Windows 11. From Beginner to Advanced

1. Introduction video: Hello, and welcome to Windows 11, from beginner to advanced. My name is Mark and I'm a full-time at course creator and marketer. What I would like to do in this video is give you a brief overview of what this class is all about. So you know what to expect and what skills you'll walk away with as well. So there's two main points I'd like to start with. To do this class, all you need is a Windows operating system and you'll be good to go. My second, this class covers the various features and functionality that Windows 11 has to offer. And it also covers basic computer optimization. So when those 11 has the best platform to run on. So if you complete this class, what will you learn? Well, of course, you'll learn about the many great new features that Windows 11 has to offer. This would include handy keyboard shortcuts, memory optimization, personalizing windows to your taste and or needs. Compute optimization to unlock your computers full potential, Managing startup applications, event reminders, and much more. Throughout the class, there are a number of exercises for you to complete and upload to the project gallery. And this will help to reinforce the various things you'll learn throughout this class. They're also downloadable resources for you to download and use however you like. And all of this is located within the project description area. Once you complete this class, what we walk away with, you'll walk away with a set of skills that will set you above the average Windows 11 user. With these skills being highly relevant for at least the next five to ten years or for however long you use Windows 11. The skills can also be applied to other versions of Windows as well. So having the skill set on your resume really can stand out. And finally, what do I need from you as an enrolled student? All I need from you is 100 per cent. And as they say, if you put 100% in, Surely you will get 100 per cent out. So anyway, I hope you enjoy this class and I'll see you in the first tutorial. 2. Use these shortcuts to improve your Windows 11 experience: So as the title suggests, this is all about improving your Windows 11 experience. So the features, functionality and shortcuts I'm going to introduce you to are worth memorizing. I don't just mean from this tutorial, but of course, throughout the whole course as well, you can save or maybe thousands of hours just by spending a little time memorizing a few dozen shortcuts. And I literally mean thousands of hours time that can be spent with family, friends, and maybe advancing your career. Now if you've used Windows before, then it's good chance you will already know some of these shortcuts, but some of them could very well be new. So anyway, let's get started. The first shortcut I'm going to show you is probably the most useful shortcut you could ever use on a Windows computer. It's a shortcut I've used for many years. And basically what it does is it just allows you to jump between the current application you have open and the last application you also have open. So you can just jump between those two applications just by using this one shortcut. So in order for this to work, you have to have at least two applications open on your computer. On my system, I have Chrome open, and I also have illustrator open here. Let's say I wanted to quickly jump over to Illustrator while all I'd have to do is hold down the Alt key and then press the Tab key once. And as you can see, it jumps right over. And I'll do that again. And I don't know if you can see this, but as I'm doing this, you can see there's a sort of in-between window that shows up very briefly. And that's basically this window here. Now to get this up and running, what you have to do is you have to hold down Alt Control and then press the Tab key. Then let go of all of the keys. Here you can just get this overview of all of the applications that are open on your computer. To select any of these, you can just use your directional arrows and then press Enter. Or you can use your mouse, of course, or you can use the Tab key. But once again, the most useful shortcut is just to hold down Alt and quickly press the Tab key to quickly jump back and forth between the two latest applications. Now let's say you wants to take a look at something that's behind, maybe your browser or any application that you have open or you can do is you can hold down the Windows key and press the down arrow once. And then once again. Take a look at what you need to look at. But just keep in mind that my finger is down on the Windows key the whole time. Now I can press the up arrow and then I'll press it once again. That reattaches the application in front of me. Now if I were to do this, hold on the Windows key and press down on my keyboard and down once again. Then let go of the Windows key. Then press the Windows key once again. Then press up to maybe try and bring back the browser. As you can see, what is being affected now is Adobe Illustrator. So once you let go of that Windows key, it disengages the connection with that particular application. Now I have another two shortcuts which allows you to kind of just shut down things straight away. But I've decided not to show you in this tutorial because I know exactly what will happen. You'll probably use those shortcuts and then close down this tutorial. But what I've done is I've just included those two shortcuts within the downloadable resource that you can download after this tutorial. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna hold down the Windows key and press down and down once again to expose my desktop. I'll let go of the Windows key. And what I'm gonna do now is I'm just going to right-click go to View, and I will show my desktop icons. Now quite a common functionality that I use quite a lot and it basically works. And I would say pretty much most applications is just to hold down the Control button and scroll forward with the roller on your mouse. And as you can see, it makes things larger. If you scroll forwards. And then if you scroll backwards, it makes them smaller. And of course it works in your Internet browser as well. Like I said, it works in many different applications. If you're not using a mouse or you have to do is just put your two fingers on the mouse pad. Hold down control and move your fingers upwards to zoom in or down to zoom out. Now if you find it hard to see something on your computer and you need to zoom in very quickly just to take a closer look. There was a shortcut to do that. And all you have to do is just hold down the Windows key and press the plus icon on your keyboard. And then this happens. So you zoom right in. Now to zoom back out, you can hit these plus and minus icons if you wanted to. But you can also hold down the Windows key and press the plus and minus button on your keyboard. Now if you really are hard of site, there is this functionality here where you can click on this option here. And anything you click on, on your desktop or anywhere else on your computer. Windows 11 will sound off or tell you what it is. So I'm sure you heard that. Let's go for this one here. Captures L of G RD volume. Now to get rid of this, you can just come to the X here. And the normal view will be restored. When I first open up my computer, typically I go to my browser and it's not that difficult just to double-click on Chrome here on my taskbar, or maybe here on the desktop. But there's an easier way of doing this. All of these applications here starting from, I think it was this one here. So 12345678. All of these applications starting from the store have a number that corresponds to it. So my browser number is number five. So to open this up with the shortcuts, I can hold down the Windows key and press five on my keyboard. You can see the browser opens up. And then I can also do the same with Adobe Illustrator. So something like that. Now let's say I don't actually have Adobe Illustrator attached to my task bar. What I can do is I can find the actual. Let's go for now. We'll use the Adobe Illustrator. I can right-click, come down to Show More Options. And then I'm going to click on Pin to taskbar. Now these two applications here are only temporary. But once these disappear, Adobe Illustrator will be, I suppose, where this black application is, which is my Mojave Video Suite. But right now where it is, the corresponding number is 12345678. So that's the Windows key plus number eight. And as you can see, it opens up. And finally the last two shortcuts. If you hold down Control, Shift and press N, you can create a new folder on your desktop. And then also, let's say if you're working in an office environment or any environment where you need to lock your computer straightaway, all you have to do is just hold down the Windows key and press L and U will be logged out of Windows. So typically when I share my office space with these other people that I don't know that well, when I leave my computer, I tend just to hit that shortcut so that I logged out of windows, which means my system is safe so long as they don't actually take the whole computer. But I am logged out of Windows. So those are the only shortcut someone show you in this tutorial. And as you probably already know, there is a resource you can download afterwards with all of these shortcuts that I've mentioned. 3. Access this course using a batch file: One thing you might find quite useful on a Windows computer, and in particular Windows 11 is how to create and use batch files. So there's two tutorials on this topic. But in this first tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can open up certain websites with a batch file. Now you might be thinking, okay, well, what is a batch file? While a batch file allows you to open up batches of things like maybe websites within a Chrome browser and, or applications. So the first batch file we're going to create, which is one that will allow you to access this course straight from your desktop. Now you don't have to use it. Strictly speaking, just for this course, you can create the batch file with any websites you want. But just in this particular instance, we're going to link the batch file to this actual course. So first of all, I'm just going to right-click on my desktop because I've had in my icons away. Welcome to View. And then I'll click on Show Desktop Icons. And as you can see, I already have two batch files here. So this is what they look like. They have these sort of gears in the middle. So first and foremost, what you need to do is you need to come to the Chrome browser or whatever browser you're using. And then basically you should have something that looks like this. Maybe not exactly the same because I'm still creating the course at the moment, but the principles will still be the same. All you have to do is go and get the URL for this course. So just click on the URL bar up here, right-click and copy. And we use this in a second. You can just minimize the window. And then what you need to do is you need to open up the Notepad. So come to the magnifying glass, comes to search, type in Notepad and open that. Now there's a little bit of code to write, but there isn't that much. Starts off with the at symbol. Then type echo space, and then type off. Press Enter to go down one line, type and start. In this particular instance, I'm starting Chrome, but you can just type in whatever browser you use and put it in double quotes. In-between those two quotes, hold down Control and press V to paste in the URL for the course. Now we need to save this as a batch file and not as a text document. So you can come to File, come down to Save As, and then you can place it on your desktop or wherever you like. You can call it whatever you like. But maybe windows course is probably the most relevant name. So once you've typed in your name, put in a full stop and type in bat, which stands for patch off. You've done that, you can come to this drop down here, click on all files because this is the type we need to save it as. And then click Save. Now you can just x the notepad itself. So here we have the batch file itself. And if I were to double-click on this, now, you can see that the course opens up. So pretty handy stuff, but let's say you