What Lawyers Need to Know About Windows 11

Okay, so welcome everyone to today's learning objectives webinar from the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association. And today we will be talking about what you need to know about Windows 11, which is the most recent operating system from Microsoft and, uh, something that statistically there are quite a number of people running it, but then there's also quite a number who have not. So first we will do a little poll and see who amongst us is actually running Windows 11. So if you want to give me a sense of whether you are running it or not, And I'll let you all have some time to take it. Okay, so it looks like 80% are not running Windows 11 yet, and 81% not yet, 18%, are. So this is good because I'm going to show you some things that, uh, I'll share the results with you so you can see that if you haven't started using it, you are not alone. And if you are using it, um, hopefully I'm gonna show you some things that you may be frustrated with and can fix, or things that you didn't know you could do. Because I frankly, I started using Windows 11 in probably about 6 months ago. So I'm kind of a newbie too. And I will tell you that some of the things were a little jerking in terms of this change. So we'll go ahead and get started. So the reason that we're talking about this is primarily because Microsoft is trying to push everybody into Windows 11, and you've probably at this point become aware of end of support issues that come up, which means that in October 2025, so about a year from now, Microsoft is going to end support for all versions of Windows 10. There's some caveat to that which we'll discuss if you go, I just am not going to be ready by next year to do this. But for the most part, it's probably best to go ahead and start planning to migrate into Windows 11 for your entire team so that you don't have to pay extra support fees and try to nurse along an out-of-date, unsupported, unpatched operating system. And if you need more motivation to do this, you have to think about the, the rules of professional conduct in terms of the competency rule to maintain the requisite knowledge and skill a lawyer should keep progressive changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology. This is a straightforward one. If you are choosing to use an operating system that's not supported, that means that it's basically insecure because it's not getting the security patches, which you are probably also familiar with the concept of Patch Tuesday. And so once a month on a Tuesday, um, Windows— or Microsoft, rather— rolls out security patches. Most of the time, the patches that they're issuing don't give you any boost in terms of functionality. It's really about security. And so without those patches, it leaves you vulnerable to hackers, crackers, script kiddies, and, and all the bad things that go bump in the night. So you really do want to make sure to upgrade. Then the other, I guess, benefit of Windows 11 is that it is faster and more efficient, and it gives you some new tools and some upgrades to the tools that are built into the operating system. And that's what I definitely want to focus on because there's some interesting things that you can do, uh, that you couldn't do on Windows 10 that you may find are big productivity boosters. So my experience is— and I have an older laptop, it's about 2 years old— and I was able to upgrade it to Windows 11 without having to get a new laptop. So that might be a question you have is, how do I know whether I can install Windows 11? So there's system requirements, the amount of RAM that you have, you have to have 4GB of RAM or more, 64GB or larger extra storage space, the firmware, um, the Trusted Platform Module, graphics cards, all this stuff. And if those types of words kind of give you pause, you're like, well, I'm not sure entirely what that means, you don't have to worry about it too much. There's two ways for you to check and make— see if you can upgrade. And one is just to go into your settings and to the Update and Security. So I'm going to pull up my settings and show you where this would be. It'll look a little different because I am running Windows 11 now. So you would go into Settings, that's that gear icon, or you can just type Settings into the Start menu or the search, find your Settings, go into Windows Update. And then if you were running Windows 10, it may have a panel on the right-hand side that says Upgrade to Windows 11. So that's one way you can do it. The other way you can do it is check Microsoft's website, and you just go into Windows 11, and then if you scroll down, it tells you all the requirements that you need, how to do it, and then you can actually, um, click on this PC Health Check app. If I do this, it'll tell me I'm already running Windows 11. If you were not running Windows 11, um, it will check and make sure that that your computer is compatible with Windows 11, and then you can start the upgrade. I will tell you that the upgrade takes some time, so before you start the upgrade, you want to do a couple of things. If you are storing files on your machine, and by files I mean, you know, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, things like that, make a backup of them. Hopefully you're already in the mode of backing up, or you have things on the server, or you have things in a cloud storage. If you're backing up, um, to a cloud backup, or you don't have anything saved locally on your machine, you're probably just fine. Um, but if you are storing things on your C drive or a local drive, you want to make sure that you back those up just out of an abundance of caution. The other thing is if you have software that you've installed on your computer that has a license key, I would go ahead and make note of that. And so you can