Hands-On Windows 186 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 look at some promises made by Microsoft to fix Windows 11 in 2026. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and this week we're going to follow up on what we talked about last time, which is Microsoft's plan to fix Windows 11 in 2026. Because since I recorded that last episode, they actually made an announcement about what it is they plan to do, which you can see here. So they've committed to Windows quality after spending the past several years being committed to anything but Windows quality. But you know, that's a big part of my life, obviously, and my role as a book author or just the website stuff or the podcast, whatever it might be.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:54]:
I mean, I spend a lot of time trying to fix all the problems in Windows. And now it looks like Microsoft is going to finally address what they call pain points in Windows. So this will be a multi episode look at this stuff because right now what we have is promises, but we don't really have much to demo yet. So it's a little more hands off than hands on, unfortunately. But next week there'll be a follow up and actually the week after that too. So over the course of the year, as Microsoft starts putting this stuff out and adding it first to the Insider program, then to what I assume will be Windows 1126H2 in the fall, I'll be able to demonstrate some of that as well. But I think it's worth taking a look at this because it's actually kind of a big deal. All right, the first one is Microsoft has committed to fixing a long standing problem with Windows 11, which is that the start menu can only be docked to the bottom of the screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:50]:
And so in this screenshot you can see we'll do four different screenshots, what that might look like if they allow people to move it to the top of the screen and the sides of the screen, which they say that they will. So sometime this year we will get this update. We'll see what that looks like in real life because there's more going on here than just moving a bar around the screen. But they have said that they were going to do that, so that's good. I'd also like to see things like making the taskbar smaller. You know, the stuff we used to have, we used to have toolbar support, we used to have all these different features in the taskbar. But definitely a good first start. One of the other things they talked about was removing some of the entry points to Copilot that exists throughout the system.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:31]:
So there's probably more than I'm thinking of. But in addition to the Copilot app itself, and then of course, the Microsoft 365 copilot app, you'll see Copilot icons in Microsoft Edge, in the snipping tool, in Photos, in Widgets, in Notepad, and actually, I'll bring up Notepad real quick just to show what that looks like here. To be super clear, this isn't about getting rid of Copilot. They're not doing that. But today, before they've made this change, there's this Copilot icon here. And I expect the Copilot icon to go away, but I expect the AI functionality that it provides here to remain. Right. So kind of a minor change, really.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:12]:
And it's not clear what form this is going to take. I don't know if this is just a menu with different choices. Maybe it comes over here. You can also right click in here and access those same options without that annoying icon, you know, So I think that's a big part of what they're doing, is just, you know, Copilot, Copilot, Copilot, you know, kind of trying to get rid of that stuff. So, okay. I mean, it's not a huge, huge deal, but interesting. And this, to me, is one of the more important changes they're talking about, which is when you go into Windows Update, and I would imagine most people don't, but if you're listening to this podcast or watching this podcast, you. You might spend time doing this.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:52]:
I do this not quite every day, but actually pretty much every day. And I always check for updates. I go into advanced options here. I look for optional updates, and here you can often get a bunch of driver updates in here. This is a fairly new computer, so I've already completely updated it. But if you've ever used this option, you'll see that you can pause this thing for up to now, five weeks. And one of the things that they've said is they're going to allow people to pause updates for a longer period of time. Now, they haven't said how long that's going to be, but if you think about this is five weeks or a little bit over a month.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:25]:
You can imagine maybe for individuals, they might go up to two months, but we'll see what that looks like. They haven't said if you've set up a Windows computer recently, and I Do this almost every day. You will notice that there's a very lengthy segment. In fact, there could be two or three of them, depending on how you do it. Where it's downloading and installing updates that can delay you getting to the desktop from anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the computer. And depending on the update you have to install, they are actually going to give you the ability to skip that. So you can go to this desktop, start getting work done. It will update in the background and then it will reboot later.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:02]:
And okay, that's great. They're going to allow you to. In fact, let me see if it has it here. I don't think this one has it yet, but I don't have any updates. But if you had a pending update here, you probably probably seen in here it will say shut down and. And then shut down and install updates. And they're adding an option where you can restart or shut down and just skip whatever the update is. So the idea is like, I have to reboot the computer for whatever reason, but I don't want it to be offline for, you know, 10 minutes or whatever that might be.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:29]:
You can skip the installation of that update. There are controls in Windows Update, and we've probably gone over this. I usually configure it like this. This one doesn't matter to me because I don't really have too many metered connections, cellular data connection, but I like to be up to date as much as I can be. But I also want to be notified when a restart is required. Right? I don't want it just to restart, especially don't want it to restart when I'm working. But anyone who has installed Updates in Windows 11, and if you've enabled us, you've probably seen that dialog that comes up and it's, you can. You can download it now, you can download it overnight, you can just cancel it, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:06]:
But they're going to give you fewer automatic restarts and fewer times for that to happen. And I think that just speaks to the kind of chaos of Windows Update these past couple years. So that's a pretty good one. The one thing they haven't addressed is cfrs. And so when you do a monthly update right now you get security updates, you get bug fixes, but you also get new features. Those things get applied to your PC randomly. It's not on some schedule. So every once in a while some new feature will pop up.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:38]:
You don't know where it came from. If you're in the Insider program, they're going to give you the ability just to get the new features. I don't know. They haven't said if they're going to do that for people just using a shipping version of Windows 11, I hope that they do do that. They're also looking at File Explorer. So this is something I'm going to talk about more in the next episode. But this is a hybrid application. It's a legacy kind of classic Win32 desktop app, but it has this adornment around it that is a modern UI, the WinUI 3 UI.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:10]:
And you can see here there's nothing going on here. And this is one of the tips we would have talked about in the past. But one of the things that I do is I turn off these three options. And the reason I do that is that when you make that change and load, File Explorer comes up pretty quick. But if you let it display these other bits of information here, you know, favorite, shared, recent, whatever it takes, a second or two seconds even, which doesn't seem like a lot of time unless you're waiting for the app to actually open. So they're going to address a bunch of the performance issues in File Explorer. We'll see how that works. I'm curious how they're going to do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:45]:
I actually think the modern UI is the problem, but they're going to try to make this app launch faster and we'll talk more about the File Explorer stuff next time around. Now shield your eyes because I'm going to open the widgets board. I'm so sorry. It's usually pretty terrible, but this has been a big pain point as well. So they've already made some changes to the ui. So we've got widgets on this side. We've got this Discover News feed, or Discover, I guess Feed, for lack of a better term. Super low quality news in here.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:14]:
Really bad. They're going to make this interface quieter, meaning there'll be less flashing and less notifications and stuff. That's something I turn off anyway. I've already done that. They're going to make this feed somehow. They haven't said how more helpful and relevant. I think the best way to do that would be to turn it off. But maybe someday there'll be a third party plugin for this because that capability exists.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:38]:
But we don't have to have this terrible Microsoft newsfeed, which is so bad. So we'll see what that looks like. I'm not really 100% sure beyond that. There's a bunch of stuff related to start and just kind of generally what I would call kind of core system experiences, performance reliability, obviously, resource usage. You know, we have this notion of a full screen experience which is becoming Xbox Mode in Windows 11. If you have a gaming PC or one of those handheld gaming PC devices, you can boot right into that thing, skip the desktop, skip all the background processing, you know, have more RAM and more resources overall dedicated to the one thing you're doing which is playing a game. And that's good for gamers, but it's also good for everyone. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:26]:
And so they're going to work on that across the board. I think they're going to take some of what they learned with the full screen experience and now Xbox mode and just kind of pull it into Windows more generally. Make it less loud, less in your face, et cetera, et cetera. You can't really tell looking at this, but this interface, which looks native and is normal looking and whatnot, is actually a combination of native code, but also JavaScript web based code. Right. So this recommended section right here, which doesn't have anything offensive in it right now, but often does, is actually rendered in JavaScript. Right. And so for depending on your computer, this thing might come up pretty slowly.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:04]:
I've been bringing it up today on this particular computer, it's been fine. I don't really see this as a huge deal, but they're going to work on more native experiences inside of some of the core experiences in Windows and start probably being the most core of them all. Right. Windows hello, which I can't really demonstrate here, but depending on your computer, you will have the ability to sign in with your face, with your fingerprint or both. Right. If you have those capabilities and if not, you have the pin. And the nice thing about this, we talked about this earlier, is that Windows hello is now tied to authenticating you through a pass key and you get this kind of a. It's almost like a user account control experience, but it's slower.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:51]:
So they're going to work on speeding that up, which was one of those things when they switched to this and we would have done, we did a show on this I'm sure three, five months ago. Not good. It's just really slow. Like it's a, it's a good idea, it's the right way to do things in a way, but it's just happens too slowly and there's an additional click at the end which I don't like. So they're going to work on that kind of thing. And then beyond that, just things like search. I'm going to against my better judgment, oh, I did the wrong thing. Try to search here.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:22]:
So I will try to type in something like Windows. Depending on your viewpoint, Windows search is either vital or broken. I usually configure this so that I don't see things that are not document or app related. There's different ways you can configure this, but you can go into here. And of course you can also do this through File Explorer. Right. And depending on the type of PC you have, because Copilot plus PCs have different capabilities, they've been working on ways to improve both the performance, meaning just really the latency or just the time it takes to get a search result back, but also the quality of those search results. And so this has been something we've been working on for and I say we it was Microsoft has been working on for 25 years.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:07]:
So they haven't gotten it right yet, but they're promising that they will. So look, this is all good news. Everything that they've said for the most part is good. The problem is they haven't said some things. And in the next episode, what I'm going to look at is where these promises fall short. You know, the important changes that Microsoft should be making to Windows but hasn't said anything about. So we'll follow this up next week with that. All righty.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:34]:
Well, thank you. I apologize. This was more hands off than hands on. But you know, we'll pick up the pace starting with the next episode. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you.