wanted to also include another website. Let's just go for Wikipedia, their main landing page. I'll copy the URL control plus C once I've selected it. And I'll go back to my batch file. And what I want to do is right-click on it, come down to Show More Options and then come to edit. I'll put it in another two double quotes. And I'll paste in my URL. I'll hold down Control and press S to save because it's still registered as a batch file. So I don't have to go through all of that and add the dot bat extension or anything like that. I can just save it by holding down Control and pressing S. I can now get rid of this. And what I'll do is for good practice, I'll get rid of this here as well. And I'll double-click here. You can see Wikipedia is opened up. And then also my course as well. Now it's actually landed on this page. This is the sort of the course creators page. But when you use this URL, you will actually be taken to the curriculum itself. That's how you create a batch file. It's really useful to have, especially if, let's say you're quite a heavy user with regard to opening up various websites and maybe applications, which is something I'll show you later on down the line. All you would have to do is just double-click on that batch file. And then all of those websites and applications would open up in one go. Of course, there's something to be aware of here, and that is the processing power of your computer. If you ask it to do too much in one go, it might crash your computer. So just be careful about the amount of websites you're asking your batch file to open up for you. Okay, So we'll move on now. 4. Snap layouts: With Windows 11, there is this new feature called snap layout, and you may have already heard about it. So what this allows you to do is just place certain applications on your screen in a sort of a more controlled manner. So for instance, with, let's say Windows ten, maybe you wanted to have one application take up half the screen on the left, and another application to take up the other half of the screen. Now you were able to do that in Windows ten and also in Windows seven. But it was a little bit difficult to use. But now we have this inbuilt feature, like I just mentioned, the snap layout feature. So on my PC right now, I have several applications that are open and I want to view all of them at the same time. So I think I'm going to take advantage of the snap layout feature. Now to use this feature, all you have to do is just to go to one of your applications. So let's just go for this here where I have this video ready to play. I want to have this at the top left. So all I have to do is just come to this option here. And here we have four options. So first of all, I'm going to go for this option here and have this video play on the left. Okay, so now that I've clicked on that, Windows has detected that there are these other applications, which are these applications here that will also open. So it's asking, okay, what other ones do you want on the right? So I think what I'll go for is the Chrome browser. So I'll click on that. And now I can have this video play on the left and I can surf the web if that's what tastes they'll say these days. However, if I wanted to have four of these applications open in front of me at the same time. What I could do is I can just come to this option once again. And I'm going to put this at the top left. Now you might think to yourself, okay, well you just click on the top-left wise or not here. To be honest with you, this is the Windows 11 inside a program version of Windows 11. So maybe this is just a small bug that Windows 11 has at the moment. But needless to say, once I click on one of these options, it will show at the top-left. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on my file explorer here. And I'm gonna put this up here at the top right. And then I'm going to put my photos here at the bottom left. And as you can see, the video is actually appeared now. And I'm going to put Wikipedia within Google Chrome here at the bottom right. You can see how easy it is to actually use this. Now as you can see what the Chrome browser, it is just a little bit too. While I would say compacts. And even though I'm doing this course and a, quite a large screen, I'm actually doing this on a 65 inch screen TV. And I can see this quite easily if you're on a laptop or maybe just a normal sized monitor, then you might struggle to see some of the finer details, let's say within your internet browser and these other applications. But with some of the applications, if you just hover your mouse over that application, hold down the Control key and scroll forward with your mouse. You can zoom in a little bit like this. I think I've already shown you this in one of the first tutorials. Now it doesn't work in all of the applications. So for instance, it won't work with a video and a boat work with, or actually maybe it will list just try out. Try this out. Okay, It does work with the photos and I do know it works with a File Explorer. So as you can see, I can change the size by holding the Control button and scrolling back and forth with the wheel on my mouse. If you're not using a mouse, you can just hold down the Control button and put two fingers on the mouse pad on your laptop and push upwards and down. And you should get the same effect. And then finally, if you remember the shortcuts, you can hold down the Windows key and press the plus icon on your keyboard. And this effects will happen where you zoom in like this, you can just move your cursor around. So like I said, you should remember this from one of the first tutorials in this course. And you can just adjust the view here within this panel. So anyway, that is the snap layout feature, pretty handy stuff. I think it really was a good idea in the past with Windows ten and Windows seven. This is the kind of thing I wanted and this is probably the reason why they've actually implemented it this time. Because it is really handy to have. 5. Record your computer screen: With Windows 11, there is an inclusive software that allows you to record your computer screen. Now strictly speaking, it is designed to record a gaming on your PC, but you can use it for other things as well. So for instance, you can record certain activities within your browser. So maybe a YouTube video or a Zoom meeting or something like that. You can also use it for some of the other Microsoft applications. So for instance, I was able to record a tutorial within Microsoft Excel using the software. But anyway, I've got these two clips of what the software can record. So I'll quickly show you the first clip. Now. Here's the second clip of a game. So I'll show you that now. So as you can see, it is pretty handy. So when it comes to do's and don'ts with the software. While actually I suppose it would be called the do's and cons. Some things you can do and some things you cannot. So for instance, you cannot record your desktop. So what you see right now in front of you. So what I'll do is I'll just show my icons so that it looks like a real desk top. You cannot record this here, and you cannot record your File Explorer. So this here, you're limited to this. Now, as you already know, you can record your browser like this, but if at any point you minimize your browser, and so same with games as well. And you expose your desk top, the recording will just stop and won't even tell you that it stopped. It will just stop. So just be aware of that. When you record with the software, it's nice to know where these clips are actually being saved to. Now strictly speaking, the folder is only a few clicks away. But what I'd like to do is have the folder on the desktop itself so that I can just click on it and have access to those clips straightaway. So what we're gonna do is we're going to move that folder and put it onto the desktop. So to get that folder, what we have to do is we have to hold down the Windows key and press I. And this will open up the windows settings. And you have to come to gaming. Then come to captures. Then this is the folder we want here. So I'm going to click on Open Folder. And I'm going to take a look at the path here. So it says it's this PC videos captures. This is where this folder is. I'm going to click on this PC here. In fact, I didn't have to click all the way back, But it's okay. I'll click on videos. And I'll click on the captures for them. And I'm going to hold down Control and press C on my keyboard to copy it. Minimize this, and I'll get rid of this here. Control plus V to paste it on my desktop. So here's the captures folder. And as you can see, I already have some screen captures in here. The next thing is setting up your microphone. Now, if you're using a laptop, then more than likely you will have some type of in-built microphone. However, if you're using a desktop PC, then more than likely you will not have an in-built microphone. Well, I mean, some of them do, but typically they don't. And you have to use some type of external microphone. But with regard to actually recording yourself, like what I'm doing now, you have to go to the sound settings to set that up. So just come to the little magnifying glass here. Come up to the search bar, type in sound, and then click on sound settings. And then just scroll down a little bit and you'll see the microphone that I'm using is registered here. So if you're on a laptop and you have an external microphone plugged in, you should have the option of two microphones to choose from. And you can just choose whichever one you want. There's also another thing here, which is the volume of the microphone. If you're recording a new microphone is really low, then you need to come to this area here and just turn up the microphone. Once your microphone is all set up, you can get rid of these settings here. And now we can open up the screen recording software itself. Now, I tried to do this earlier, but unfortunately, my screen recording software was clashing with the Windows screen recording software. So what I had to do was I had to compile a whole load of screenshots and put them into PowerPoint. Now let's get your screen recorder up and running. You have to hold down the Windows key and press G on your keyboard. And this will show up. Now to get rid of it, all you have to do is just press Escape on your keyboard and it will shut down. So I'm just going to run through a few of the settings with the screen recorder. But I think a few of them are pretty obvious. To start recording, you can hit this button here and it will start recording. Oh, and by the way, when you start recording, it won't actually see what we're actually seeing on the screen. It will just see what's in the background. But yeah, you hit this button to start recording. And there's also this here, the microphone setting. You can turn this on or off if you want to record yourself on a microphone. So that's pretty straightforward. Then there's this middle module here. And here at the top we have these widgets. Now if you wanted to add widgets, and there aren't that many of them, you can just come to this icon here and add some widgets. Now as you already know, we've already added a Captures folder to the desktop where we can get a hold of our captures straight away. But if you really wanted to, you can hold down the Windows key and press G to come to this window here. And you can just click on gallery here once it's been added to the toolbar and you'll gain access to those clips. But I just prefer to have the captures folder on the desktop. Then there's this icon here, and this is very similar to the Processes tab within the Task Manager. And basically it just tells you what programs are running right now or what applications are running in the background. So that I suppose before you start your game, you might want to shut some of them down so that your computer has as much processing power as possible. So with regards to this window, to get the real-time information, you can just hold down Control, Shift and press Escape. The Task Manager will open up. And then you just want to navigate to the processes tab. And basically they should be identical. So whatever you see in this window here should be identical to what you're seeing in here. In this particular