get your license key. So if for some reason the software wasn't compatible with Windows 11, and it would have to be pretty old software not to be compatible. I literally had no problems, and most of us are running so many things in the cloud. It, doesn't make any difference. But if you do have, say for instance, you're using Time Matters or PC Law or Tabs3 and you're old and running older versions, you want to make sure that you've— I mean, for so many reasons, have your license keys written down. And that way, if you need to reinstall the software, you'll have the license key that you can put— plug back in. Now I will say that if you are running really old software and even nursing it along, then one of the things to keep in mind is you may have to upgrade, and that may cause pause. And that's why I'm suggesting that you go ahead and start this process now, because if you find out that you're running, you know, a version of TimeSlips that hasn't been updated in 10 years, it may not run on Windows 11. And because of that, you're going to have to upgrade TimeSlips or make a decision about whether that's something you want to continue to run. So for some of you, this is going to be, um, a little expensive, um, and create some change and change management issues. For some of you, this is going to be no-brainer. Um, so, but that's all stuff to be aware of. The other thing is, if you do not have administrative rights to your computer, those are required for installation. So if you're logging in as a, um, non-administrative user on your computer, And a lot of IT departments will set your computers up like that so that you are less prone to being able to download bad things. You'll have to get their help in order to get the admin rights to do that. So that may mean you need to call your managed IT company to help upgrade your computer or log in as the administrator. So that's another thing to be aware of. As a regular user without admin rights, you cannot upgrade to Windows 11. So Backup everything. Look at the software you're currently running. If you have a question about whether it's supported on Windows 11, contact the vendor or go on their website and see what the system requirements are so that you know that you're not going to all of a sudden lose access to a vitally important function or feature of software on the computer that you're using. So, so far, and again, feel free to chat any questions or turn on your mic and ask me questions if any of this stuff has, um, made you think hard. And then the other thing, of course, is that, um, it's going to take some time. Once you start this update, it's, it's pretty straightforward. You're going to click on Windows Update, install Windows 11, and it walks you through the steps of doing it. It— I put here that it takes at least an hour. You cannot turn your computer off when you're doing this upgrade, and so give yourself— I would give yourself more than an hour, quite frankly. I would give yourself like 3 hours just to be on the safe side. I will tell you, the first time I tried to do the install and update, it just hung up and it wouldn't, it wouldn't run through. So I had to try at least 2 more times. Yes, that is frustrating. And so by the time I got I was frustrated enough to call the IT department to have them walk me through it. It worked just fine. So if you have somebody who helps with your IT stuff, if you have them look over your shoulder, it's bound to be an easy process. But do give yourself time because you can't shut down. So if you think, oh, at the end of the day I'm going to run this update, um, or I've got an important call, you can't pause this. So give yourself plenty of time to be able to do this. Once you have run the update, um, you're going to reboot your computer, and then the first thing you're going to do is go back to where we looked in the settings and make sure that you've installed the latest build and all the security patches. So again, you're going to go into your settings, you're going to look into Windows Updates, you're going to go into the Get the Latest Updates and make sure that you have patched the Windows 11 version that you've installed. So the installed Windows 11 that they're going to give you may not have gotten the patches. So first thing you're going to do is go in and make sure that you have updated with the most recent security patches and all that good, good stuff. And then the next thing is that you may have to update some drivers again, depending on the, the how old your peripherals are. Hopefully you've been keeping up with this. This is why I I am constantly writing articles about keeping your technology up to date. I have worked with law firms that haven't updated anything in what seems like a short period of time, 5, 6, 7 years. And you, you know, you get, you get busy, you keep doing things the way you do it. Everything seems to be working. Then you're forced to make an upgrade or an update and things start breaking and falling apart like a house of cards. So best practices to keep everything up to date, if you can put your laptops or your desktops on a replacement schedule, lease out your big floor model hardware and stuff like that. That way you'll get— you can keep up with the latest and greatest without having to repurchase things. But if you do have old peripherals, you may have to update drivers, and that's not that hard of a problem. Most of the time your computer will tell you what you need to update. So that Windows Update, again, under Settings, you just go into Windows Update, and it'll show you, you know, what you need to do. Look for optional updates. One thing is if you are using a managed IT provider or you're on a bigger network, they may control the Windows updates, so you may have to get help. So for instance, in my organization, I cannot update. I