hi everyone kevin here today we are going to take an in-depth look at the insider preview of windows 11. microsoft just made it available on monday and now anyone can get windows 11. of course assuming that your hardware meets all of the system requirements and from what i hear microsoft has a pretty high bar if you’re interested in installing windows 11 i’ve included a link to a video in the description that’ll walk you through step by step how to pull it off in this video we’re going to look at everything that’s new including the microsoft store settings the new file explorer widgets and the list goes on all right let’s jump on the pc this brings us to the first major change and this is probably the most obvious when you log on to windows 11. here you’ll see my taskbar is now center aligned so it looks kind of similar to what you might expect with mac os or chrome os now this is a fairly major change and i think microsoft realized that maybe some people won’t like it so it’s actually very easy to shift it back over to the left hand side here you could right click on the taskbar and you’ll see taskbar settings when you click on this this opens up the settings screen and at the very bottom there’s something called taskbar behaviors and when you click on that here i can change the alignment back over to the left so it looks more similar to previous versions of windows one option or setting that’s not available here for the taskbar you can no longer change the size of the icons in past versions of windows you could have small icons medium or large icons here you just have a default size now i don’t know if it’s just with this insider preview that the settings just not available yet or whether it’s being cut altogether but i do like the size of the icons right here so for me it’s not really a deal breaker the next major change is the start menu and here i can access it by clicking on the windows logo icon up here i see all of my pinned apps and i can customize what this view looks like here for instance i can simply press and hold on one of these apps and i can move it to a new position so maybe i’ll place it right there i could also take an app and i could drag it to the next page of my pinned apps and i could place that down at the bottom over here if i click into all apps here i see all of my different apps here i could right click on them and i could pin it to start now if i go back to my start view here i’ll see that app that i just added to start once again i could press and hold and here i’ll pull it to the previous view and i’ll place it right here at the beginning so here i could customize exactly the set of apps that appear here down below i have all of my recommended files and at least right now i see files like word excel and powerpoint files that i’ve recently worked on so it’s kind of like the recent view when you open one of these apps but instead of just being one specific app it’s an aggregated view of all of the different content types now at least so far i’ve noticed word excel powerpoint here’s a pdf file but it seems mostly limited to microsoft’s file types i think for recommended to be truly valuable it’d be really neat to see other file types come into recommended let’s say for instance maybe you’re working on a photoshop file or maybe a video editing file if those would also show up here i think the utility of recommended will be a lot greater with the start menu open i could simply start typing and that’ll drop me directly into search now alternatively i could also click on the search icon down below and that will also open up search the major change here with search is the search field is now on top with windows 10 it appeared down at the bottom so this new placement aligns more with what you’d find on say google or bing where you have the search field in the top left of the page and then you have all of the results appear down below here i’ll click on the best match and let’s jump into settings this drops me into the revamped settings screen and one of the biggest changes that you might notice is here all of my different categories are omnipresent so currently i’m in the system view but let’s say i shift into bluetooth and devices or network and internet i can very quickly and easily jump between these different categories in windows 10 when i jumped into a category i’d have to navigate back click into a new category and then jump forward it’s nice to see all the settings now in one place and it kind of reminds me of what was called god mode in windows 10 where you could basically create a screen that listed all of your settings in one place this is a step in the direction where it’s gotten a little bit easier to get to your various settings one of the big complaints about settings in windows 10 is that you had two separate interfaces you had a legacy experience with all of the settings and there was a more modern one with a subset of settings now windows 11 mostly gets away from that but there are still some settings that require a legacy view here in system i’ll click into sound within sound i have most of the common controls but if i scroll all the way to the bottom here we’ll see more sound settings and this icon implies that we’re going to get kicked out of this experience when i click on that yes that opens up a legacy interface where i can access all of my sound controls and so there are still two different setting interfaces so it’ll be nice to see if microsoft can move away from this and consolidate everything into this experience next up windows 11 has made some pretty substantial improvements to snapping in windows 10 i was able to snap but it just wasn’t as intuitive here for example i could take a window and i could drag it over to the side and this will snap it over to the left hand side next it’ll ask me what window i want to snap over on the right hand side but here i’ll exit out of that and instead of using that i’ll come up to the maximize icon and here i can choose where i want to snap a window so let me place this maybe in the top right hand corner and down below i’ll select notepad and snap that in the bottom right hand corner so it makes it really easy to position my windows where i want now let’s say i press windows d and i minimize all of my windows let’s say maybe i want to restore that group of snapped apps right here i’ll hover over the chrome icon and here i see the individual windows and over on the right hand side i see the entire group when i click on this this restores the entire group back to that position windows 11 now makes it a lot easier to set up virtual desktops and to be fair this is something you could do in windows 10 but it wasn’t as easy to find and you also couldn’t personalize it as much now it’s really easy to find there’s an icon right down here on