Hands-On Windows 197 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 a brand new Start menu that's coming later this year. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat. We've been taking several looks at all the new features coming this year to Windows 11. There's some confusion about when things are going to arrive and so forth, but to me, the big ones that I think will impact most people are the new Start menu, which we haven't looked at yet. The new taskbar, which we did look at.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:39]:
There's a new widgets experience we'll be looking at soon. Windows Update, we did look at that one and a bunch of other things, but those are the big ones. So I wanted to move forward to the Start menu because that is one that we have not seen yet. However, I missed something last time. So the episode we did recently about the taskbar, I forgot to show you one thing, so let me just jump into that because, you know, I feel like the taskbar and Start are pretty closely aligned, right? Primary, secondary way to launch apps, etc. So I have the taskbar here. It's in this new small icon mode, which I love. I can go into Taskbar settings, and we did this last time, but you can or you will soon be able to, because this is not unstable yet.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:22]:
But you'll soon be able to move the taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the right. Like I have it here to the left or to the top right. So that's kind of fun. And I think this is how I showed it. It's a. It was basically this view here. But the thing is, if you change some of these options, you can actually make this look more like it used to back in the windows 10 and older days when you could move the taskbar. Right? So if I go into Combine, never.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:50]:
And then I have to do it on other taskbars because I have multiple taskbars here. And it is not doing it, it's doing it on the other screen. So that's Microsoft for you. Good stuff, Microsoft. All right. Well, what it does is it resizes it so it looks like the width of a button, which is the way it used to be. Right. It is not doing that.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:10]:
Oh, there it goes. It took a little while there. Okay, so I finally did it. I don't know why that took so long, but anyway, you can see like this here. So widgets are at the top, which is a Little strange. You'd almost think maybe should be up there and widget should be down here at the bottom, but maybe that's something that will change. So that's kind of neat if you like this kind of thing. I don't frankly, but I know some people do and it's going to be a big deal for some.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:33]:
Okay, so that's that one taskbar feature I don't think I looked at last time. And now we have the new Start menu. So like the taskbar, the Start menu is currently in the Insider program as of this recording very late June. We don't know exactly when it's going to appear out in stable. My belief that it's probably going to be part of Windows 1126H2, which is that second half of the year release. It's not a major release in the sense that same code base as 24 and 25H2. So it's going to be an EKB as we call it an enablement package. So you'll just reboot real quick, some switches we flipped and you'll have the new update.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:15]:
It's not a big churn, you know, major update, but we'll see. Hopefully it will come even sooner. It's kind of hard to say. So when we bring up the new Start menu and this is a small screen, maybe the scaling isn't the greatest. So everything's a little big looking. But just looking at this and I'll put this in the default category view, it's not immediately obvious that anything has changed as it turns out. Actually some things have changed. So to understand what changed we actually have to go into settings, right? So personalization start.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:53]:
Now you could also do that from here, right? You can right click the Start menu but and what you'll see here is a different set of options. We can now completely control whether pinned, recent and all appear or not in the Start menu, which is really cool. I do have Recent enabled, but you might have noticed I don't have a recent group here for some reason. It is a beta and I have been messing around with it so I'm going to chalk it up to that kind of a thing. We also have the Start menu size option, which we'll look at in one second. But what's interesting to me here is that if I actually just turn all these things off and bring up Start, there's nothing here. Like it's actually empty, which is really interesting. We get the same options we had before, right? If you are using this slice for the mobile phone connectivity you can kind of toggle that on and off this Search as before, which goes to Windows Search.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:47]:
You get your profile image over here, which for some reason is not showing a picture. But this gives you those options for going to other users or signing out. And then the power button as before, right. You can add folders and all that kind of stuff, but you can turn these arbitrarily on and off. And I think the biggest thing that's changed. Well, that's a big thing, actually. Right. Um, maybe more ability to customize it is of course, a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:13]:
But when you look at the Start menu, a lot of the two primary interfaces here to me are pinned and what used to be Recommended, right? And up here we had an all button, and it would go to a secondary display, so it was still the Start menu, but it would go to a different display. And then down in Recommended it would be the same thing. And so those secondary screens are actually gone. If you could see Recommended here, it turns out there there's a way to have a secondary screen recommended, but this all group down here, which was added to start earlier this year. So this is not unique to this version of the Start menu, but it provides these different views. We would have looked at this, but it's a way to see all of the apps installed on your computer from one place without having to go to a secondary view, which I really like. And what they've done up here is just provide a toggle to show more or less of the items that are pinned. So if it takes up too much space, you can kind of, you know, toggle it so it takes up less space.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:11]:
So to me, this is not a major deal. But I honestly, I think it's pretty cool. And I like that they're giving you these capabilities. Right. So this was here before, but now it's a sub menu off of this recent item. We can turn off recent completely, but we could go in here and say, well, I don't want to see recent or suggested files. I don't want to see suggestions, you know, recommendations, ads, basically, which is typically the way I would do this. I can't show this to you anyway, it's not showing.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:37]:
But if I was to install an app, you know, a recent section would appear. This is what used to be recommendations, right? And depending on how you configure it, you can see what you might see there. And then the all area, the all apps list essentially is configurable directly in the thing as before. So that's not new. The other big New thing in here. Because most of the rest of this basically works the same way. I had turned off account related notifications, which was a feature of the previous version of the Start menu. Now you can see I've got a little ad in here to turn on OneDrive folder backup.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:18]:
You can actually hide that thing, the image, which is not hiding, which is hilarious. Every time I change anything, it doesn't work. But the way this is supposed to work is this is. This would just show like a blank picture. So I feel like this has been. Oh no, that's what I had before. I'm sorry. Actually, that's why that was like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:34]:
But the menu's still there, right? So. And you can see a picture in there. It's just a way to make it a little more minimalistic, I guess. But the bigger thing in here to me is that sizing ability. So there's no ability to grab the side of this thing and drag it. You can't make it bigger or smaller that way. But you can choose between automatic small and large views. And the way that these will work will differ depending on the size of the screen, the scaling, the resolution, etc.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:02]:
Etc. There's not much configuration. One of these two will always be the same or in my experience so far has always been the same as the default automatic view. So if I put this on small, that to me looks the same as it was. And if I put it on large, in this case, it just got wider. Right. So this is a 16 by 9 display. It's relatively small.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:25]:
If this was a taller display, a bigger display, it would get bigger vertically as well as horizontally. But this is a way to show more on screen. You don't get that full screen Windows 8 type experience, but you do have this capability to expand the view. So that's pretty cool. So I think, you know, when you think about, I'm going to put this back because it's a little too big on this screen. But you know, when you think about these are small changes. But again, this is a very common user facing ui. You see this thing every day.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:58]:
It interacts with, you know, probably a billion people every day use this thing. So kind of a big deal. And combined with the new taskbar capabilities and let me go back into there, I think it's, you know, this is Microsoft touching a part of the UI that, you know, they haven't done a lot of deep work on until this year. It's kind of interesting. And you can just combine things here, right? So if for some reason you wanted to have the taskbar on the top like this, of course, the Start menu. This is now the new Start menu. You know, it animates out of that spot correctly, shows correctly, etc. This top mounted taskbar is going to act like the bottom one in the sense that where things are on screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:45]:
If you wanted to go into taskbar settings, let me do this and orient it to the left, which is not the default. This is the kind of Windows 10 style. Again, you get the, you know, the correct orientation for things. This is when widgets does move over to the side task. Sorry, Start goes to the top left in this case, or just the leftmost part of the taskbar. And then again, you know, the Start menu just appears where it should appear, which is, you know, kind of what you want. So it's interesting. It's not, I don't, you know, to me this is not a big, big deal, but I do know that it is for so many people.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:25]:
And honestly, just the ability to make the Start or the taskbar smaller to me is the greatest thing. I'd love to have that kind of smallness for a Start menu or just be able to get rid of the Start menu even. But anyway, it's, it's not, it's not bad. It's definitely an improvement. So like I said, we don't know exactly when this is coming in the sense that today, if you wanted to, as I record this, if you wanted to try this, you have to join the Insider program. Depending on where we're at in time, you either jump into dev or experimental 25H2 preferably, and you'll get it as, you know, as you update the computer and you know, we went through that list actually to show it to you again, but this computer is in the inside of program. But if you go down to this Insider program thing and do the feature flag menu, which we talked about at some point in an earlier episode, you know, these are the feature flags for things that will just be part of Windows in the near future. So this is how I got the alternate taskbar positions we were just talking about.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:24]:
And then somewhere in this list, yeah, there's a small taskbar one here as well. So the Start menu, I don't think this is even part of a. Yeah, it's not a feature flag. So I think if you just get into the inside of program, you just get the new Start menu. So hopefully by the time you see this video or soon thereafter, we'll either know when this will be arriving or you'll just have should be so anyway, I hope this was interesting and useful. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at Twitter tv H. Thank you so much for watching.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:02]:
Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you.