Hands on Windows 136 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up. Next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to take a look at five more new features for Windows 11 that we haven't discussed yet. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I'm Paul Thrott and, as always, I guess we're going to be talking about Windows 11 and, more specifically, five new features for Windows 11 that are coming this year. Depending on where you're at and where we're at in time, when you see this video, they might have already arrived, but these are five features I don't believe we've discussed yet, so hopefully this will be new information. The first one is called Windows Sandbox. So that has been a feature of Windows 11 for at least a couple of years, but sometime in the past five, six months, microsoft has started testing a brand new 2.0 version of this tool. It is available now in 24H2. So if you have Windows 11 24H2, you should be seeing this now already. It's basically a lightweight virtual machine that is based on the hardware that's in your computer, so it's designed for testing, software development, debugging Maybe you want to download an app, you're not sure if it's safe, et cetera.
So you want to put it in this kind of safe sandboxed environment, hence the name. And the beauty of this thing is that it doesn't retain anything, right? So I can't actually put a new file on the desktop because this doesn't come with anything, but I can put a new folder. So I can just put that new folder there and if I close this and it takes a second, it gives you a little warning there and run this again. What will come up again I'll just throw in the surprise is a pristine new Windows 11 environment. Right, and that's the point. It's a fresh start every single time.
Earlier today I was playing around with this. I installed a browser, downloaded some files, killed it, came back. It was all gone. I'm not going to go through that because it takes a long time, but basically a stripped-down version of Windows. You don't get all of the built-in apps In fact, you don't get too many at all. You don't need, like Notepad, like I said earlier, not part of it etc. But you can run, uh, microsoft edge, which I won't do, so you don't have to see that terrible uh home screen that they have by default.
And for this version 2, which is still in preview, but in windows 11, I should say, the way that you install this is a little different from a lot of apps. Um, you have to go to this old school windows feature, uh, control panel. I've already. So that's not it. Where is it? It's in here. Oh, it's already. It's grayed out for some reason. Oh, because I'm doing it inside the sandbox. That's hilarious. You just have to check Windows sandbox, click OK, it will install. Can't have sandbox in the sandbox, apparently.
And the difference, the big difference between this and the original version is this little menu here. So, in addition to going full screen, you can share a folder from your local computer. I will in fact choose the Pictures folder and that will appear on the desktop as a shortcut here, and that's opening the Pictures folder that's actually on the underlying computer. Now, again, when I close this down, that goes away. That does not persist. Clipboard redirection, audio input and video input, meaning it will take those things from the underlying hardware. So those are all new features. So, for example, actually I guess I'm going to have to run Edge so you can see this, but this is on the local computer.
If I run Notepad and I type in something that is grammatically incorrect, like that, and then go back into this environment and I apologize for what's about to happen. But if you thought this thing was terrible in English, wait until you see it in Spanish. This is the clipboard output right from the underlying computer. So, nice, right. Think a lot of people don't know about this. But, like I said, this is really good for downloading something from the internet, seeing if it triggers a security alarm of any kind and just playing around with software before you put it on your local computer. So I think it's a it's a great way most people probably don't know about, but can be super useful in certain circumstances.
So for the second one, it's actually here right here. That's that little icon down in the bottom. But I need to bring up something. Well, something better than that, actually. So let me bring up Notepad again, and if you are using any app in Windows and you type Windows key plus period, you get this emoji and more pop up. So if you want to do something like clown car like, as you can see, I do fairly often Let me make that font a little bit bigger. Maybe I'll make it a lot bigger actually, so you can see it. That's how you can get this stuff into text of anywhere you can put text you can bring up.
Sorry, you can bring up this emoji and more shortcut and this little pane appears. You know you have a cocktail, whatever you can search for terms if you haven't used this, etc. Okay, pretty basic. The problem is it's not really discoverable, right? You need to know this keyboard shortcut. It doesn't appear anywhere in a UI anywhere, and so what they've done? Microsoft has added it to the taskbar system tray area and now you can just bring it up this way so you can just click on it if you want it to come up. So kind of nice, not a big deal, but if you use this a lot. I'm starting to use emojis more than I thought I would at my age, but if you find yourself needing them or using them, a much easier way to do that or a much more obvious way maybe.
Most people probably know, or hopefully know, about this quick access menu where you right-click the start button and you can get these kind of power user system level apps and utilities. One of them says system. That used to go to a control panel, but now it goes to the settings app and this is like going to system and then scrolling down at the bottom and going to about. So this bit here is new and this is a fairly recent addition. If you haven't seen it by the time you see this, you will see this soon, and these are called top cards and there's not really a lot going on here now. But in future, as more and more features of Windows require certain hardware, microsoft is going to use this as a way to alert you to things that could be better. So this is a laptop I'm using. In fact, it's an ARM-based laptop, so it's not like there's an external GPU or GPU card, I could add. But if this wasn't good enough or wasn't reasonably modern or whatever the criteria will be in the future, they would actually warn you here to let you know hey, you might want to upgrade to a better graphics card or whatever. So this is just the beginning of something a little new and kind of a clearer way of showing you the top level system components that you have in your computer.