instance. They're not identical because these screenshots are from yesterday, but basically they should be identical. So before you shut anything down, just make sure that you know what you're shutting down because it might be a critical program. So just be careful with regard to that. Then finally, we have the settings here. And there's just two main areas. I want to take a look at this, the capturing section, which is the audio to record. And this gives you the option to record the game and enabled Mike, we have the all option here or not. Choose whatever option suits you best. And then there's the shortcuts themselves. So we already know the Windows key plus g brings up the screen recorder itself. But the other one to remember is going to be this one here. The Windows key plus Alt plus r to start recording and stop recording. If you can't be bothered to click this icon here. Like I said before, to get rid of this, all you have to do is press Escape and it will disappear. So this is one last thing I want to go through with you. We need to go back to the Windows settings. So hold down the Windows key and press I on your keyboard. Then come to gaming. Then come to captures. And just scroll down a little bit. We have these settings here. So the main wants to take a look at, I suppose, would be maybe the max recording length. Because sometimes you might forget to turn off the recorder, in which case you don't want it to eat up all of the memory on your computer. So you might want to set this to whatever you want. Capture the audio when recording the game. That's an important one. And there's also the video frame rate. So at the moment it's set to 30 frames per second, which is recommended. And that's fine with me considering Hollywood only uses 24 frames per seconds. So if 24 frames per second is good enough for Hollywood, 30 frames per second is good enough for me. Then there's the video quality. And depending on how powerful your computer is and how much memory you have as well. Because the higher video quality is obviously going to use more memory. You might want to choose high or just standard. So whichever one you prefer, you can just turn this option off here to have the cursor within your game. It's totally up to you. Once you're done, you can just exit that. And we're all done that. Once you've finished recording, remember, you can just navigate to your captures folder on the desktop and it should be in here. So the one thing to take away from this is just to remember you cannot record the desk top. You can not record the File Explorer, but there are other things as well you need to be aware of. So for instance, if I was to go to YouTube and watch a video and put that video in full screen. You may find that the screen recorder will stop working. So I noticed this within Windows 11. It didn't happen with Windows ten, but it happens in Windows 11. So that's just something to be aware of. So you just have to test, test, test, just to find out what the software is actually capable of. Okay, we're gonna move on to the next tutorial now where I'm going to quickly introduce you to the software that I use just in case you're interested in doing what I do. 6. Disk cleanup: What we're going to take a look at now is something called the disc cleanup. So what did this cleanup can do for you is it can help to free up space on your hard disk. And this in turn can also improve your system performance. With the disc cleanup process. It basically searches your desk and shows you the temporary files on your system. So the likes of internet cache files, unnecessary program files, and it deletes them in terms of unnecessary Program Files. This would also include the contents within your Recyclebank. If you've got anything in the recycle bin that you're having second thoughts about? I'd recommend that you go into the recycle bin and take those items out because this process will delete them. Yes. So go to the recycle bin, open it up, Take a look in here. If there's anything you want to keep, just make sure you click hold and drag and pull them onto the desk top or use whatever arrangement you like. Now if you've never done this before with your computer, this process can take quite a long time to do. I remember one such case, one of my friends, that this process and he'd never done it before and actually took I think it was upwards of around six hours to do a disc cleanup on his system. But something else that was really slowing down the process was the facts that is, computer was using a hard disk drive. If you're using a solid-state drive, this process should be a lot faster than a hard disk drive system. But if you're not sure what type of drive your computer actually uses, we can quickly identify that in the File Explorer. So to open up the file explorer, hold down the Windows key and press E on your keyboard. And that is a very handy shortcut because how often do you use the File Explorer? I would say more than likely because you're using a Windows computer, you visit the File Explorer quite a lot. So that is the Windows key plus e. It's definitely one of those shortcuts that's worth remembering and using as well. So in the File Explorer and just scroll down to this PC. And just before we move on, just make a mental note of how much free space there is on your local desk. Because after the disc cleanup, you should see a little bit more space open up on the hard disk. Okay, so to see what your system runs on, you can just right-click on the local disk, come to properties that navigates to Tools, and then come down to optimize. And here you can see on my system, I have a solid state drive. Yours will say solid-state drive for the C drive, or it might say the hard disk drive. Now, if you are on a hard disk system, like I said, it could take a lot longer for you to, to carry out this process. If so, you may have to put this tutorial on pause or whatever you want to do, but yeah, just keep in mind that it might take a long time to carry out this process. Okay, so once you've identified the type of driver that you use, you can just get rid of these windows here. I'll just press the Windows key to bring up my task bar here. And what you wanna do is just click on this magnifying glass and starts to type in the word desk. And straightaway we have disc cleanup show up. Now if it doesn't show up, just make sure you type in the whole two words disc cleanup. And once we click on this icon, the process will start. I'm gonna go ahead and do this now. Now I don't know if you saw that, but there's this first little pop-up that shows up. And it's basically just a little progress bar telling you that it's looking at your system. Typically that only shows up for a few seconds. And then it moves to this window here. So at the moment it's telling me that I can free up to just under one gigabytes of disk space on my C drive. But what I can do is I can also check these here to delete these temporary files as well. As you can see, we have the recycle bin here. Checks oh, actually, before I move on, you could keep this unchecks if you want. If you don't want to delete what's in neuroscience. But in this particular instance, I'm going to keep it checked because I do want to delete it. And at this point you can just click on cleanup system files. And it's actually moving quite fast. So that's pretty good. If this processes is slow at any point, I'm just going to edit it to make it a little bit faster. Okay, so now it's saying you can use disc cleanup to free up to 33 gigabytes of disk space, which is actually quite impressive. I didn't realize it was gonna be so high. So what I can do is I can start to just check these boxes here. Now with regard to the space where freeing up, you'll always find that there is more space to be freed up every time you do it this cleanup, there is always space to be cleaned up, even if you do a disc cleanup. And then directly afterwards do another disc cleanup, There's always files or space that can be freed up. So just keep that in mind. What I think is happening here is some of these temporary files or just being restored almost instantly. And it begs the question, why does windows let you delete these temporary files if it's just going to restore some of them as soon as you delete them. So I suppose that is the question of the day. So once you have selected all of these options here, you can click Okay. And we'll ask if you want to permanently delete these files, and I'm quite happy with that. So I'll click on delete files. And this is probably the longer of the processes. I'm not sure how long it's going to take. But like I said, I will probably just edit the video just to make it a lot more faster. But just looking at the progress bar now it's actually quite fast, So I think we'll be okay. Okay, so that's that process finished. Once that progress bar has finished, it just disappears. And there's no windows saying, well done, you've just done a disc cleanup. You can now move on with your life. It just stops and that's pretty much the end of the process. Okay, so I'm just going to right-click on the desktop here, come to view and I'm going to come to show desktop items. As you can see, my recycle bin has been emptied and something else I wanna do is just come down to this PC. Now it says I have 58.9 gigabytes free on my system. Now, like I said, that figure was quite high and this is probably because I haven't done a disc cleanup on this computer in a very, very long time. But needless to say, I'm pretty happy that I gained an extra, I think it was around 33 gigabytes of free space on my computer. And hopefully when you do this process, you'll end up with a whole load of extra free-space yourself. So that is the disc cleanup process. 7. Personalizing Windows 11: So what I'm gonna do in this tutorial is go through some of the basic settings to personalize Windows 11 to your preference. Now I'm not gonna go into too much detail here because there are lots of settings. But rather I'm going to visit the basic settings because the tutorial would end up being half an hour long. So starting with the first thing. Now, typically when I am on Windows, I don't usually have the task bar exposed like I do here now. I've just kept it exposed for the stakes of the course. Typically what I like It's to do is just to drop down out of sight when I'm doing other things on my computer. And this is just a personal preference of mine. We'll take a look at that setting and a few other settings as well. With regards to the taskbar, see the settings, you can just come down to the taskbar itself. Right-click, come to task bar settings. We just come straight down to the bottom to taskbar behaviors. And here we have automatically hide the task bar. So with this selected, you can see the task bar disappears. And like I said, this is just a personal preference of mine. So you might want to use this yourself, but basically this is how you can turn it on and off. Then we have the taskbar corner overflow. And that is gonna be this area down here at the bottom right. Now if I open up these settings, we have these kind of widgets that you could turn on and off. So let's just take a look at Nvidia Container. I'll turn that on and you can see the icon shows up. And then we have team viewer. You can see that icon shows up as well. So you can just tailor this to your preference. Then we have this area here, the pen menu, touch keyboard and virtual touchpad. Now, to be honest with you, this is a desktop computer, and I think virtual touchpad has something to do with laptops quite possibly. But in any case, I don't actually know. But one thing I do know is the touch keyboard and I have this turned on at the moment. So with that turned on, it shows up down here. And if you click on this, you're presented with this keyboard here. But basically you can turn it on from here. Now, just clicking on personalization up here. Well, actually before I move on, we have these settings here, the task view. So if I turn this off, you can see that option disappears from the taskbar. And then we have widgets, and then we have chat as well. So I'm just going to click on personalization. We end up with these settings here. Now if you're wondering how to get you, you can on the desktop just right-click and come