can't update on my own. That is something that has to be done from the, um, IT administrator, so I have to ask them to make sure. And the reason they do that is because on occasion a Windows update will break something, and so they want to test it before they roll it out to the whole organization. And so if you've got an IT company that is helping you, they may also have that set up. So you, you probably want to give them a heads up that you want to upgrade so that they can be on standby to help you make sure you get all the patches that you need. So the next thing is, once you've gotten Windows 11— so again, feel free to ask me questions if you have tried this process and failed, or you've found that something goes wrong. That's always helpful information to know how you got past it. Like I said, when I tried to do the install the first time, it just kept hanging up. And by hanging up, it would just churn and churn and churn and turn, but it never completed the installation process. I have no idea why. Um, but I tried it again, again, after called IT department. They did nothing. They watched me do it, but for some reason it worked that time. It's inevitable. Um, so once we get it installed, things are going to look a little bit different. And so I want to show you how to make it look comfortable to you. And one of the things that, um, it, it ha— that happens when you install Windows 11 is that it moves your task pane in the, the bottom part of your computer. And that in and of itself is enough to throw people. So the other thing is File Explorer looks different. So I'm going to show you how to fix this. I can't fix File Explorer, but I can show you how to make the, the taskbar, um, look like it always does. So I'm going to go into Settings, and then you go into Personalization, and then you go to the taskbar. And I have all these instructions written down, so don't panic. Um, and then you look under Taskbar Behaviors and you want to align it to the left because by default it's aligned to the center in Windows 11. So if you look at the bottom of my screen, you may notice that this is aligned in the center and it does not look the same as your old one. And if you have a whole lot of things pinned to your taskbar on your computer, um, it's going to truncate. It's going to be a little frustrating. So my recommendation is again to go to the taskbar settings, and for the alignment, click on left. And you can see that now you have a lot of room for all of your, um, your icons in the taskbar. And so I'm one of those people, I don't want to go look for apps. I don't, you know, I, I don't also put things all over my desktop. I pretty much use the taskbar to get access to the things I use all the time. So for that reason, I need left aligned. The next thing is another big change, um, which is some of the icons across the bottom of your screen. Oops, so I'll minimize this. So for instance, Down here, um, things look a little different. Um, for one thing, we don't have the tiles anymore. So tiles have been replaced with the Start menu, and when you click on the Start menu, you can see that you have Search, you have apps that you've pinned to it, you have recommended files, and these are files that you've opened or folders that you've opened recently. Um, and then you have, uh, access to My Documents and your power button so you can shut down or restart. So this looks a little different because before in Windows 10, and I guess the good news is that I barely remember what it looked like before, so you get used to the differences pretty quickly, but This has replaced that, that tiles. Now you can pin things to the Start button, so I can add apps to this, and I'll show you kind of how, how to do that. But I'm going to run through a couple of things, so we're going to do a whole like little workflow. The next thing is that you have this lovely search. And so when we go to search, it again looks a little different. We've got a search button down here, and if you click on it, you'll see again recent things that you looked— or this, you can search for apps, you can search for words, you can search for, um, people, you can search for pretty much anything you want to. So if I start try typing in search, you'll see that I start getting more options. And so I typed in the word Gamma because I know that I did, uh, I did a presentation that included an app called Gamma. And so I can go over and look for everything, or I can look in my work files and it will look for documents., and so you see I have a spreadsheet that has the word gamma. I have a PowerPoint presentation, so on and so forth. I can look in apps. So if I had gamma installed as an app, I can look for that, look in documents, search the web, look on settings, look in people and photos and all sorts of other things. So that search It's pretty powerful, and it, it, it can help you find, you know, anything from changing the display on your computer to a document that you've got a keyword in. It's not the best search, and it never has been, but one thing that you can do is go in here and make a small adjustment by going into search settings. And when you go into search settings, you can have it do strict safe search, search your cloud content if you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, search history on your document. So those are some settings that you can go in and play around with. And then the other thing is you can go in and click on indexing options. And so if you click on Indexing Options, it's going to bring up— and it's funny because when you're in Microsoft, um, some of the tools are so old that when you click on them, all of a sudden you feel like you've been thrown back into Windows 95. So this is one of those. And so we are making sure that we've included all the different locations. And so if you