So no waiting a second ortwo for Windows to catch up with what you typed. It's pretty much instantaneous. The dedicated space for pinned and recommended apps hasn't changed. And now that live tiles are gone, it should make pinning appsa lot more straightforward than it used to be inWindows 8 and onward. I swear, I've seen this menulayout in Linux before though. In case you don't like it, there are already third-partyreplacements popping up. So don't worry too much about that. Anyway, the All Apps buttonon the top right brings you to an alphabetical listing ofall the apps on your system. Just like the Start menudoes by default today. Folders, at least for now, still seem to work asthey do in Windows 10. But Microsoft says that they're going to beremoving folders entirely from the Start menu for the final release. The task bar itself, yes, it's centered. However, you can changethat by right clicking on it and clicking on Task Bar Settings. Though you'll note that right clicking no longer gives you any window controls, task manager or toolbars to play with. And you can't choose the position that's located on-screen either. I'm sorry, no more verticaltaskbar for you, Abraham. You can also turn on and offthe dedicated search button, which despite it being the same thing as the Start menu search isactually kind of useful now because it gives you recent search results as you hover over it. That's pretty cool. You can also turn on and offthe integrated Teams chat and the widget panel button. Speaking of the widgets panel. That's a thing. They made a big dealabout it, but frankly,
I don't see it being all that useful. By default, you've got your weather, your money, your sports and your news, but I'd hazard a guess that most people aren't usingMicrosoft services for those. There doesn't seem to bea way to personalize it outside of Microsoft services. There's no widget store. So basically the onlyway to manage your news and interests is to go to MSN. (he heaves a protracted sighs) Your mileage may vary here. Hopefully Microsoftallows third-party widgets to exist here too. Otherwise I see it beingcompletely overlooked by almost everyone. Sort of like that news interest button that Windows 10 reasonably got. Notification center, meanwhile, has been significantly updatedwith a very Apple-like view of stacked cards that includes the calendar aswell as your notifications. The controls that usedto live here, like WiFi and Bluetooth toggles,now live in the same area as the network and audioicons in the system tray, which is now called taskbar corner, I guess. And they similarly slide in as cards, including controls for anymedia that's currently playing. Like Windows 10, you can choose which quicksettings are visible here. If for example, you want akeyboard layout switcher. There it is. Unlike Windows 10, right clicking on most objects in the OS, the desktop included, now brings up a new glassy context menu with bigger, more spaced out items. With this Show more options button, which just shows the oldWindows context menu. You can't win them all, I guess. That's gonna be interesting for people with, say, 7-zip intheir right-click menu, who now are going to haveto make extensive use of this Show more options button. Have fun with that.
But hey, it's not all bad. In folder views, there's now an open Windows Terminal item, a feature that I legituse in Linux all the time. It's a nice touch. Windows Terminal, by the way, is a brand new app. It's hardware accelerated, and it can run any kindof command prompt at all in a tabbed interface, keeping your workspace alittle bit more manageable than it has been in the past. Where Windows 10 only hasPowerShell and command prompt, and these are available here as well, you can add your own. Here we go. We can use any command line we want. So if I had Bash, for example,with subsystem for Linux, that would work here too. Oh, and like many Linuxterminal emulators, it can detect URLs andmake them clickable. This is all pretty sweet if you ask me, and long overdue. File explorer has beencompletely redesigned with a simplified UI that only has the mostcommon features right there in the top bar. It's not a ribbon anymore. Instead contact sensitiveoptions like formatting or optimizing drives andmapping network shares live in this See More menu, and incidentally map network drive isn't an option in the right-click menu anymore, much to my chagrin. There is no right-clickcontrol to customize the top panel either.
At least not yet. But the familiar options window is still there. So you can tweak how everything works. Almost all the options here are the same as in Windows 10, but there's one standout setting, Decrease space betweenitems, AKA compact view. You can also toggle this onthe main bar's view menu. And what this does isrestore the old views for lists, details and small icons. Wait, old views? Yep. By default, Windows 11 addsextra spacing to these views, including on the sidebar, presumably to make touchinputs less frustrating. It's an interesting approach to be sure, but it's probably goingto annoy you at first, unlike our new waterbottle lids, super slick, and you get a 50% discountif you buy it with, or already own an LTT waterbottle at lttstore.com. What may also annoy youare the folder icons. Seriously, they look like they were takenfrom a random Linux theme with how mismatched thecolors and iconography are. Not only that, but the indicator thata folder contains files is much smaller now. Being an itsy-bitsy sliver of white next to the folders tab. Sure, it looks neater andis more realistic, I guess, but it's tougher to make out at a glance because rather than looking for a shape, you're now looking for contrast. And the icons are already pretty bright. So good luck with that. Not only that, but that also means youdon't get any icon previews of files in a folder asyou do on Windows 10.