the taskbar and when i click on this i can see all of my different desktops here i’ll click on new desktop and now i have two i can click up here on the text and maybe i want this first desktop to have all of my work apps so maybe i have word and excel and then for this other desktop i could click on the name and maybe i call this play maybe i’ll have a game open and maybe i’ll browse the web there here i’ll click into my second desktop on my new desktop here you’ll see that none of my apps are currently open so it’s basically a clean slate for me to open different apps and windows and i can also personalize what this experience looks like here i’ll right click on the desktop and i’ll select personalize within personalize here i’ll select background and i can select a different background for this virtual desktop now when i click on my virtual desktops here i could very easily differentiate them from one another within settings i can configure two different options related to virtual desktops i can decide whether i want to show all apps from across all desktops on the taskbar and when i alt tab between windows i can decide whether i want to see all of my different apps regardless of what desktop it’s on or only the apps that i specifically have open on that desktop next up we have widgets and down below on the taskbar let’s click on the widgets icon this opens up a pane over on the left hand side and currently you can’t expand this pane so you’re stuck to this space however microsoft has shown in some examples that you’ll be able to expand this to use up the full screen within the widgets view here at the top you’ll see things like the weather stock quotes your calendar and if we scroll down just a little bit here you’ll see some news headlines you can customize what all of these widgets look like here if i click on the ellipsis you could adjust the size you could also remove it all together in some of the other widgets you could also customize it here for example with the stock widget maybe i want to type in a ticker symbol and then track that stock here i’ll click on cancel with widgets i could also reposition them simply by dragging and dropping them into a new position when i scroll down a little bit when i click on let’s say the news it’s going to open it directly in microsoft edge irrespective of what your default browser is and i’m not sure if i like that all that much microsoft should respect your default browser but i can see why they’re doing it they want to try to encourage you to use edge next up the system tray has also undergone some changes and probably the biggest one here we’ll see the internet the volume and the battery icon and they’re all connected when i click on them this opens up an interface where i can modify them but once again they’ve all come together also right down here in the bottom right hand corner it’s pretty hidden and hard to discover but there’s an icon that’ll minimize all windows that are open on the desktop or the show desktop icon when i click on that here it shows me the desktop and when i click on it again it’ll toggle the state and once again i can see all open windows also in the bottom right hand corner the calendar the time and the action center are now all combined when i click on this up on top i can see all of my different notifications also down below i can see my calendar here i could reduce the size of the calendar or here i could expand it again with the action center i have found that sometimes it can be a little bit disruptive luckily within settings i can customize what notifications come through up on top i could turn notifications on or off and here when i click into focus assist i can define what my priority notifications are and here i could even set up rules like what time can notifications come through file explorer has also undergone a whole bunch of changes and probably the most visible one is at the very top there’s no longer a ribbon instead we now have a command bar right up here i could create new content also when i select a file here i have access to some of the most common actions i can choose how i want to sort files i could also choose whether i want to see thumbnails or just a list view and then i have some overflow actions i could access a similar view if i simply select the file and i could right click on that and that’ll open up a context menu and one of the big changes from windows 10 you’ll notice that there’s a little bit more spacing between all of these different items my guess is microsoft is trying to make this experience more touch friendly down at the very bottom i could also show more options and this opens up a more traditional context menu now i’m not a big fan of having a menu within a menu but my guess is you won’t very frequently have to open up this menu because the previous one will have most of what you need the microsoft store has also gone through some substantial changes over on the left hand side now you’ll see four different main views here you have the home view and this shows you all of the top and trending apps there’s also an app specific view you have a gaming view and there’s an entertainment view where you can get entertainment apps and also get content like tv shows or movies now my big complaint with the microsoft store is they still don’t have very many apps for example my video editing software is davinci resolve and when i search for that you get a lot of content related to davinci resolve but you can’t actually download the app my hunch is this will probably change in the near future the microsoft store now allows all types of apps whether it’s win32 pwa uwp or even an android app also if a developer wants to use their own commerce platform microsoft won’t take a cut so i’m expecting that we’ll probably see a flood of apps appearing within the microsoft store last up the new xbox app is also included with windows 11. if you’re a game pass member you can access all of your games here so what’s the difference between the xbox app and the microsoft store both of them have a gaming section well in the xbox app you’ll find more of your hardcore games and in the microsoft store you’ll have more casual games for instance you’ll find candy crush in the microsoft store but you won’t be able to find that in the xbox store you might have noticed that we didn’t touch on android apps or teams integration into windows and that’s because those are not yet part of the insider builds but hopefully they land soon so we can check those out all right well let me know down below in the comments which feature are you most excited about and also which feature are you kind of like i don’t know if i’m going to use it that much let me know down below to see more videos like this please consider subscribing and i’ll see you next time you