down to personalize. So firstly, we have the background and I think this is pretty obvious. This just deals with the background picture on your desktop. And we have three options here. We have pictures, solid color and slideshow. So solid color allows you to choose obviously a solid color. And then we have picture which is what it's set to now. And then this slideshow. Now if you click on slideshow, what would happen is the pictures would obviously change every now and again. You can specify how often you want those changes to take place. We can do that with these settings here in the Change Picture, every option or setting I should say. So we have one minute, ten minutes and so on. So you can choose that. So with regard to this being a slideshow, they don't actually slide in and out, but rather they just fade in and out. I'm just going to leave this on picture. I'll just click on personalization once again to go back. And I'm not going to go to colors because while I cannot go into too much detail with all of these settings, because it would just be, it would take too long. But rather I'm just going to jump straight into themes. And this is quite an interesting one. You can just choose from these various themes that are available. So let's go for glow. You can see how it changes. Then we have this one here, which is one I kind of like. So what I'll do is I'll just leave it on this. So you can just choose from whatever option you want. Now we have under related settings, contrasted, contrast themes. So I'll click on this. And what you can do is here you can just choose from these four options from this drop-down here. So let's just go for desert. And then click Apply. Then it just takes a few seconds for it to take effect. And then you end up with a look that looks like this. Now I do like this look, but I don't like it as much as the original lock, but maybe you would like to go through some of these options. And who knows, you might find one that you really like. But to put it back to its default setting, you can come back to this drop-down and then click on None, and then click on Apply. And I'm just going to click on personalization once again. And I'm going to come down to only two more. We're going to take a look at, we're going to take a look at lock screen first. So here we have the window spotlight option selected. So when you turn on your computer, you may have noticed that you have this picture in the background that every now and again changes. And this is whatever Microsoft specifies. So I'm quite happy just leaving it on this. But if you want to, you can choose picture or slideshow. Then we have the screen timeout option. And now if you're on a laptop, you might want to take a look at this and just find out how long it takes for your screen to turn off or to turn off when plugged in. And then you have some sleep options here as well. So you just come to these drop-downs and specify what you want. Okay, so that's all I want to take a look at that. Claim back to personalization. Actually, before I go any further, I just wonder where it is. There was actually a screensaver that you can turn on. I think it's under Themes. Let's just take a look. No, it's not here. Actually, it would be under lock screens. Let's just take a look here. Oh, yeah. Okay. No problem. I kind of just star denotes set. So under lock screen, you have screensaver. Now, if you live through the eighties and the early 2000s, there was a time when screensavers were all the rage. Now I can't remember if they were available in Windows ten, but they are available in Windows 11. Income to the setting here and click on it. You'll be presented with this window here. And don't worry about the aspect ratio here you can see it's, it's squared, which is the old aspect ratio for Windows. But in any case, you can come to the drop-down here and you can choose the type of screensaver you want, certain moment minus sets, two ribbons, but you can choose whatever one you want. And there's also 3D text. Now if you choose 3D text, you can come to settings. You can choose what you want the text to say. Then you have the resolution, the size, the rotation speed, and also the type of animation as well. Then just click Okay once you're done. And if you want, you can just click on Preview. Let's take a look. Now with regard to my screen recorder, I'm not sure if this is actually going to record this. So while this just take a look and see if it works. So at the moment, I don't know if that actually works because I need to take a look back at the video. But hopefully it did work. But if it didn't, don't worry, the preview is in here in this monitor. And then you just have this option here to choose how long you want the computer to wait for before it's tones on the screen saver. So once you're done here, you can just click Apply. Then get rid of this here. And you're all done. Now onto the last two things. If you aren't quite a heavy computer user, like I am, you might want to turn on the night lights before you go to bed or some hours before you go to bed. Because as you know, when it comes to blue light, which is what the screen emits, it can mess around with your sleeping pattern. So you might want to take advantage of the night light before you actually go to bed. So come up to the search bar up here at the top-left. Type in night light or just type in night and select Night Lights. Now mine is actually turned on at the moment. I think I need to reset my computer because for some reason, every time I turn it up and then back down, it doesn't seem to be working for some reason. Yeah, I think I need to restart my computer or maybe update my windows. But basically you have the strength here you can choose from, and obviously you can choose to turn it on and off. But then you also have this drop-down here where you can schedule the night light and you can turn on the night light at this time here and have it turn off at this time here. Then finally we have this here. If you hold down the Windows key and press W on your keyboard, you end up with the side panel here. And basically this gives you access to basic information, obviously the weather. And here we have some stock market reports and so on. But if you want to add some other widgets, you can just click on Add widgets. We have some more options here you can choose from. Then just press Escape to get rid of that. So you'll notice this picture in the background. It does look quite nice. Now, you might recall at the beginning I showed you that you can choose a slideshow that will change the picture according to whatever interval you specified. But with regard to these picture backgrounds, these default picture backgrounds, I've noticed that they change automatically anyway. I'm not sure what the intervals are, but I've just noticed every time I've gone to my browser, then come back to the desktop, I've found that maybe the sun is in a different position in the sky, or maybe the trees on here anymore or the whole picture is just changed. So I think that is pretty cool. So the last thing I want to show you now is with the icons on your desktop. So as you can see, if I drag this over to the right here, it doesn't allow me to do that, but rather it just goes back into place here. And this is just something I prefer to keep it all nice and neat. Now, to adjust this, you can just right-click go to View. And then you can un-check auto, arrange icons. Which means you can just move them around freely and they'll stay where they are. Then you have align icons to grid. And I suppose I can see how this works. You can't actually put it in between. It has to be within a column or within a row. So the rows are this way or the columns are the vertical lines. Okay, so that's all I wanted to show you with regard to personalization. We'll move on now to the next tutorial. 8. Setting event reminders: If you're anything like me, then every now and again, you will forget about some type of event that's coming up. Well, the good news is within Windows 11, you can get notified of certain events that are coming up. And this can all be done within Outlook calendar. To get to the Outlook calendar, you can just come down to the search magnifying glass here. Then even though it says calendar here, and even though it says calendar here, it's only here because I just searched for it recently. You can type in calendar here. And here is the application. And you can just click on this. When you first open this, if you've never opened it before, Microsoft might ask if you want to synchronize your email account. And you can go through those various simple steps of synchronizing your e-mail account. If you do that, then you will find that certain emails will input an event into your calendar automatically. So for instance, I had these two flights to the UK on the 15th of December and returning on the 7th of January. And these were put into my calendar automatically. I've also got these two package deliveries from Amazon as well. So it is handy having your e-mail account synchronized to your Outlook calendar. Okay, so first of all, what I need you to do is just make sure you're in the month view. So just click on month. And as you scroll through this calendar with your mouse roller or your up and down arrows on your computer when you're elsewhere in the calendar and you think, actually I want to go back to today's dates. I can quite easily be done just by clicking on today. Then we have these different views here, we have the day view. And this can be broken down into different days and weeks as well. And this can be broken down into work week and week. And then the month view at the end. So how do you input an event? While Let's just say hypothetically, I have a birthday tomorrow on the 15th of January, which is a Saturday. And I wanted to set myself a reminder. What I can do is I can come to the day option here. I'll come to this drop-down. I'm just going to select two day or two days. And if I really wanted to, I can scroll along with these two arrows here, back-and-forth. But let's say my birthday party is at 09:00 PM. I can just scroll down. And within the 15th of January, I can just click on the nine PM slot. You'll be presented with this window here. And typically it's a good idea just to click on More details because you do get more options to click on. Give her events her name, choose your location. You can check this to have it as an all day event or uncheck it and choose a time. So I went full nine PM and let's just say My birthday is going to finish at 1030. And if he really wants to have this event run over multiple days. So you can come to an end date here and you can go further into the future. And then you can put a message in here and this message will be presented to you when you get your notification. Then we have the reminder up here, which is quite important. Now of course, if it's a flight that you want to be reminded of them quite possibly you'd want one days notice. But for my birthday party, I'm just going to go for one hour's notice. So I should get a notification at 08:00 PM tomorrow, provided I leave this event as active. Now, we have this invite people area here on the right. Now you may think, okay, well maybe if you want to invite people to your birthday, you'd want to send them an email and email invite using this tool. But to be honest with you, this is just linked to an online meeting. Because as you can tell, if I were to put a fake email address in here. And then just click on this to use this address. You can see the online meeting button has turned gray. So now this event thinks it's some type of online meeting. So it's not necessarily an invite to my event or my birthday party. It's an invite to an online meeting. And that's not what I want to do. So I'm just going to x this fictitious person here and leave it at that. Okay, So my events is now ready to go. All I have to do is just click on Save. We'll come back to the calendar automatically. And here's my event. And what I can do is I can just click on month. And I can see my event is here and it's telling me that it's at 09:00 PM, signified simply by the nine p. And that's pretty much it. So I should get my notification tomorrow for my birthday party. Now if you want to alter this event