store a lot of things on your local drive, you want to make sure your C drive, is indexed, that your Outlook is indexed, and you can click on Modify, and you can pick other locations on your computer, um, so that you can add anything that needs to be indexed so all of that will be pulled up in your search. So the next thing I want to show you is another change in the toolbar. Um, this is on by default, and— and this is a tool that is useful, and it's the Widgets tool. And so let me again get out of this. So Widgets is really busy, and at first I thought this is totally useless. I don't need all this MSN content, which you can choose which content you see if you want to go and, and, you know, mess around with the settings. But honestly, this is not where I'm picking up my news, so I don't need all of this, all these stories. I just— but there are some widgets that are helpful. So the first thing I want to do is show you how to turn this off. So when you go in here and it looks really busy and there's a bunch of junk, you can go into your settings and and then you scroll down to Show or Hide Feeds, and then you turn this off. And when you turn it off, it says it needs to restart it. And then when you open it again, you'll see that it, it gets a lot cleaner because you've removed all this, um, news, and I use that word loosely. And then you, you have widgets that you can add. And let me resort it so they load better. All right, so I've added some of these things. Some of them are here by default, and the way you add or remove widgets is you go on to this plus sign and you can add a focus session, which we'll talk about because I think this is actually a really useful tool. Um, games, Microsoft Feed, we don't need that. Note sidebar, I'm not sure that that's something that I haven't found any particular utility. Phone Link, which we'll talk about, which is actually being able to view and interact with your smartphone from your computer desktop. Sports, again, not for me. Spotify. Now Spotify, if you are a Spotify subscriber and you like to listen to music while you work, go ahead and add that. Traffic, if you want to be able to see, um, local traffic, add that. Watchlist. And then it has a link for finding more widgets. So if I click on Find More Widgets, it's going to take me into the Microsoft Store. There's not a ton of widgets out there, um, so If you wanted to add your Microsoft or your Facebook Messenger or Facebook or some of these other things, you can add them to your Heart's Delight. Some of them do cost money. I haven't really found that any of these are particularly useful for me. So what I have is my Spotify because I do listen to music. I've added my phone link. So I can see what's happening in notifications on my phone. Weather is helpful to know if there's a storm a-brewin'. And then the focus, and then my Microsoft feed, and that's basically documents that I've recently accessed. So widgets can be useful. They're— it's not all that robust at this point, but it is there. So I had a question. Okay, let me show you how to eliminate feeds again, because yes, I agree, that is incredibly frustrating. So you go in here and you go into this gear icon, and gear icon is the, um, uh, universal symbol for how do I make things work the way I want them. And then you scroll down to show/hide feeds. Sorry. And then you toggle the feed on or off. So that's how you get rid of, um, the Microsoft News Feed, which again, in my, my feeling is it's not all that useful. So another big change is how My Documents looks, or your File, um, Explorer. So I'm going to move this over here. There's some benefits to the way it looks now, and there's some drawbacks. So you've got Home, and Home typically organizes by files that you've recently used. If you are a Dropbox user and you are syncing your local drive with Dropbox, that will appear here. And, um, for the person who's asking about, um, how to eliminate feeds, I have an article that actually goes through and gives you the instructions to do this, which I will send with you. But you just go into the settings and, and find, um, the feeds and toggle on and off.. But My Documents looks different. You have some— I think there's some benefit to the changes and there's some drawbacks. It doesn't look like it did before. If you've got Dropbox, if you've got OneDrive, you know, all of this appears here. And then at the top, you've got your OneDrive, and then here, this section are favorites. So I've added particular folders and pin them to my favorites. And then in other cases, if I frequently use a folder, it will also just appear in favorites automatically. So if I need to go into my OneDrive, um, it defaults to these icons, and I do not love the icons because I find that it's very hard for me to read. So you just go to View and you click on Details, and that gives you that list that you're used to. Now, one thing, if you were unaware, and this is not something new to Windows 11, but it is something that I, I like to do, is if you right-click up in this top, I can add lots more things. Like, for instance, Date Created. The Date Modified is useful, but the Date Created is also useful. So you can see, you know, when you drill down to a folder, that, that stays there. And then I can, you know, drill, drill, drill and see files on the date they were created and date modified. You can also move these around. So if I want date created before date modified— so there's a whole lot of additional metadata that you can view just by right-clicking and going to More, and you can see some of this is dependent on the type of file. So for instance, if I go into, um, my gallery, and my gallery is all of the image files that I have, and say I want to— I'm going to go into Details pane. Nope. Oh, poo, it won't do it. So this is a slightly— this is all about