Recall is an upcoming AI feature of Windows 11. It takes captures of the screen every five seconds and saves them on the local system. Users may then interact with AI to look up information or process data that has been captured.
Most current Windows 11 PCs won’t get Recall functionality, as a Copilot+ PC is required. These PCs have specific requirements that include a neural processing unit and 16 GB of RAM.
The first iteration of Recall will only be available for specific Snapdragon ARM processors on top of that. With time, Recall will become available for AMD and Intel PCs as well.
Recall Criticism
Windows 11’s Recall feature is not without criticism. Here are the main points:
It records a user’s entire activity on the Windows PC, with a few exceptions. This makes it the holy grail for law enforcement, spammers, malicious actors, advertisers and marketers.
Recall snapshots require lots of storage. The default is 25 GB on a 256 GB hard drive. While you can drop that to 10 GB, it is still a lot of space. On 1 TB+ drives, the default is 150 GB of storage.
Disabling Recall in Windows 11
There are three options to disable Recall on PCs that support it.
Via the Settings app.
Via the Group Policy Editor.
Via the Registry (not yet available)
Settings app
Open the Start menu and select Settings.
Go to Privacy & security > Recall and snapshots.
Toggle Save snapshots to off.
This is all to it. Recall is disabled from that moment on for that user account.
Turn off Recall in the Group Policy Editor
Note: The Group Policy Editor is only available in Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions. Home systems may disable Recall in the Registry, which is explained in the next section.
Open the Start menu.
Type gpedit.msc and press the Enter-key to load the Group Policy Editor.
Use the hierarchy on the left to go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows AI.
Double-click on Turn off Saving Snapshots for Windows.
Change the statues from Not Configured to Disabled.
Restart the PC.
Disable Recall in the Registry
Information not yet available, will update once it becomes available.
A lot has been written about the upcoming Recall feature of Windows 11 version 24H2. Reserved exclusively for Copilot+ PCs, it will be unavailable to the majority of users who upgrade their Windows 11 PCs to the new version.
Recall, in a nutshell, takes frequent captures of the entire screen and stores them encrypted on the local system. Windows 11 users may then invoke the Recall feature to interact with the saved content.
From searching for specific information over getting summaries of watched videos or telecalls to finding that specific asparagus recipe that you looked at some time ago in Edge.
Search across time to find the content you need. Then, re-engage with it. With Recall, you have an explorable timeline of your PC’s past. Just describe how you remember it and Recall will retrieve the moment you saw it. Any photo, link, or message can be a fresh point to continue from. As you use your PC, Recall takes snapshots of your screen. Snapshots are taken every five seconds while content on the screen is different from the previous snapshot.
How Recall works
You use natural language to find something and Recall returns the information separated into text and visual matches.
Recall is shown as an icon on the Windows 11 taskbar and it may also be started using the keyboard shortcut Windows-J.
Recall displays a timeline on start that you may use to check out a specific day. Recall loads and displays the snapshots of that particular day then, allowing you to interact with the content.
Search is the heart of recall. You use natural language to find or interact with the saved content.
Type what you are looking for and Recall returns any matching snapshot. The AI feature displays hits from all apps by default, but you can filter results by a specific app to narrow down the results.
The feature distinguishes between close and related matches:
Close matches — includes at least one of the search terms or images that represent the search term.
Related matches — displays related items, e.g., cannelloni results when you searched for goat cheese pizza.
Selecting a screenshot launches the Screenray feature. Microsoft says that Screenray anayzes the snapshot and enables interactions with elements of it.
The company writes:
What you can do with each element changes based on what kind of content screenray detects. If you select a picture in the snapshot, you can copy, edit with your default .jpeg app such as Photos, or send it to another app like the Snipping Tool or Paint. When you highlight text with screenray, you can open it in a text editor or copy it.
Is Recall a privacy nightmare?
Recall records most activity on a Windows PC when it is active. It is up to the user to enable or disable Recall.
Microsoft has added options to disallow the capturing of specific apps or websites. Some of these are only available in Edge.
Recall does not capture private browsing sessions in Chromium-based browsers. In Edge, the feature may furthermore block captures of specific websites.
In other words, if you use a different browser than Edge, website filtering won’t work. If you use Firefox or another non-Chromium-based browser, everything will get recorded.
Recall runs locally only according to Microsoft. Captures are stored locally and the OCR feature runs local as well only.
The main privacy concerns
Recall runs locally only. The main concern that some users have is that someone else may gain access to the recorded data.