here, you can click on it just once and then click on the event itself. You'll come back to this window. You can change whatever you want. Or if you wanted to, you can delete from here as well. You can delete this event. You can also delete the event from here by right-clicking and then coming to delete. There's a few other things just to take a look at here. When I click on the event itself, just once I'm presented with this red shape here on the left. And I can change the shape to signify whats the event is about and the color as well. I can do that just by right-clicking. And we have show as what I can do is I can choose one of these shapes here. So let's just go for working elsewhere. And I'm going to change the shape color. Two, Let's just go for a yellow color. Now. I can come, now I can click on the event itself. Now we have a yellow color with the shape that I chose. And I suppose that just makes things easier when it comes to identifying what an event is all about. Okay, so once your event is set up, you should be notified of the event. And here's just a quick snapshot, a screenshot of a test events that I set up earlier. So no matter where you are on your computer, you'll get this notification as a reminder. And also one other thing. If you use the Outlook calendar app on your phone, more than likely you will get the notification on your phone as well. So if you are particularly busy, that it may be worth downloading the Outlook email app and using that as well. And with regard to the bigger events, the likes of flights and quite possibly packages that are being delivered to you. He may be notified via e-mail as well. 9. Send items via email QUICKLY!: If you've used a computer for any amount of time, at some point you've probably sent something via email. So some type of attachment, like some pictures. So Microsoft documents or whatever it is. I think this is quite common practice. Now to do this, the steps are quite straightforward and simple. You would open up your browser, navigate to your email account, and you may have to login, setup the e-mail, attach the attachments, and send the e-mail off. So yeah, really simple, but there's just a few, too many steps. Well, the good news is you can actually do this right from within the desktop of your computer. So you can cut out loads of unnecessary steps. So that's something I'm going to show you how to do in this tutorial. Now you may already know that when it comes to sending things via email, there was a certain size or limit. So for instance, you cannot send a video that is one gigabytes in size. Most, if not all, email service providers just don't allow for that kind of thing. But for smaller file sizes, the likes of pictures and Microsoft documents, this is fine. You can use this type of service not to send larger file sizes. There are quite a few services out there you can use. I suppose one of the more common services would be Google Drive. But one service that I use quite often and is a favorite of mine is WeTransfer.com. I find their services quite convenient. Now you may already know about WeTransfer. And if you do, then just feel free to skip this part of the tutorial. But basically, you can send up to two gigabytes for free, which is pretty good. And the sign-up process is pretty straightforward. And once you're in, we transfer all you have to have as the recipient's email address. Then you put in your own email. And then I think it's optional for a title or a message. Then you can just click Transfer. And at this point, they will just ask you to confirm your e-mail address with a six-figure code. And then these files will get sent off and they will stay active for, I think up to about seven days. Okay, So sending things from here in the desktop. So sometimes there's more than one item that needs to be sent. If this is the case, all you have to do is just click on the item. I should say the first item, hold down Control, click on the second item, and then go for however many items you want to send. So in this case, we're just gonna do too. And I can just right-click and I can click on the Share button here, the Share icon. And this will start the process. So that's how you do that. But in this particular example, I just want to send one item. So all we have to do is just right-click on the item, come to the Share icon here. This will start the process. Now when it comes to sending emails to someone, you do have to have an e-mail address yourself. I think that's pretty straightforward and obvious. Now if you're doing this for the first time, you will have to set up your e-mail account with Microsoft Outlook. And that can quite easily be done just by clicking on this icon here. And that will start the process. Now I'd say that more than likely because you are using Windows 11, you do have an Outlook account. If you don't have an Outlook account, you may have to go off to outlook.com and create an Outlook account. Once you're done with that, you would have to set it up here. And you can do that just by clicking on this icon, just like I said. And then we'll just ask you to put in your email address, your password, and then I think you just click Okay or something like that. But as far as I remember, the whole process is really quite straightforward. Then the email composition templates will open up. Once you're finished with that process, this will open up straight away and you can send off your email. So under normal conditions, once you set up, all you would do is just right-click on the item you want to send. Comes to the Share icon, comes to the mail icon here, then that would be it. And you just add the e-mail address here, and then click send. And you'd be done. So it's pretty straightforward and pretty easy. So as you can see, there's quite a few steps that I was able to eradicate or get rid of when it came to sending someone an email. Now, I am constantly sending people little files here and there. And this is the primary method that I use. I almost never, ever navigates to my e-mail service provider within my browser because that's just way too many steps. I'm always sending people things right from within my desktop. So really convenient stuff. 10. Google lens : When you are online, what is also referred to as surfing the web. At some point you may come across an image that you like. And within that image, there is something that catches your eye. So it could be an item of products or a person. And you want to find out more about it. But it's hard to pinpoint and get details on it. Well, this is where Google Lens comes in handy. So here on the right I have this picture of this kitchen. And let's say you are looking for some type of bar stools for your kitchen. And these bars tools here, these three bars tools catch your eye and you think, I think that's exactly what I'm looking for. But how do you isolate these pictures from within this image here? Or this bar stool, or bar stools from within this picture here. Once this where Google Lens comes in handy. So all you'd have to do is just right-click on the image itself and then come down to search image with Google Lens. This window will open up. And what we can do now as well by default, we have the circles that have shown up. If I were to click on the circle here, you see we have this little search that takes place and it shows us plants that are associated with this image here. So straight away, I know that this is a, however this is pronounced. And it's giving me more details on this particular breed of plant. And then we can also click on the circle here. And it's going to come up with some gray kitchen drawers similar to the one in the picture. But more importantly, I want to take a look at these bar stools here, these kitchen stools. So I'll just click on this image. And I think that this is the one we're looking for here. This is a pretty much a replica. And it could be the actual one in this photo here. So as you can see, that's quite easy to use. Now what I could do is I can also just move this around and put it elsewhere. So let's go for something like this. So now we have these lampshades and as you can see, the ones that Google is found for us are pretty similar. So I'm pretty sure you can see how this works. Let's do this just with one more image. Let's go to this image here of this Formula One car. In fact, let's go for this image here. Let's say I wanted to find out what racing team this car belong to, R belongs to this white car here. So I can right-click, come to the search image with Google Lens. I'll just move this around over the white car here. Okay, so cool. It's telling me that this is the Salvatore a t 01 and it's a Formula One car. Obviously. That's pretty good. So as you can see, it's quite a convenient tool to use. So we're just gonna do one more example here. I'm going to come to Udemy, where you are doing this course currently. And here we have this lady sat on this chair. And I'm going to right-click and I'll click on Google Lens. And straightaway It's showing these sort of tight fitting brown dresses. And if I really wanted to, I can also just narrow this down to this plant here. Okay. It's also registering the table as well. So I'll just move this up to something like this. And there we go. So you can see how accurate this says in that, in this selection here, the plant is over to the right. So Google is also showing us plants, are plants that are over, well, in this case over to the left. So it's also taking the position into account. I think that's pretty cool. So with this last image, I just wanted to show you that it pretty much works with ninety-nine percent of all images within your browser. I should rather say your Google Chrome browser. So hopefully you will find a use for this sometime in the future. Every now and again, I do use it myself. If something catches my eye and I want to find out what it is. 11. Managing startup applications and more: When you turn on your computer, there are applications that start and run automatically. And you probably are already aware of this. But there are applications that don't, strictly speaking, need to run. And as you progress with your ownership of your computer, you will have more and more of these applications and or programs that will start running when you start your computer and they will run in the background. Now obviously, this will impact the performance of your computer. And it's a good idea to know how to manage these applications. So that's why you're gonna be doing in this tutorial, we are going to be Managing startup applications. And this is all done in something called the Task Manager. Now you might already be aware of the Task Manager. When a program refuses to shut down, you may want to go there to force the program to shut down. One of the more well-known roots when it comes to getting to the task manager is to hold down Control Alt, and press Delete. This is quite common knowledge, but there's a few other ways of getting to the task manager. You can, if you want. Just come to the task bar here, comes to the magnifying glass and type in task. And you'll be presented with a task manager here. But the shortcuts that I use is Control Shift Escape. This is what I use pretty much every single time. So starting with the startup applications, just come to this tab here. And actually just before we go any further, when you come to the task manager, if this window is like this, if it looks really small like this, all you have to do is just click on More details and it will open up like this. Yes, So first of all, just come to the startup tab. Here's a list of all of the programs that start when I turn on my own computer. Now some of them have already been disabled by myself. But basically this is the list and I'm pretty sure your list will look different to mine. So what you have to do with this list is just go through each of these applications. And if you find one that you don't really know about and you don't like the looks of it, then you may want to just Google it or something like that just to find out exactly what it is. But some of these applications on my computer are actually quite straightforward. So for instance, Microsoft Edge. I think everyone knows that this is an Internet browser. And as you can see, I've disabled