images, so it shows you the images. But let's see if I can go, um, to a different folder where my pictures are. Somewhere there's a, a pictures folder. But as you do that, you can add other information so you can see the date the image was created and the date modified, all that kind of stuff. So the way that you would add a folder to this Favorites is— I'm gonna go ahead and, um, find a folder and say I wanted to add this folder to my Favorites. So you just right-click on it and say, um, you can pin it to Quick Access, which is over here. So if I pin to Quick Access, it adds that folder over here. I can unpin it as well, just right-click on it and, um, unpin from Quick Access. I can also pin it to my Start menu, so that folder would appear here in the Start menu. So I've put my CPM folder, my Clio folder, File Explorer, things like that. So that once you kind of go through and add things, um, hopefully you can get to where you need to go just from this menu alone. The other thing that I like to do, because all these little folder icons start looking— everything starts looking really similar to me, so I've started to, um, change the icons. So you can see for CPM, this is my primary folder that I use all the time for most everything, so I changed the icon so it's a little bit more recognizable. So I gave it a, um, a cute little butterfly and I changed the, uh, the downloads. It's already got this. Um, but you can go through and change things. You can see here if I save this, um, and I pin it to quick access there and I changed the icon. So the way you can change the icon for a folder is you select the folder, you right-click on it, and you go down to Show More Options, and then you scroll all the way down to Properties, and then click on Customize, click on Change Icons. And again, we're, we're going back into Windows 95 world, and so You know, again, this just makes it easier for me. So say I want to add a star to this. Click OK, click Apply, click OK. Now Email Attachments from Flow, the folder icon has changed into a star. It's just a way to add a visual cue, um, for an important folder in addition to adding it to your Quick Access folders. And again, the Quick Access folders, you can intentionally pin things to it, but also if you keep going back to a folder over and over again, it will add it to there. So any questions about any of that so far? Okay, hearing none. Oh wait, you know what? Let me show you something else real quick. Another thing that I found with the new, um, Explorer that's actually kind of positive and kind of useless is that you can create tabs. So up across the top, you can click on this plus button and you can open up a folder and see the files and folders in that particular one and leave that open and go back to the main menu. And I can open as many tabs as I want to. So if I want to stay in a particular folder and I'm doing a lot with that folder, I can just leave those tabs open. They don't stick. So once I close down File Explorer, those tabs close and they don't come back. So it's not exactly like a browser where you can reopen, um, closed tabs and, and that kind of stuff. But it is useful if you're dealing with a lot of documents and say you've got Dropbox and you've got OneDrive and you've got shared files on a server and you want to have them all open, you're getting in and out of them all the time. You can open these tabs. The other thing that's a bit different with File Explorer is the right-click menu. So if I go into a folder and I right-click on it, and that's because I want to change the file name, used to be Rename File was in this menu, but now, um, you've got a tiny little graphic up here that is Rename., and if you click on that, you can rename the file. You can also see if you're a OneDrive user or a Dropbox user, you can share the file directly from OneDrive in File Explorer, which you could not do before. You had to go into the OneDrive interface. So now File Explorer just works a little bit better with your cloud storage. You can copy files from here. You can open the file with different things, um, share it, add it to favorites, compress it, look at the file properties, you know, lots of different things. Edit with Acrobat. But if you want to see what the menus used to look like, then you have to go to More, and now you can see you can edit with Acrobat, open in Acrobat, edit Notepad, do, do different things with it. The menu looks the same. There's that Rename button, the Create Shortcut, all that. So a lot of the menu that you were used to seeing is all under a right-click and then going down to Show More Options. Now, another thing that I have a habit of doing is selecting multiple documents and right-clicking, and I want to combine them all into a single PDF. Acrobat doesn't work quite the same way, um, as it used to. So this just opens these in Acrobat, but if I wanted to, um, combine them, I need to show more options, and that's going to give me, um, well, the ability to combine them. But basically, at this point, um, it's hit or miss. So I just open Acrobat and, and select my files. It's a bummer because I used to— I I didn't even open Acrobat to do some things. So someone's asked, are we able to have multiple File Explorer windows open, or are the tabs intended to replace that? I have not tried to open multiple instances of File Explorer, but I just did. So you just right-click on File Explorer. Now I've got File Explorer open twice. So if that's your comfort level, absolutely do that, or you can use these tabs. So either one works. All right, so the next thing I want to show you is some other things that you get with the new Windows 11: multiple desktops, Snap layouts, the Focus widget. Um, there's some interesting things here. So one of the things that you get with Windows 11, and you could do this in Windows 