There are several scenarios where this may happen:
Malware infections may gain access to the data. This gives threat actors access to a user’s entire activity on the PC. It may include information about financial services they use, online accounts, password managers or security software, and confidential information in Word or Excel.
Law enforcement, including border agents, may want access to the information as it highlights (most of) the activity of a user on the Windows 11 device. Users may be coerced into giving state representatives access to their Windows PCs.
It is your choice
You may or may not use Recall. Most Windows 11 users cannot even use it, as their PCs do not meet the minimum system requirements.
If your PC supports it, you may want to ask yourself a simple question: do I really need it? Is it improving may workflows or helping me in another way?
It is a novelty feature, but how often will you make use of it once that novelty factor wanes off?
If you ask me, I won’t make use of it. All my PCs are not Copilot+ PCs and even if they were, I would turn it off as I do not need it. I know where to look when need to find something.
For businesses, it may play a bigger role. Making everything searchable, including video calls and presentations, is certainly useful in some scenarios.
What about you? Will you use the Recall feature when it comes out?
You have several options when it comes to downloading Windows ISO images. From downloading them from Microsoft using the Media Creation Tool to using tools such as Rufus to download them.
One of the easiest options to get the latest Insider or Stable ISO images is to use UUP Dump.
It supports:
All Windows releases: Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server.
All Windows channels: Public Release, Release Preview, Beta, Dev and Canary.
Quick Options to get the latest build of a specific channel.
Recently added builds to see the latest releases.
Select the desired language and click next.
Select the desired edition, e.g., Windows Home and Pro, and click next.
Make sure download method is set to download and convert to ISO.
Check conversion options:
Include updates.
Run component cleanup.
Integrate .NET Framework 3.5.
Use solid (ESD) compression.
Select create download package.
Pick a local folder and select save to download the ZIP archive to the local system.
Right-click on the download ZIP file and load the properties.
Select the unblock option and click ok to proceed.
Extract the ZIP archive.
Modify CustomAppsList.txt to select the Microsoft Store apps that you want installed when using the ISO image. Add # in front to block installation and remove # to include the installation.
Run uup_download_windows.cmd to start the process.
Note that Windows may throw a SmartScreen warning.
The process may take quite some time. Wait until you get the notification that you may press 0 to exit.
Microsoft has added support for extracting archive formats and creating ZIP archives in its Windows operating system. This is a useful feature, as it allows users to manage several popular archive formats without installation of third-party software.
If you encounter archives occasionally, say once a month, then it is usually easier to use the built-in functionality than third-party tools.
Now, Microsoft is working on bringing support to create 7-Zip and Tar archives to Windows 11. This works identical to creating zip archives.
Just right-click on and select the “compress to” option to see a list of all available archive formats. Pick the one you want and Windows will compress the selection of files to the format.
The three supported formats increase the usefulness of the feature. While Windows continues to lack support for creating other popular formats, such as Rar or Gz, adding native support for more formats is still welcome.
Third-party archive software is superior
While it is great that Windows is getting support for extracting and creating archives, most users may want to use third-party software still.
The main reason is performance. Extracting archives with Windows’ built-in extraction feature is much slower. Similarly, creating archives using Windows’ built-in compress to functionality is also much slower.
This is true for any of the supported formats. It can takes minutes longer to extract an archive using the Windows functionality. Might not be such a big problem if the functionality is needed rarely, but if you happen to extract or compress regularly, you should use third-party software such as 7-Zip or WinRAR to do so.
Closing Words
All in all, it is still a good feature addition to Windows. It improves handling of archives right out of the box. Still, most users should install third-party archive software to manage archives on Windows.
What about you? Do you use archive software? If so which and why this particular piece?
If you have installed Adobe Acrobat on Windows devices, you may receive regular notifications to make it the default PDF viewer on the system. This happens only if Adobe Acrobat is not set as the default PDF application on Windows.
Microsoft Edge is the default PDF viewer by default on Windows systems.
The notification reads: “Make Adobe Acrobat your default PDF app. Easily view, comment on PDFs, and more when you select Adobe Acrobat as your default viewer for PDF files.”.
Adobe’s support website has a support page about the prompt, or better, disabling the prompt. Problem is, it explains how this is done for an older version of the notification and only when launching Adobe Acrobat.
The actual Adobe Acrobat prompt has three main controls:
Set as default — which starts the process of making Adobe Acrobat the default PDF viewer on the Windows system.
The x-icon — which closes the notification.
The three-dots-icon — to turn off all notifications for Adobe Acrobat or open the notifications settings of the operating system.