I can't say I'm a fan of that. And not all apps got the same makeovers that Explorer and theTerminal have either. Notepad is still as basic as ever. And if you dig around enough, you'll find apps thatdate back to Windows 3.1, complete with 16-color icons. The old-school control panelis still hanging out here too if you look for it. Although unlike the phone dialer, they did give it new icons. To Microsoft's credit, there's more functionalityin the new Settings app than ever before.
So chances are, you won't need to digthrough the old control panel as often as you used to. Crucially, toggles to enableand disable network adapters have been added to the new advanced network settings pane, and you can get all therelevant status info here, too. It still opens up the old-schoolNetwork Connections window if you need to make any changes to the adapters themselves though, or do anything fancy like bridging. There are a few other goodies in here, like being able to restrict app access to download folders as wellas all the existing controls for documents, pictures, et cetera. And all of this is laid out in a much easier to navigate selection of sub-menus than thesometimes labyrinthine Settings menu in Windows 10.
It's still there. It's just a lot easier to navigate IMO. Even the System overview that, frankly, isn't thatuseful in Windows 10, got an overhaul, now showing you the status of Office 365, OneDrive and Windows Update. The Display section got asignificant overhaul too. Now multiple displaysare hidden behind a menu rather than havingdisplay arrangement panel front and center. Like if you have a singlemonitor, why do you need it? Scale and resolution arehigher up on the list of most items. Although I would prefer the refresh rate to be adjustable here too, rather than being hidden under the advanced display settings. To be fair, I guess for most people, that really is an advanced setting. So I guess I'll give it a pass. HDR though, that has its own section thatcomes before all the others. No longer a little link hiddenamong all the other stuff. The menu itself isn'tsignificantly different, but it does include the auto HDR setting, which we'll get to later. For now, if we go back to the advanceddisplay settings pane, you'll see that Microsoft has added lines about the HDR certificationand peak brightness of your display. Which is such a nice quality of life thing for troubleshooting. It really feels likeHDR is finally becoming a first-class feature. And it's about time. Come on, Linux.
Time to pick up the pace. It's not to say that all the settings app changes are good. Changing your default browser has become significantly more difficult now, with the removal of commonapp types like web browsers, mail readers and media players. Instead, now you have to change the handler for every link type in filetype individually, which (he sighs) Microsoft, buddy, listen. This used to be a criticism of Linux. Why do you want to makeit a criticism of Windows? Where the logical conclusionis that you're doing it so that people will finallygive up and use Edge? It's all well and good that you want to give people more granular control. But as user-friendly as this UI is, I don't want to spend five minutes adjusting all of these settings every time I switched to using a new app. Can you imagine what the newSet as default browser prompts are gonna look like? (he exhales) Speaking of imagining how things look. While using Windows 11, one of the things you'll notice is that even apps that aren't designed around Windows 11'srounded corners design, well, they've got rounded corners. Even things with custom skins like Steam. This hasn't been a problem for me yet, but I guess we'll have tosee if it reacts poorly to certain types of windows, like skinned media players for example. What, people still use those, right? Windows 11 is less consistent with other design elements though. It's still jarring to be in dark mode and load up a classic app, like Notepad or Device manager, and see that it's still usingthe old school Windows UI, where even the title bardoesn't fit the new look. At least touch users shouldappreciate how much easier it is to drag stuff around thanksto the larger touch targets.
As well as the new touchscreen gestures and better auto rotationwith snap windows. The new touch keyboardresembles most mobile keyboards in both standard and smallmodes right down to the emoji and Tenor GIF button. Interestingly, there's also classic emotes in camoji here. Though, while categorized, these aren't searchable like emoji are. Huh, man, these classic ASCIIemoticons bring back memories. Oh, wow, what's this? (glassy music) (clears throat) Holy balls. This video has gone on for how long and I've only talked about the new UI? See what I mean about lotsof superficial changes coming together to makesomething much more substantial? The crazy part is I'm not even done yet. Virtual desktops got a lot of love, and you can set them up almost as completely differentworkspaces with unique wallpaper and snap layouts. But what are snap layouts?
These let you create window layouts, like how you've been ableto do since Windows 7, but with far more flexibilitythan we've seen to date. And thanks to the snap groups feature, these layouts can be saved and restored when you connect an externaldisplay, for example. Snap groups keep theselayouts in a single place on the taskbar so it can beminimize and maximize wholesale. You can kick this whole process off by either dragging your windowto the side of the screen as usual, or by hovering overa window's maximize button and selecting a layout. You need a 1920 pixel wide display in order to access thesetriple snap layouts. But overall, this whole feature setis a serious improvement for not just laptop users, but anyone whose desktoplayout randomly shifts when their monitors go to sleep.