10, it just was not, um, very straightforward or easy to do, and now it's super duper easy in Windows 11, is the ability to create multiple desktops. And I gotta be honest with you, I wasn't sure why you might want to do this, but what happens is you create desktops for things to keep yourself focused. So I can have a desktop that has all of my social media open. I— and then if I want to go— and you can open anything on any desktop, but just switching back and forth keeps you focused. So I could have one with social media, one with deep work where I'm just working on, um, specific applications like Word and Fastcase. If I'm using a bunch of different AI tools, I can have them all open on desktop. So the way that this works is I'm gonna, um, open this again. So down here there's this little square over squares, and if you mouse over it, you can see that I have different desktops. So the Keep Up Communication, that's Task and Outlook. Deep Work is Word and a browser. AI Tools, if I click on the AI Tools again, it switches me over to a different desktop and I would have the AI Tools running. And you can open as many desktops as you want. You can give them names, so you just right-click click on this, rename it, and we'll call this Demonstrations. And that way, if I wanted to create a desktop that showed Demonstrations, I wouldn't have to switch on my own desktop. I could just go to this one. So you can create as many desktops as you want and toggle between them. That may be out of the bounds of anything you'd ever want to do, but it is something that you can do. And as you see, it kind of seamlessly slides back and forth between the documents. So you, or you can open lots of different things on different desktops and kind of move back and forth, um, so that you're not constantly opening and closing and, and just getting things kind of all jumbled together. Another thing that Windows 11 has done that is pretty jarring— up here you have the X to close out whatever you're looking at, and we're pretty used to that. And then the minimize button that puts it down into your task tray. But this used to be a different button entirely. Um, and it would, it would shrink the, the window so that you could look at under other windows. Well, what it does now is it gives you a bunch of different layout options. So if I wanted to quickly tile my windows so that I had PowerPoint open and something else open, I could click this and this shows PowerPoint And the other item that I had open, if I mouse over it again, um, you can just continue to mess around with, uh, and, and once you click it again, it, it expands back. But you can say I wanted to tile these 4 things that I had open. But the nice thing is that you're tiled, and I'm gonna remove this. So, so I can— before, when you tried to tile a bunch of windows, which is, you know, a very basic Windows thing, to get them to stick, to be able to use them independently and all of that, was kind of a pain, right? So now you just click up here and you can tile to your heart's delight. So that's one of the things that I think is an improvement, but it takes a little bit of getting used to. Another thing that, um, they have introduced is this Focus Session. And I think Focus Session is actually really interesting, um, for those of us who are trying to keep distractions to a minimum and work in time blocks, which is a recommended time management tool and technique. And this is now something that's built into the Windows clock, and it's in the widgets. So I like it being in widgets because I can just easily start it up. So if I go into my widgets— whoops, that's not widgets. This is widgets. And I can say, let's focus for 25 minutes. But if I bill in 26-minute increments, I can change it. And I'll show you where to change it some more. I, I've pinned this If I want to unpin it, I can go here. And when I click this, basically what happens is it launches— whoops— this focus session, and it just keeps me focused. If I want to customize this Then I can expand it. I can actually have it, um, focused with my to-do task from Microsoft. I can change the, um, the focus session amount. It'll check my progress. I can give myself some music to listen to while I do it, um, and, and so on and so forth. You can stop the timer. Start it again, play audio. It's just a nice way to create a— and it also turns off notifications when you start this focus session. So if you start a focus session, you say, I really need to focus for 26 minutes, set your timer for 26 minutes. You can tell it, you know, I don't want breaks or I do want breaks. I've written a whole article about this. That gives you some ideas about how you can use this for focus session. But if you've ever used something like the Pomodoro technique where you've actually gone out and gotten a Pomodoro app, now you have one built into your operating system. And this is, this is in the clock as well. If you don't want to use the, the widgets, you can just open the clock. And of course, the things that you've always had— your timers, your alarms, the stopwatch, the world clock, all that stuff is still there. And if you go into settings, you can change your focus. I think I, I don't think I can actually change it to 26 minutes break periods. So you can go in and say, yeah, turn Spotify on or off, make a sound at the end of the break. Um, change my notifications so that it doesn't notify me while I'm doing deep work, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot you can play around with in here, um, in the settings so that this focus session is actually really useful for you. Another big thing that has been added to Windows 11 is Microsoft Copilot. This is not the paid version of Copilot. This is the version of Copilot that comes with the operating system. It is useful. It is not as useful as the