How to disable the Adobe Acrobat prompt
Apart from making Acrobat the default PDF viewer, your best option is to activate the three-dots icon and select turn off all notifications for Adobe Acrobat.
Note that Adobe suggests a different solution on the support page. The main difference is that Adobe’s provides a solution for the message when Adobe Acrobat is started, and not for the Windows notification.
Still, if you want to disable it as well, you may do so in the Windows Registry:
Open the Start menu.
Type regedit.exe and select Registry Editor.
Confirm the UAC prompt that is shown.
Go to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\AVAlert\cCheckbox.
Double-click on iAppDoNotTakePDFOwnershipAtLaunchWin10.
Set its value to 1.
Note: if iAppDoNotTakePDFOwnershipAtLaunchWin10 does not exist, right-click on cCheckbox and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value. Name it accordingly and set its value to 1.
Closing Words
You could also remove Adobe Acrobat, if you do not need it. On most systems, it is installed for a purpose though.
The Windows Snipping Tool is a good screenshot tool that covers a lot of use cases already. While third-party screenshot tools, including PicPick or ShareX, are usually better, the Snipping Tool is sufficient for many Windows users.
Microsoft is testing a new feature integration in the Snipping Tool currently. It integrates Bing into the tool. More precisely, it adds an option to run a visual search for content displayed by the Snipping Tool.
To use it, you select Menu > Visual Search with Bing. This opens the Bing search results for the displayed content.
You can give it a try right away. Just visit Bing Images and select the “search using an image” option on the webpage.
Here, you may upload an image or select one of the sample images displayed by Visual Search.
The feature identifies objects and people. Multiple identified objects are selectable and the search results reflect the selection. It is also possible to highlight a specific part of an image to get related content and information about it.
This is the latest in a series of new features that Microsoft baked into the Snipping Tool. Recent additions include support for text recognition among other features.
Visual Search using Copilot
Windows Copilot may display information about the active image on the Windows system. You can upload any image to Copilot or allow Copilot to access Clipboard images.
You’d have to copy the image to the clipboard first, which many screenshot tools support.
The information that Copilot provides is limited, however, and it is not visual, but text-based.
Closing Words
Microsoft continues to integrate Bing, Copilot and AI into Windows and applications. The upcoming feature update for Windows 11 heralds the beginning of AI PCs, at least according to Microsoft.
Snipping Tool users who do not need the feature can safely ignore it. It can be useful to some Snipping Tools users, but a feature like it may work better on mobile devices.
What about you? Which screenshot tool do you prefer?
Back in April 2024, Microsoft changed the description of a Windows Start menu preference in an Insider build. It changed it from “show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, and more” to “Show recommendations for tips, shortcuts, new apps, ads, and more”.
The addition of three letters — ads — seemed to confirm Microsoft’s path of turning Windows into an advertising vessel.
Current Windows versions may show ads — Microsoft likes to call them promotions, recommendations, and tips — in various places already.
Copilot — may return ads as part of its answers.
File Explorer — may show notifications to use OneDrive for backup.
Lock screen — may show ads when Windows Spotlight is enabled to show wallpapers.
Notifications — may display suggestions and tips. These may also include promotions.
Search — Windows 11 Search supports web results by default, which may be displayed as suggestions.
Settings Home — displays Microsoft 365 and/or Game Pass subscription information and options.
Start Menu — may show ads for apps under recommended.
Start Menu — account profile icon may show a warning, if not signed-in with a Microsoft account, to sync data to OneDrive.
Widgets — shows curated content from the Web, by default from MSN and other Microsoft services.
The release of build 26212 for Windows 11 changes the description again. This time, it reads: “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more”.
The word ads is gone, and so is the word shortcuts. The term new apps has been replaced with app promotions. The latter indicates that Microsoft continues to hold on to the idea of promoting Microsoft Store apps in the Start Menu.
Ads on the other hand, appear off the table for now. Since this is a development build, there is still the chance that Microsoft is making changes to the description and functionality in the future.
Microsoft never revealed how ads would look like in the Start menu. Maybe it had plans to integrate them into the new Windows 11 Start menu sidebar feature that it started testing recently.
Closing Words
The reversal is a win for the Windows community, but it is likely not the last battle that needs to be fought in regards to ads in Windows.
Microsoft’s Windows operating system may use Windows Updates to install driver updates. One of the main purposes of the feature is to ensure that recent drivers are installed for all components.
While that sounds good on paper, it has led to issues in the past: from releasing older drivers to the installation of extra tools, including those with Telemetry.
Windows administrators who want full control of driver installations may disable automatic driver updates.