Like mine. My workstation's monitorsdo that to me all the time. I use a program called Sizerto shuffle windows around, but this could mean I no longer need it. Now, all I need is AltDraggingintegrated into Windows. I can dream, right? Overall, though, the UI feels much smootherand more responsive than Windows 10, and a lot of that probablyboils down to faster, smoother animations,particularly in modern UIS. But even something as smallas launching File Explorer feels more responsive thanit does on Windows 10. And aside from potentialoptimizations under the hood and what Microsoft callsa new storage stack, my suspicion is that Windows 11 is leaning on its heavier RAM requirements in order to moreaggressively cache recently and frequently used programs. I don't have any solidproof of this, however. Now let's talk new features. Running Android apps is the big one many people are looking forward to, but unfortunately I've gotnothing to tell you about them 'cause they haven't beenenabled in Windows 11 yet. Not even by downloadingthe APK files manually.
I did try. The Microsoft store looks pretty much like it does in Windows 10 right now. So presumably once that gets updated, we'll be able to get a peekat how this will all work. For now, we'll just have tohurry up and wait, I suppose. The other big headliner feature is direct storage. Although it's no longerWindows 11 exclusive. Direct storage basically accelerates the loading of textures and assets intoyour graphics card's memory without having to botherwith the CPU at all. So the CPU is free to do its own thing. It makes things a lot faster,or at least it should. We just don't know yet. What it will supposedlybe in Windows 11 is faster than it will be on Windows 10 as a result of that new storage stack. Although again, how this works inpractice is anyone's guess because we don't have a baseline for how it runs on Windows 10 yet either. Once it gets supported, we'll be checking it out.
So make sure you get subscribedso you don't miss it. There are some features we can test today, and the big one is auto HDR. This debuted on the Xbox Serieses, and as the name suggests, this requires an HDR monitor and can automatically generateHDR metadata for SDR games running Direct X 11 or 12. It works by generating a heatmap for high-intensity pixels and translating that intoextra brightness data that can be displayedas though it were HDR. The effect is, honestly, shockingly good. It doesn't crush blacksor blur out whites. And it doesn't feellike the color space is artificially extended. Like in some scenes, the HDR effect doesn't lookany different from SDR at all. But in others, thedifference is night and day, and this is going to be whatmakes people keep HDR enabled instead of toggling iton and off all the time. It's not quite on the same level of native HDR-supporting games, but it's pretty dangimpressive nonetheless. This split-screen effect by the way, is unique to the betaversion of Windows 11, and it's hidden behind a registry key.
Frankly, I think they should put a toggle in the HDR settings page so people can test theirgames and displays. But what do I know? Windows 11 is expected to launch sometime in the holiday season. Current rumors suggest October. And when it does, you've got a bit of prep workto do before you can upgrade. We've already done a dedicated video on how to install Windows 11, but the short version is that you'll need to enable your system's trusted platform module, either physical or built into your firmware, and you'll need to enable Secure Boot. Without these prerequisites, the official installationmethods won't allow you to proceed because thesefeatures together allow for significant security improvement. This security, which can be enabled in Windows 10 as well by enabling your TPM and Secure Boot, is also why Microsoftisn't officially supporting Intel's Kaby Lake or AMD'sRyzen-1000 processors. Those CPUs lack the instructions necessary to do this security and hardware, meaning you'll take a performance hit.
Here are the full officialsystem requirements in case you were curious. We've marked everythingthat can be worked around with an asterisk. The upgrade is going to be free for all current Windows 10 users, just like Windows 10 was freefor Windows 7 and 8 users. But we still don't knowif it'll cost anything for new builds. If it does, presumably it'll be the sameprice as Windows 10 right now, which is 109 for Home and 149 for Pro. But should you upgrade?
If you've got a very recent PC and you can't bear thethought of leaving Windows, chances are yes. But if not, or if you just don't want to until the bugs are ironed out, Windows 10 is gonna stickaround until October 2025, which should give you plentyof time to weigh your options. And plenty of time for this segue to our sponsor Micro Center. - Thanks Micro Center forsponsoring this video. You can get the best pricesand selection on anything tech at any one of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. If you use Micro Center'scustom PC builder, you can spec up the bestPC at any price point. And once you're done in the PC builder, just add your computer and setup to the Micro CenterCustom Builds Showcase, which is a great placefor people to gather and discuss each other's builds and get inspiration for their next PC. So don't wait, head to the link in the video description to check out Micro Center, and get a coupon code for a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones. - Thanks for watching, guys.
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