paul is because the account I'm using to sign into Windows is Paul.com so it takes the first four in my case because the next one's an assigned, but it will take the first four letters to create that name. Now if I signed in with an account that was something like thorat at or whatever, in that case this folder would be called T H U R R, which is not great. And the reason it's not great is because I have a lot of scripts that I run that rely on that folder path, right? Because as we dive into Paul and we go to, in this case, it's going to be in OneDrive and then we just dive into wherever the thing is, it doesn't matter. You can see this path is Users Paul. And if that thing is T H U R, my scripts aren't going to run correctly because that location, the Paul location in that case will not exist. So this gives me and others the ability to name that thing.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:01]:
So if for some reason I sign up with an account or I want it to be a specific folder name, now you can do that. So again, this is, you know, it's not going to impact a lot of people, but the people who need this stuff really need it. And that's a wonderful change. Really, really good. If you have been using Windows for a long time, you might be familiar with System Restore, which is a feature that I want to say dates back to Windows xp. I'm guessing it has sat unchanged in Windows for many years. It still works for the most part. The problem is that some of the changes Microsoft has made to Windows prevent this from working correctly in some cases.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:38]:
Meaning that you might take a system snapshot, right? Which kind of saves the state of the machine at whatever point in time you make some change. You install an app, you install a hardware device and the drivers it requires. Something goes wrong and what you want to do is go back in time. And usually what this is about is removing errant driver installs, right? I do enable this if you watch any like the win 11 DeBloat episodes we've done, it creates a system restore point. But this thing is. It's stuck in this kind of classic. It's a Control Panel dialog. It's hard to find.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:14]:
Most people don't know it exists anymore. It hasn't been updated in a long time, et cetera, et cetera. So Microsoft, as it turns out, is actually modernizing this. And I will go to the right location this time. So system recovery. And then you can see now we have this thing called Point in Time Restore. And this does basically the same thing, right? It allows you to create automatically on a schedule, restore points, set the usage like you do in the other interface. You can also just create restore points on the fly.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:47]:
They're compatible. It's the same system. This is just a more modern interface. This is starting to happen this is a modern UI for something that frankly we do need in Windows. There's some other stuff, minor. In April, I don't think I have enabled, there's the ability to do voice search. So if you want to search for files and File Explorer, you can do it with your voice. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:11]:
They're going to see lots and lots of that kind of natural language interaction. But I do want to talk about two kind of bigger features that are coming down the road. They're not necessarily going to be there in April, although I think the first one might be. But the second one I'll talk about in a moment will be coming later in the first half of the year. So I don't know why this is so small, but this is a Microsoft image. So what this is is web browser integration directly in the Copilot app, right? And so this is split view. The idea here is that if you have something over here that is a link and you click on it, normally what it would do is go to your default browser and. Or probably Microsoft Edge, knowing Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:52]:
But now what they're going to do is have it load in Microsoft Edge inside of the app. So he may not like that, but this is a way to do that type of thing without switching context. You're not going back and forth between two different apps, you're doing it side by side. And frankly, I'm not super excited that this isn't going to use whatever browser rendering engine you're using, but whatever it's inside the app. And I think that does make sense. So I think that's going to be. I think that's going to be cool for people. The other one is something called Xbox Mode.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:19]:
So I can't really show you this per se, but I will at least I'll just bring up the Xbox app, I guess be the easiest way to kind of show this. So if you're familiar with the way that gaming and Windows has evolved between Windows 10 and Windows 11, you know that we have this gaming section in Settings and there's Game bar settings and Game bar is that thing that pops up, you know, Windows key plus G. Or if you have an Xbox controller, the white lit up button in the middle. This app and then the Xbox app both support a full screen mode, right? And so that's. There's a variety of reasons why you might want to do that type of thing. The big one is if you're using a controller and they also used that work that they did previously in Windows 11 to create what's called the Full screen experience for Xbox Rog Ally gaming handles, right. And there was a way, I think last year we would have done an episode about how you could bring the full screen experience to any Windows PC. And Microsoft had said, look, we're going to do this for everybody.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:16]:
But now they're going to call it Xbox mode. Right? And so I suspect what that means is that this game mode thing, which is now just a toggle, which is always on by default, the idea here is that when you're playing a game, things that run in the background should turn off so it's using fewer resources, your game gets more resources, etc. But they've evolved it for those gaming handhelds where it actually boots into this mode with full screen experiences for those two apps and what is now going to be called Xbox mode. And so this is going to enable any Xbox, I'm sorry, any Windows 11 PC to behave a bit like an Xbox console. It's going to. It plays Windows games, although Xbox games are probably coming in the future as well. But it will do so in a way that you're not going to get notifications, you're not going to have things running in the background, you're not going to, you know, have other things taking up resources. It's going to do that stuff for you.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:07]:
And I suspect what we're going to see here is a lot more granular interface where you might be able to go in and say, well, actually I do want to be, you know, interrupted by this thing perhaps, or whatever it might be. It's okay for this to run, but not for this. So I think we're going to see more than this single toggle, but we'll see because we don't have it yet. So there you go. I mean, I would say for the not quite. We're about a third of the way through the year, right? Yep. And a bunch of small features. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:36]:
Nothing. Nothing dramatic per se. Although the copilot web integration is kind of interesting if you want that kind of thing. I think this Xbox mode is going to be interesting. We will look at both of those in a future episode because I can't really show those too well right now, but by and large, I mean, 2026 so far is turning out the way that Pavan Davlori said it was going to be. Right. They've been focusing mostly on the fundamental stuff. So we had a really bad January and then it's been pretty good since then, frankly.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:03]:
So this is good news. I think I'm pretty excited about it. So we'll see how the rest of the year goes. In the meantime, thank you for watching. I hope you found this interesting and useful. You can find out more about the population podcast at TWiT TV H O W We have new episodes every Thursday. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you as always to our club TWIT members.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:24]:
We love you. Thank you for being a member.