Downsides
Drivers won’t be updated automatically anymore on the system as a consequence. This means that it is up to the administrator to find, download, and install new device drivers.
Drivers may introduce improvements, such as better power management, new features, bug fixes, or improved performance. They may also introduce undesirable changes, such as telemetry.
Disabling automatic driver updates in Windows using the Group Policy Editor
Note: the Group Policy Editor is not available in the Home edition of Windows. Home edition administrators need to modify the Registry instead to make the change directly there. See the next chapter on how to do that.
Open the Start Menu.
Type gpedit.msc and press the Enter-key to launch the Group Policy Editor.
Windows 10: Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Tools > Windows Components > Windows Updates.
Windows 11: Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Tools > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Updates.
Double-click on Do not include drivers with Windows Updates.
Change the status of the policy to Enabled.
Restart the system.
Windows won’t download and install drivers anymore via Windows Update after the restart.
Block automatic Windows driver updates via the Registry
The method below adds the same restriction to the Windows system. It works on any edition, including Home.
Open the Start menu.
Type regedit.exe and press the Enter-key to launch the Registry Editor.
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
Note: if a key does not exist, e.g. WindowsUpdate, right-click on the previous value, and select New > Key. Name it accordingly and proceed.
Right-click on WindowsUpdate and select New > Dword (32-bit) Value.
Name it ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate.
Double-click on the new value and set it to 1.
Close the Registry Editor.
Restart the system.
Closing Words
It is up to the individual user to keep automatic driver updates enabled via Windows Update or disable them. Usually, it is better to download and install drivers manually, but that requires regular checks or the use of third-party driver checkers.
Inexperienced users may want to keep the default setting, even though that may mean getting unwanted extras during driver updates.
What about you? Do you install drivers manually or let Windows do the lifting?
Updates introduced some of these features. You can now drag and drop tabs around to create new File Explorer instances or merge instances.
Soon, you will also be able to duplicate an open tab.
Windows 11 File Explorer: duplicate tab
Microsoft announced the option some time ago. It is now available in Beta insider builds of Windows 11.
To use it, all you have to do is right-click on any open tab and select the new duplicate tab option. This spawns a new tab in the same File Explorer instance that displays the same path as the source tab.
We’re rolling out the ability to duplicate a tab by right-clicking on a tab in File Explorer.
When is this landing in stable? Microsoft does not say. A likely candidate is the Windows 22 2024 Update, which is expected in September / October of 2024.
Workaround to duplicate tabs
Here is a quick workaround to duplicate tabs right now. It has flaws and it is not as quick, but it should work in many cases.
The one requirement is that the source tab should have at least one folder listing.
Middle-click on the folder in the source tab. This opens the selected folder in a new tab in File Expxlorer.
Use the path to navigate back to the source folder by clicking on its name.
Closing Words
Duplicating tabs is just a small feature, but some Windows 11 users will certainly find it handy. I have to admit that I do not use tabs at all. I prefer to use two File Explorer instances whenever I need access to multiple folders, e.g., for copying files.
What about you? Do you use File Explorer tabs or use a third-party file manager with tabs support?
Users face several issues when it comes to these changes:
Only some of the features can be disabled on non-managed devices.
Settings are all over the place to make the changes.
OFGB (Oh Frick Go Back) — disable ads on Windows 11
The open source tool OFGB is a relatively new program for Windows 11 to disable ads and experiences.
The program has an easy to use interface. It displays the available options, most checked and applied automatically when it is run.
Here is the list of available preferences:
Disable File Explorer Ads
Disable Lock Screen Tips and Ads
Disable Settings Ads
Disable General Tips and Ads
Disable “Welcome Experience” Ads
Disable Personalized Ads
Disable “Tailored Experiences”
Disable Start Menu Ads.
Note: it may be necessary to run the application with elevated rights, especially if you sign in with a regular account and not an administrator account.
Second note: the program requires the .NET 8.0 Desktop Runtime, which you can download here.
Closing words
The program is for users who prefer graphical user interfaces over Registry files. It is trivial to create a Registry file that makes the same changes. If you are interested, let me know and I will create it.
The program’s UI is bare bones. It has no apply or reset option, which the developer should consider adding to improve its user friendliness.
All in all though, it offers a quick option to disable ads on Windows 11 devices.
Now it is necessary to keep up with the changes that Microsoft introduces to release updates that reflect these changes. You can check out Winaero Tweaker as well, which offers similar tweaks and many more.
What is your take on ads in operating systems? Do you use tools or programs to disable them?