The fourth, one of five I wanted to show you is live captions. Unfortunately, this is having a fit on my computer here today, so every time I run it I get this. I can install English. Yes, please do. It says it's setting it up and then it will say it's all set Eventually. Actually it's taking longer than usual. Maybe it's actually working this time. He says confidently it says it's ready, but then if I run it again it will just go through the same process again. So I'm just going to cancel that and close it.
But the point of this feature is that live captions itself isn't new, but if you have a Copilot plus PC, whether it's AMD, intel or Snapdragon based, it can do real-time language translation. Now, and this is something that should be coming out and stable For everybody in the March slash April timeframe. So by the time you see this, this will probably be available. Hopefully it will work on your computer better than it does on mine, but it's the type of thing. I'm here in Mexico. I could watch a YouTube video in Spanish and it would introduce live Captions. It's not just to English, it, whatever languages it supports, you can go back. I could watch a YouTube video in Spanish and it would produce live captions. It's not just to English, whatever languages it supports, you can go back and forth in any direction. So that's actually kind of a cool feature. That, again, I wish I could show you.
Snipping tool number five and I'll have a bonus because I couldn't show you live captions, so I guess technically there'll be six. But Snipping Tool is an app that I didn't originally believe needed to exist. I didn't quite understand what the point of it was. But as time has gone on, microsoft has improved this quite a bit and we've talked about some of those improvements. So, for example, there are OCR capabilities. If I bring up a let's see if I can find something that actually has words on it like a screenshot here If I bring this thing up, it will give me this text or OCR capability, which is image to text actually, and we've talked about this before. You can just copy to the clipboard, make it a table, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a cool feature.
It tried to just tell me there would be a little pop-up, that you can also do things like draw on here with the mouse, and I get it. Supposedly the way this works is if you hold it there you go. So it creates this. It straightens that out. There are already objects. You know shape drawing things you can do here. But this is kind of a neat thing. If you want to just do like a freehand style, like it probably do a circle, it might work. You hold it there, turns into a circle. And if you want to just do like a freehand style like I could probably do a circle, it might work. You hold it there, turns into a circle and then you can edit it right. I don't use this kind of feature a lot, but if you do, kind of a cool idea.
The other thing you can do with snipping tool, aside from the image stuff, is record videos, and I'm not going to do this. I don't have a way to. I can open files, but I can't open a video file, unfortunately. But if you create a screen grab or a screen recording of some kind so it's of whatever length the most common thing that you want to do with that is to trim the beginning and or the end of it off, and there's now a trim tool built in. So once you have a screen recording loaded in here which again I wish I could do, but I can't easily do there'll be a trim option and then you'll get the ability to move in on either side. That actually works really well too. This has become a neat thing. Actually, before we go, I should also do this. We could do visual search with Bing, which I don't recall if we have done yet, but this is loading over here in Chrome, so this loads the Microsoft Bing site. We might have shown this, I guess, but now we're searching for this image on Bing using the visual search tool that's built into that. So that's pretty cool too.
One last feature that's coming is they're making a backend API, an application programming interface, for snipping tools. So if you're a developer creating a Windows app, you can use features from this tool in your own apps. You don't have to use the whole app. You can say I just want the OCR capability or I just want the screen grab or whatever the feature may be. So in the future I think we're going to see third-party apps and probably some other Microsoft apps that will take advantage of some of the features you're adding here. So that's pretty cool, okay.
So the bonus feature because I couldn't get live captions to work is most people are probably at least a little bit familiar with Snap. So if I bring up two apps, let's bring up no patent pain, right, so you can use I'm gonna use keyboard shortcuts here, but Windows key plus left arrow to move it to the left. Then I get to choose the other one and use them side by side. This is the most common configuration, but it's not the only way you can do that right. So one of the other ways is you can mouse over the restore maximize button or you can drag an app toward the top of the screen and you get that little pop down that you just saw there. So in both cases, what Microsoft is doing is just providing some language here that tells you what the point of this thing is.
Right, because this thing would pop up and I think it confused a lot of people, and so now, in addition to giving you the keyboard shortcut that would also produce this little pane. It's telling you what it's doing right. So as I move it to the top, it says "'Drag a window here to arrange it on your screen'". If I keep dragging, now I can choose the layout. So it's just a little bit of user education.
Not a big deal, but, as with this little emoji thing here in the corner, basically Microsoft acknowledging that we have these features that people aren't finding. So how can we help educate them that they exist? And that's honestly not a horrible way. So nothing monumental, I suppose, but we have been doing a lot of shows lately about new features in Windows 11, and it seems like every month, every two months, there's more, so there's five more by the time you see this, you should see most of these, if not all of them, on your computer. The exception is live captions. If you don't have a copilot plus PC, you won't get live language translation, but then neither did I, so I guess that's not that unusual.
Alright, there you go. Hopefully you found this educational entertaining. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv slash how. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you, and if you're watching on YouTube and you're stuck with the ads, do consider joining Club Twit please. You can find out more about that at twittv slash club twit. Thanks. See you next week.
