Microsoft Windows Productivity

Since young, I have always used Windows as my default personal computer operating system. While today most of tech and music industry uses Macbook / Macbook Pro for work (except Microsoft of course), I remained strong in Windows. For serious gaming, you also can't get away from Windows most video games are Windows only. It's important to be efficient on this operating system and so here are some of my own tips and tricks.

Productivity

In the Age of AI, you need to quickly access AI assistant on your computer. With Windows 11+, Windows + C key automatically brings CoPilot up front and center. Even though many people use Claude or ChatGPT, basic information and task can be run easily from CoPilot. I have a Synapze Blackwidow V4 Pro Keyboard (I am not an affiliate) and mapped M1 to Claude, M2 to my PC Folder, M3 to my mail (Spark Mail), etc. Some of these are on my task bar already but navigating these without mouse is better productivity.

To be more productive around the Windows OS, it's important to master some of the following shortcuts and trained yourself to use these as second nature:

• Alt+Tab - Switch Application

• Alt + F4 - Close current Application

• Alt+Shift - Change your language Input

Browser Navigation in Edge/Chrome:

• Ctrl+W - Close The Current Tab

• Ctrl+Tab (Ctrl+PgDown)- Next Tab

• Ctrl+Shift+Tab (Ctrl+PgUp)- Previous Tab

• Ctrl+Shift+T - Reopened closed tab(s)

On some newer keyboard that don't have a PrnScn (PrintScreen key) you might need to access that through another shortcut: Win + Shift + S that brings the snipping tool to allow you take both screenshot and video.

If you change the Settings of your Windows often press Win + I to go there.

Using PowerShell

As a tech person, I use PowerShell a lot. In order to operate with a lot of engineering development such as Node it's better to use PowerShell 7 (pwsh.exe) intead of the default Windows PowerShell (which usually 5.x version). This can be configured when you press Ctrl + , to open settings inside PowerShell to change it.

Browsing

Microsoft Edge will come in as the default engine for your operating system. And you may want to change Edge's Home Page or New Tab page. Many articles put a huge long article about it but all you really have to do is navigate to edge://settings/startHomeNTP and everything explains there.

Note Taking

Microsoft Office comes with OneNote, and for about 10 years I was using EverNote Personal ($7.99 / month) and one day I realized that by paying Microsoft $99 a year already for the Microsoft Family 365 I am already paying for 6TB (for 6 people) of OneNote storage (along with other app storage) which is more than enough for anything and beats Evernote's pricing dramatically. To incentive people to move over, Microsoft tried to provide an official importer which originally you could download to make the process easier. However, due to over the years changes in format and protocol understanding, this tool no longer works today (2022) with the existing Evernote version. I tried downloading the Evernote Legacy App (accessible here) which then the Legacy App (with a grey icon) when opened will resync all your notes. At this point if you reopen your downloaded importer (StartOneNoteImporter.exe) it will then recognize your notes as stored by the Legacy App at which point the import will go forward. Unfortunately, many, if not all of your notes import don't work properly and in that case you are best to manually do some copy/paste or spacing adjustment or rearrangement.