it on my computer. So what I did with this was I just clicked on it and I went to disable. So let me just do this. To do this the opposite way round. You can see it's enabled here. I can click on it here and then just click on Disable. And that means it will not start up when I turn on my computer. So yeah, you can go through this list and just find programs that you don't want running when you turn on your computer. And if you're not quite sure whether to leave it running or not, something you can do is just to look at the startup impact. So what I can do is I can just click at the top of the column here to sort the higher startup impacts to the top, I put the lowest at the bottom, or I should rather say none. And I can see, okay, these five applications here have the highest startup impacts. And I can go through them and just decide whether I want to enable or disable them. And of course I can go through the rest of the list as well. So you can do that with your own computer. And you might find some applications that have a very high startup impacts or just the high startup impacts. And you don't actually need it to run. So it's just slowing your computer down for no reason. So that's how you manage startup applications. There's quite a few other tabs up here, as you can see. I would say that for the general computer, use them, you're probably not going to use most of them. So for instance, Services, details, AP history, quite possibly users, and maybe even performance. The main ones you'll probably going to visit is startup and processes. And like I said, maybe performance. As you can see, the computer system is broken down into these different areas. We have our central processing unit, the memory, the Random Access Memory, the desk. And the desk removable, which is actually a USB drive. I just have plugged into my computer at the moment. Then we have the Internet connection and the graphics processing unit. I suppose the most useful would be the Ethernet option because you'll be able to see what your Internet speed is when it's actually being active, when it's active. Then finally we have the processes. Now, just like with the Performance tab, we have a breakdown of the computer system. Again, we have a CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU. And depending on the application, each application takes certain resources from a certain part of your computer. So for instance, my screen recorder, which is this here with Abby video suites. This takes up quite a lot of memory and also quite a lot of my graphics processing unit. It's quite a heavy user of those two. Now what you can do is with these columns, you can actually click just on the top of the column to sort largest to smallest. So I can click on memory and I can sort largest to smallest. As I suspected, my recorder is almost at the top, but my Google Chrome browser is at the top because I have quite a few tabs open within my Chrome browser. So you can do this with all of the columns here. You can do it with CPU. You can see what's taking up most of the CPU. Then of course, the desk, the network, and GPU. Now if you run into any problems with a program that does not want to shut down, all you'd have to do is just select it in this list. I've just selected Google Chrome here. Then you can just come to end task that will end that program slash application for you. Okay, So that's pretty much all I wanted to show you. There's just one last thing. With regard to browsers, the likes of Google Chrome, and I think it might be the same with the likes of Mozilla, Firefox and Microsoft Edge. If you come to this drop-down, you see we have all of these Google Chrome's open. This is just the tabs. This is just the way Chrome works. So when you open up multiple tabs within your Chrome browser, you will have these multiple Google Chrome's open within the main Google Chrome itself. Even though I only have about five or six tabs open within Google Chrome, they implement the other ones as well, which act as backups just in case you lose one of your tabs by accident. And I won't go into detail there because I literally can't. I'm not really sure exactly why they have to do that, but that's just the system that they implement. So you can expect to see quite a lot of Google Chrome's open within just your single main Google Chrome. Alright, so that's everything I wanted to cover there. But the main thing is just visiting the startup tab just to see what is enabled and what is disabled. 12. Creating and using batch files (Part 2): You may recall at the beginning of the course, I briefly introduced to batch files. This is when you clicked on an icon on your desktop and your browser opened up with the corresponding websites or websites you specified within the batch file itself. But what I would like to do now is to go into a little bit more detail with batch files. And I'd like to show you how you can start applications with a batch file on your computer. Now once we've created this batch file, I'll show you how you can get this batch file to start automatically when you start your computer. Okay, so like I said, I want to start applications with a patch file. To do this, you have to get the target information. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show my icons on my desktop. And the application I want my batch file to start is going to be Photoshop. But I can see, I don't think I actually have a shortcut on my desktop. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go to the magnifying glass here. I'm just right-click on Photoshop here. I'll open its file location. I'm just going to right-click on it. I'm just going to create a shortcut. Okay, So just recommending, I put it on the desktop, so I'll just say yes to that. And I think I'm also going to do this with Illustrator as well. Another program that I use quite a lot. So I'll come to show more options. I'll create another shortcut and I'll just click on. Yes. Okay, So here's Illustrator and Photoshop. So like I said, you need the target information. So you can just right-click on the application. Go to Properties. And it's this information here. So I'll just click inside of there and hold down control and a, to select all of it. I'll right-click and then click on copy. And I can just get rid of this. Next thing now is to open up the Notepad. So it goes to magnifying glass. And I'll open up my notepad. Now, just like in the first batch file we created, the code is pretty much the same. There's just a few differences. In fact, I think there's only one difference that we have to make. It starts with an echo. Then typeof, start. And this is the big difference here. You put in to double-quotes, move along, put in to double-quotes again. Then in-between these two quotes is where the target information goes. So I'll just hold down Control and press V. And I can see I've ended up with too many quotes yet. So I'll just get rid of the extra ones. Then I'll go to File, Save As. And I'm going to go to my desktop. And just remember that you have to give the notepad extension and set this to all files. And then click Save. So now I'll get rid of this. And if I were to double-click on this now, hopefully Photoshop should start up. Okay, so that works. Okay, so I'll just get rid of this. Now, if I wanted to add Illustrator as well, I could just right-click go to properties. And this is already selected, so I'll just right-click. Go to Copy, get rid of this here. I'll go to my application, sorry, my batch file. And I'll go to Show More Options. And I'll click on Edit. Now, unlike when we created the batch file to open up the various websites within your Chrome browser. You can't just put another two quotes and here at the end and then add your other targets information. But rather you have to go underneath type in, start. Put another two quotes in. And I'm just gonna go ahead and hit control plus V Because I remember the last time that double-quotes were already there. I'll hold down Control and press S to save this. And remember it's already saved as a batch file. So we already have that dot extension. I can get rid of this now. If I double-click on this, Photoshop and Illustrator should start. Now one thing to be aware of with this is you don't want to overload your computer. So for instance, Photoshop and Illustrator are quite heavy programs in terms of the amount of processing power they use. But my computer's quite up-to-date so it can handle it. But that's definitely something you want to be aware of. All right, so the next thing now is to show you how you can get this batch file to start automatically when you turn on your computer. Now one thing to be aware of here, and I've just touched on it a second ago. This type of batch file can use quite a lot of processing power. And when you first turn on your computer, it already has quite a few things to think about. Now. Usually, Windows has got quite a good management system. And it just does things well, I suppose one step at a time. But you will find that your boots up will be quite slow. If you're asking it to open up maybe various batch files with different websites and applications and things like that. So it's good to just be aware of that. Alright, so how do we do this? Well, to be honest with you, it's really straightforward. You can hold down the Windows key and press R on your keyboard. And this will open up the run command. You can also just go to the magnifying glass here and then go to Search and type in Run command, or just run. But this is already open. And all you want to do is just type in shell, colon, startup, and then click Okay, this will open up and all you have to do is just select the batch file you want startup to open for you. Right-click and we'll copy it. And then just paste it into here. Now, you could do the exact same thing with the batch file that opens up the various websites with new Chrome browser. But with regard to using shell startup to start applications, there's no point in actually creating a batch file. All you would have to do, just go to the application, right-click, go to copy, and just paste it in the application here. That's all you have to do to get these applications to start up. But I don't need Photoshop startup when I turn on my computer. So I'm going to press Delete. Okay, so that's all I wanted to show you with regard to batch files. Just two things to take away from this. Just remember if you want to edit your batch file, you can just go to the batch file itself, right-click, go to Show More Options and then go to Edit. And also the other thing was, if you're not particularly good at remembering your code or what is known as syntax. Then just keep these two batch files on your computer for future use. 13. Unlock Ultimate performance mode and Disabling background Apps: What we're gonna do now is unlock something called ultimate performance mode. Because you're doing this course, I take it that you do have Windows 11. And if you do have Windows 11, that it means your computer is pretty much well, quite up to date. So you should have a pretty good processor, maybe even a pretty good graphics processing units. But more importantly, your CPU, your central processing unit, should be quite up-to-date. Which means you should have quite a lot of processing power that you can take advantage of by unlocking the ultimate performance mode. I'll just let you know when you unlock this particular mode. And there's another three modes you can choose from, and we'll look at those in a second. But when you use the ultimate performance mode, your PC or your laptop will use more power. On average, I think it's around an extra two or nine per cent, but in return, you do get more processing power. So why would you want to use alphabet performance mode? That's totally up to you. Maybe you're into video editing or photo editing. Maybe you're into gaming and you need that extra cake just to get that extra performance. So before this tutorial, there was some text I asked you to copy and you will need that text now to unlock the ultimate performance mode. So let's go ahead and get started. So first and foremost, come to this search magnifying glass. What you want to type in is Windows Power Shell. And this is what we want here. So click it. And then the text I