paid product, and they will, you know, be delighted to sell you something, but you can use this. And what I'm going to show you is the Copilot in the Edge browser. Edge does come with, um, Windows 11. You don't have to use it. You can use whatever browser you want to. Uh, I do like the Edge browser for a variety of reasons. Primarily one of my favorite is these, um, vertical tabs versus horizontal tabs. I already have a lot of bookmarks, so I get my bookmarks and my open tabs kind of messed up, and I I just like having vertical tabs. And I have a whole article on how to customize your Edge browser. But in your Edge browser and in your toolbar down here, you'll see that if I open Copilot in Windows, which is always in your browser in the bottom, if I click it, it opens in a screen that I can't show you. So I'm not going to show you that. I'm going to show you basically it's the same thing. And click on this, and you can generate a page summary from the page that you're looking at. You can suggest questions about this page. You can just chat with it. You can add an image. You can add a screenshot. You can upload a file. You can use your microphone to ask questions. So this is built in. Now, if you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, then you'll note that this is not the commercial version. This is not a consumer version. This is the, the commercial version rather. And this has commercial data protection. It does not save your searches. It does not save your prompt history. It doesn't save the results. So it's not always the right tool to use, but it is helpful if you say, I'm gonna go to one of my articles, and this would be for— so if I'm on a web page and I want to say, what, what are the top things you should do to protect your computer. And then the key is that you say from at this page, and it'll summarize the page. Things like that. It's helpful for— or you can copy and paste text in it. So if you're— you open it up, you've got an email that you're typing and you want to have it check the tone, you can copy and paste the text of the email and say, is this, you know, adjust the tone to make it sound more friendly or whatever. But you do have this AI Microsoft Copilot built into the operating system. It is not looking at your stuff, um, because that would require you to have a subscription, um, an additional fee for $35, uh, but it can come in handy. So another thing that has changed, this, this is weirdly useful to me is, um, a tool that everybody has known for a really long time, which is Notepad. So there's two things to know. WordPad no longer exists. So the new operating system does not come with WordPad installed. You get Notepad, but Notepad is a bit different. So one thing is that Notepad has tabs, and you also don't have to save the file. So every time I paste something in Notepad, it, it creates a tab and it saves it in Notepad automatically, which I find kind of useful because I— and it's still just a plain old text editor. But if you're like me and you find that you have to copy and paste into products that get messed up by Word's formatting, I just paste plain text into WordPad, do what I need to do, copy it out. So that works really well. And you've got some things that you can do, um, under Edit, Define with Bing, add time and date stamps. You can actually add, um, headers and footers. So a few other things, but Ultimately, if you didn't use WordPad or Notepad for any particular reason, you're probably not going to start now, but it is a little bit handier because it doesn't automatically delete what you put in there and you don't have to remember to save it, which, um, full admission, I often forget to save things in Notepad the way that I would normally do, and I'm Word. Um, another thing, and I'm going to show you a whole little workflow right now, is so many of us are using web-based applications, um, software as a service, you know, whatever you want to call it, and then we have to, in order to get to something like Clio, we are gonna open the browser, navigate to Clio, or bookmark it or whatever, and then go to it. You can actually install web-based applications as applications, as if it's something that lives on your desktop. So I'm gonna show you kind of a, a, a workflow on how to do that. So right now I am opening the Edge browser and say I want to add Google Docs as an application so I don't have to open the browser, navigate to Google Docs, or find it in my, um, my over-aggressive bookmarks folder. So you go into this ellipses and then you go to Apps and you say Install this site as an app. And then it'll ask you what you want it to be named. So I'm gonna say Google Docs. Then what has happened on another screen is opened as its own thing, and I can And it also pops up, do you wanna pin this to your taskbar? Do you wanna pin it to Start? Do you wanna create a desktop shortcut? Do you wanna always start on device login? So again, if you're using Clear or MyCase or any, any web-based application for your practice management, um, you can have it auto-start at device login, you know, and you don't have to go in the browser and get it open and all of that. So I'm gonna have this pinned to my taskbar and pinned to Start. So I'm gonna say allow. And so now if I close this, it's going to be in my taskbar and my Start menu. So there's my Google Docs. Now the other thing that you can do, and I don't— I'm one of those weird people who I like to organize and folder things a lot, so I have all of my Microsoft apps in one little kind of folder. And this is a lot like your phone in terms of you can stack apps on top of each other. Um, and I've got all the AI tools that I use, and a lot of these are web-based, but they're showing up as apps. So I'm gonna drag Google Documents over here onto Gmail and let go. And what that does is it