asked you to copy, just paste it in here. So hold down Control and press V. That will go in and press Enter. Okay, So we're all done here. So now I can get rid of the PowerShell. Now, come to the magnifying glass and type in Control Panel until it shows up. And here it is. Select this. And then in the search, type in power, and click on power options. Okay, So the output performance mode is while it's here and it's here. Now the thing is when you put in the code into the PowerShell on multiple occasions, like for instance, I've just put it in twice, you end up with two ultimate performance modes. Now, do you remember in Windows ten, when you duplicate them, you were able to delete them. But on Windows 11, I can't actually see that option here. And maybe it's hidden away something or something. Maybe I just need to find it, but basically you are able to delete them. But anyway, if you keep putting in that code, you will end up with loads of different ultimate performance modes. When I say different, when in reality they're all the same. Now if you did not put in that code that I showed you into the PowerShell, then this would not show here. The only options you would have would be power saver, high performance. The balanced option. By default, you'll find it'll probably be on the balanced option. So now what we can do is we can just select ultimate performance mode. And all we have to do now is exit this. And to be honest with you, I'm not really sure at this point whether you need to restart your computer. But you could just for good measure, just to make sure that those settings are activated. And now you are in ultimate performance mode. If you're not happy with ultimate performance mode, or maybe you're finished using it. Just remember how to get back to where we were before. Come back to the magnifying glass. And why don't need to type in Control Panel again because it's within my recent area here. So I'll click on Control Panel, type in power, power options, then just choose a different plan. So with regard to performance on your computer, there's one thing that will really slow your system down. And that is just quite simply having too many things running in the background or too many applications. So this is a big issue that I think a lot of PC users experience. And it's quite simple to manage these background applications. Now of course, if you have loads of applications open, so for instance, you have Photoshop open, video editing, your browser, your email. While then all I could say is your computer is limited to how much processing power it has. And all you have to do is just close down some of these programs. But what I really want to attack now, our background applications, applications that run in the background, but they're not actually visible. So these are the types of applications you should know how to manage. How do we take a look? Well, all you have to do is use the shortcut, hold down Control, Shift and press escape. The Task Manager will open up. Here within the Processes tab, you can see what's actually running on your computer. Now you can see I'm using quite a lot of memory here, and most of it is being dedicated towards my MOV video suite. And that is obviously because I'm recording my screen at the moment. But what you could do is if you don't know what's taking up most of the memory, or the CPU, or the desk, or even the network. You can click at the top of the column. And very briefly, you should have all of the programs slash applications that are using the most memory. And the same with the CPU. Like I said, you can just choose from any of these columns. So I clicked on CPU there, and we have the top figures at the top. So just sorts the largest to smallest. So once you've identified what is taking up the most memory or the most CPU or desk, you can just select it. Let's go for Nevada Video Suite. But I'm not actually going to end the task because I'm using the program. You can select it and then just come to end task. Now, just be aware that some of these programs need to run in the background. They are critical components to Windows running. And I suppose if you were to try and end these certain tasks, windows with suddenly stop working and who knows, you'd have to reset your computer or something like that. So just be aware about what you're trying to stop. Now if you see something and you don't really like what it looks like. So for instance, this one here, anti-malware service executable. You could go to Google and just Google that name. And then Google will tell you, yep, it's a friendly program or maybe it's malicious or something like that. I do know that this one I've selected is just my windows 11 antivirus, antivirus software. So I'm quite happy to have this running. And basically this is always running. And then finally, one tab you definitely want to visit is the startup tab here in the Task Manager. So when you start your computer, there are applications that start automatically. And basically they're listed here within the startup tap. So all you have to do is just go through the list here, find what you do not want to start selected. So for instance, Cortana, which is something I never use. You can select it and then just click on Disable. Now with regard to these different applications, they do have a different startup impacts. So you can look at the startup impacts. And if you do come across a program, you're not sure whether you want to stop it or not. Just look at the startup impacts and think to yourself, okay, if it's none, then I'm just going to leave it as it is. However, if it's something that's quite high like this here, which is my, which has something to do with Adobe Creative Cloud. If it's quite high, quite possibly you might want to select it and then just disable that particular program. And as you can see, I've already disabled this one here because the startup impact is quite high. So you can just go through this list on your own computer and decide what you want to disable or enable. 14. Windows 11 video editor crash course. Part 1: What we're going to take a look at now is Windows 11 video editor. Now it's not the most complex of video editing software, but for quick videos, it is perfect. Let's just go ahead and open up the video editor. So come to the search magnifying glass here and just type in video editor. And here it is. I will open this. Now there's a few projects here I've already worked on, but I'm not going to open any of these. What I need you to do is open up a new video projects. And at this point you can name your project. So you can give it any name you want. But I'm going to call it the ocean and I'm going to have to call it the ocean number three because I think I already have another two projects called the ocean or something like that. But you can call it whatever you like. And then click, Okay. Now I don't actually like this dark theme. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to minimize this. And I'm going to go to right-click personalize. Just have the brighter theme. So let's just go for this one here. I think that's much better. Okay, so back in the video editor. Now before this tutorial, there was an article that allowed you to download a video. And what I wanna do with that video is really shorten it down to a video less than 30 seconds long. And I've got a quick preview of what we're going to create. Now it's quite a simple video in its nature. There's nothing complex about it. But by the end of this tutorial, you should have a good understanding of how to use this editor. So let's just quickly take a look at this video. Okay, so the first thing to do is to put the video in this area here, the project library. So I'll go to Add and I'll go to, from this PC. Well, you'll have to do is you have to go locate that video that you downloaded. It might be in your downloads folder, which will be here. But as for me, the video itself is right here. So I'll select it and I'll click Open. And now we're good to go. So with regard to this area here, there's only a few tools you have the general layout of what you want your files to look at, and there's only two options to choose from. There's the smaller icons and then the larger ones. In fact, I don't think they're called icons, maybe thumbnails or something like that. I prefer the smaller ones. And then there's delete and then there is placed in storyboard. But what I can do is just click hold and drag down onto the first square here, which is exactly the same as placing it in the storyboard. Alright, so we have the video fully loaded now. Now, one tool I'm going to show you, but we're not actually going to use it to build the video itself is going to be the split tool. So I'll quickly introduce you to this tool and how it works. It is pretty straightforward. So with our video in our timeline here, also known as the storyboard, I can select it and I'll go to Split. And what we're gonna be doing here is splitting the video into. So I'm going to split the video at about the 22nd mark. So roughly around here. And it tells me, okay, clip one will be over 20 seconds or around 20 seconds, and clip two will be three minutes long. So I'll click Done. Now we've ended up with two clips in our storyboard. We have the 20-second clip and this clip that is just over three minutes. So don't if you could see what happened there, we actually subtracted 20 seconds from the original clip. Because as you can see with the original clip, it's actually three minutes and 21 seconds long. So let's just do that one more time. So you understand it. I'll select it. I'll come to split. This time. I'm going to split the video at the one-minute mark. And that should leave us with one clip of a, which is one minute long. And then the second clip is two minutes. So now our clip, our main video, which is this video here, has been split in three places. Now if I really wanted to, I could click hold and drag this onto our storyboard and carry on cutting it. As I wish. I should rather say splitting it. But I'm not gonna do that because I don't want to push my my computer too far. I think it's already struggling a little bit. Okay. So that's how the split tool works. But like I said, we're going to focus mostly on the trim tool to make this video. To get rid of these video clips, you can select them and then just go to Delete. Once again, I'm going to click hold and drag the video into the storyboard. Before we go any further with regard to editing this video clip here, I'm going to add a title card. Now I can see it's actually struggling a little bit here to load the video like at the beginning. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete it and drag it back in. And this sometimes works. There you go. So it worked. So I forget my train of thoughts now. Okay, So what we're gonna do is we're going to add a title card before we actually move on to trimming this video itself and making the video. So I'm going to click on add title card. We end up with this sort of pink slide. Now you'll notice when I click on the video itself, we have all of these options show up. But when I click on the pink slide itself, we only have a few options. Now with regards to the title card, it's more about text than anything else, and you can choose the duration of your title card. So if I click on this, I can have these times settings here, or I can choose my own time setting. I can add another title card. You can also add a background. So you have these different color themes. And you have a color picker here as well. So let's just go for maybe this color here. I'll click Okay, and I'll click Done. Now I'm going to come to text. And I've just got to make sure that this is actually selected. I'll come to text. And now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to type in the word today. And now I'm going to choose the animated style itself. And the one I used in the original video is this one here. Once you've done that, you can choose the layout, how it's actually going to be laid out in the clip itself. So there's a few options, but the one I've chosen the video is this one here. Now, with this slide down at the bottom, you can choose when you want this animated texts to actually come in. So we have a 3 second clip, as you can see here. If I move the slider to about halfway, it means that this animation will show at about the 1.5 second mark. But what I wanna do is have the animation shows straightaway the text animation. So I'll click Done. Sorry, I want the text animation to show right the way through the whole clip. So I'll click done at this point. Just remember again, you can come to duration. And if you really wanted to, you can change this to maybe five seconds or something like that. And if I come back to texts now, you can see we have this extra two seconds. So I'd have to edit this and drag it out so that the whole thing covers five seconds. But what I wanna do is just keep it at around this. The 3 second mark. I'm just going to keep this at three seconds. I don't want any more than that. I'll just double-check to make sure that this is all the way. Okay, That's fine. Actually, what did I do there? Okay, That's better. Now if I were to click play. So I'll click on the first clip here. You see we have the animation for three seconds and then we move into the larger video. Okay, so let's take care of the larger video. So like I said before, we're not going to be using split, we're going to be using mostly trimmed. So with this clip selected, I'll come to trim. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have this first clip here where it's the boat or whatever it is moving along the water, along the oceans edge there. And all I want us to have the sorry, the first five seconds of this clip. So roughly around five seconds. And you can see as I move around, we do have a timer here telling us how long the duration is. So I'll click done. And now we have a 5 second clip of this boat moving along the water and filming the cliff side here. So there you go. In this clip is about five seconds. Okay, that's perfect. Now what I'm going to do is because I need more material to trim. I'm gonna go get the clip once again, the larger clip, and drag it into my storyboard. I'll select it and come to trim. And with these drag handles here, I'm looking for my second view, which I know is the sort of, sort of bird's eye view right here. And all I want is just to have this for about seven seconds. So looking at that timer in-between my drag handles here, I think that's perfect. So now I can click Done. And now I have this clip here. And once again, without even looking at it and wait to click in our sorry click hold and drag the clip back into my storyboard. I'll select it and I'll come to trim. I think it was this rock on the ocean side right here that I want, and I only want this for about five seconds. So again, looking at those figures, I want it for about five seconds. They go, I'll click Done. That clip is done. And then finally the last one is going to be, I think it was this sort of this camera moving up, looking down on this big rock or something like that. So anyway, I'll select the clip, I'll come to trim. And I'm going to just look for that clip. But here it is, right here. 15. Windows 11 video editor crash course. Part 2: I'm not going to make it perfect because I think that'd be an all day trying to match this with the music that will put it in a minute. But basically I just want around ten seconds of this clip. Now I'll click Done. And now what I wanna do, and this is in the original clip. There is some text, so it's a plane heading over overhead. There is some texts that shows up in this video at around the 5 second mark in this clip. So I'll select this. I'll go to not add title card. This time we need to come to text. We can add text to the clip. So type the text you want itself, and you can choose the animation style. And then also where you want to place it, similar to the title card settings. Now we're going to choose, okay, at what point do you want this animation to show? I want to show this at around, maybe run the 4 second mark or something like that. So roughly speaking, it's around here. And I'll click Done. Now we actually have a full video ready to watch. So just click Play. Then we go to this second clip here, and then this one here with the rock on the ocean side. And then finally this one here with the big rock below. And then the animation shows at around the 5 second mark. So pretty much that's the video done. Now if I really want to, and this is not included in the extra video, I can just select this clip here. And a way to come to text. And what you can do is you can just experiment with some of these options. So let's just go for the simple option. In fact, I think I need to put some texts and first, we call this a big day out. And you can just choose where you want to place the text itself. Now, preferably I'd rather have the text at the bottom left here because that's the more conventional place where text is placed. So I don't know why that's not actually available. In fact, you can see it just goes up here for some reason. I, I prefer it to be down here. But unfortunately these the only two options that are available. And now with this slider I can choose, Okay, what points do I want this to show? I'm going to show it relatively early on. So maybe at around the 2 second mark or something like that. Now I'll click Done, and now I will just select. So I click on this clip here. I don't have to have it selected browser, click on it, and I'll click Play. You can see this text comes in. The video is all edited. Now the next thing to do is to add music. Now there is some inclusive music that comes with Windows 11. It's here on the background music. And all I have to do is just select one of these. So the music I used for the video itself was this one called amplified. I'll select it and I'll click done. Oh, actually you do have the volume for the music itself. I'm just going to leave it at 100. And it says sync your video with the music's beats. But in my experience, it doesn't really work very well, but I'll just select it anyway. And I'll click Done. Now, I'll go back to the beginning of the video and I'll click Play. Now on my screen record, I don't know if I've actually set the recorder to record system sounds, but I'm sure you can hear it through the microphone, but the sound is there. So the video, sorry, the music itself is only about 30 seconds long, so it's perfect for the length of the video. But basically that's how you add background music to your video itself. Now with regards to these clips, you can just click hold and drag and move them around like this within your storyboard. So if I really wanted to, I can bring this here and put it at spot number four or put it back here in its first place, its original place. So you can do that. When you select these clips, you can see there's quite a few options here to choose from. You have text, you have motion which will click on it, click on it and quickly take a look very quickly so you can zoom in and zoom out and things like that. You have, you have 3D effects. Your computer needs to be pretty fast to run the 3D effects. And it doesn't work very well. I'll click on it anyway. But basically you can add things like that. So let's just add this animation here. And I'll click, actually, let me just make it run all the way through. I'll click Done. Actually what I'll do is I'll just make it quite large. Let's go for something like this. I'll click done. I'll press play. I mean, that's pretty cool, I guess. So. You could just use that if you want. And there are many other options to choose from, from 3D effects. So you can just take a look. You can come to effects here. And here are these other effects that you can choose from. Like I said, they're a little bit sort of temperamental and hard to use. But I think when I first started, I started when I first downloaded them or this one in particular wasn't working very well. Maybe it was just my Internet connection or didn't download properly or something like that. But it seems to work well. Now, there's also the 3D library. We have these 3D models that you can also input into your video. Alright, so I'm just going to start to bring this to an end now because I don't want this tutorial to be too long. It's already at 20 minutes, but just the Polish sharp, you can just go through the rest of these settings. I mean, that's the speed settings which are quite straightforward and filters. And then there's custom audio. Now if I were to click on this, in fact, what I'd have to do is come to background music and click on none to cancel the current background music. If you come to custom audio, you can add your own audio tracks. So I'm going to click on add audio file. And I have this song here. And I'll select it and I'll click open. And I'll click Done. Actually, I'll get rid of this here. And I'll click done. And hopefully it should work because in the past didn't work very well. Okay, so now I have some custom music within my video. You could do something like that. So once you're done with your video and you're ready to export it. What you can do is you can just click on Finish video. But before I do that, I'm going to come back to custom audio and just get rid of this song here. It's still here. I'll click that and that. Okay. I'm just going to add the original song, which was the song called amplified. And I'll click Done. Once you're done, you can just click on Finish video and then click on Export. And I'm just going to place it on the desktop and I'm going to call it ocean test. Then I'll click Export. And depending on how powerful your computer is, this could take while, maybe not so long or maybe a long time. But my computer is pretty decent, so it doesn't take too long. Then once it's finished exporting, it will just give you a quick preview of the video. This video is saved on my desktop so I don't need to navigate there. I know where it is. So that's a general overview of how the video editor works. I really want to do this just to break it down a bit because like I said, it's not your conventional video editing software. And I suppose once you get used to it, it's actually quite simple to use. But generally speaking, just for a nice short little videos or maybe it maybe a holiday you've gone on or maybe something at work. It's easy to put something together pretty quickly. Now it's just two more things I want to show you. Now with regards to the video that you downloaded to do this tutorial, if you're wondering how to get videos off of YouTube, because you can't actually download them when you're on your computer. Where you can do is you can copy the URL like this. Control plus C come to something called a YouTube converter. So all you have to do is just type in YouTube converter. And this is the one I prefer to use. Y t MP3. It should be on the first page and just paste in your URL here. And then change it to mp4 so that you get the video. Or if you just want the sound, choose MP3, and then click Download MP4. And this will download the video itself. Then to find the video comes to your File Explorer, then come to downloads. And it should be the first one on the left. I mean, that's pretty handy to use both regards to this website as far as I know, it's quite safe, but just use it at your own risk. And then finally, in terms of music, if you wanted to get your hands on a big library of music, what you could do is you can just type in YouTube Music Library into Google or whatever search engine you use. And then come to the first option, the studio.youtube.com. And as far as I know, you will have to have a YouTube account, which is basically just a Google account. And here we have a whole list of songs you can choose from, and you can choose your genre, mood and things from this drop-down here. And once you've press play on the, on the song itself just to hear what it is and how it sounds. And you're happy with it. You can just come to download. And then once it's downloaded, you can come to the File Explorer again and you will find it under Downloads. Okay, so that was a bit of a long-winded tutorials. It's probably been the longest so far. I'm not sure what I'll do, whether I'll break it down into two tutorials or something like that. But generally speaking, that is an overview of how to use the Windows 11 video editor. And in all honesty, I was never going to be a short tutorial anyway, because there's just so many things you can do with this.