creates a folder that has my email, my Gmail, and my Google Docs. And then and call this Google. And then when I want to go to that, I can either have it in my, um, taskbar, or I can go into this and either go to Gmail or Google Docs. So that's something that I've been using, and this was available in Windows 10. It's just a little bit more, um, sophisticated now and easier to do. But that's something again that you can do so that you can get into. So, you know, down here, I had all my Clio tools. I have my Claude and ChatGPT, you know, things like that. Things that are not installed applications, but I can have them at the ready as if it were. So whether it's in the cloud or whether it's installed on your computer, you can have it accessible through your taskbar or in the Start menu. Other things I will not go into depth with you because we're running out of time, but I've just, I've written some articles. The Snipping Tool, um, is significantly enhanced in Windows 11, so you can get a screenshot of anything. You can go in, and if it has text, you can copy text, you can redact text, you can clip a screenshot, or you can actually record a short video. You can do a visual search in Bing. So if you do a screenshot and you— then you can say search for this screenshot in Bing. You can open it up in your screenshots folder. You can share it. And then the new thing is that you can edit it in Paint, and Paint is also significantly enhanced. So in Paint, and I'll actually just open this up for you because you might find this amusing. So I can go through and crop, um, I can alter the image, I can remove background. So we can use the image and, and put a different background color if we want to. And then there's also an AI-based image creator. So I can sign in with my Microsoft account and actually create AI-based images in Paint. So that's, that's a new functionality. Then I just read an article yesterday, and I'll send it to you because it has more detail, but you can actually— in Windows 10, if you had an Android phone, you could view your phone on your desktop, which is useful for, say, you know, you're getting two-factor authentication via text message and you've got to look at your phone, or you need to use your authenticator app on your phone, and you're constantly kind of going between your computer and your phone. Phone, or you just want to be able to check your text messages without picking up your phone, make calls, all that kind of stuff. This Phone Link now works for iPhone and Android. And so what it looks like is literally this is my phone. I can access any of the apps on my phones, things that I might not have on my computer. I can go look at my text messages and actually interact with text messages, respond to them. I can make phone calls and see calls and search my contacts, go into my apps, and then also all the photos on your phone. I'm sharing these because of course I have nothing but cats and flowers. People always say, what's on your phone roll? Cats and flowers. So I can go in and save these to my desktop. If I need to edit them in Paint, do all that kind of stuff. So adding— and then if I want to go into a particular app, um, like I want to go check my flight status on American, when I click this, what happens is it, it brings up— and I see if I can move this over here— it actually brings up the app, and I'm looking at this app as if I were looking at my phone. So I've given it permission to do this. You can set this up, um, but you know, if I just wanted to check my status on a flight, I could have this pulled up. And I can also add these things to favorites. You know, it's important that we add Chewy to the, the favorites so we can make sure that our auto ship is functional. So that is all the time that we have. And what we can do is I will send you the articles that I've written about this. Oh, also you have, last but not least, some new security features. You can use Windows Hello to unlock your computer with your face or your fingerprint, which isn't— the Windows Hello has been around for a while, but it's easier to use now. Microsoft Defender is a built-in antivirus and anti-malware. There's good backup now. So there's a whole lot that you can go into. Again,— if you want to find all the different security options, you just go into your settings, go into privacy and security, and look at all of the different options you have, whether you turn it on or— this, this is really dependent on if you're using a managed IT company that's got some security stuff already built in. Most of this stuff is not going to have a negative reaction to what you're already using. So I, you know, I, I like having as much backup and security as possible. Finally, if after all of this you say, even in a year I'm not going to be ready for this, you do have an option to purchase Windows 10 Extended Security Updates. They are not going to be available until October of next year when this is, um, out of support. There's different pricing for business and consumer and educational extended support. It's not intended to be a long-term solution. It does not extend technical support. It just extends security patches. And it's— the price is going to double every year for a maximum of 3 years. So you're not going to be able to push this on forever. But if you go, we've got too many people, it's going to be too expensive, you can do an extended security patch for a cost depending on how many users you have. It's going to be somewhere between $45 and $60 per user, and it's going to double every year. But if you need to extend some time and you're not ready to buy a whole new fleet of laptops, or you don't want to have to upgrade a ton of old software, you, you do have that option. So that is me. I am going to stop the recording. I will send you the recording and the articles that I've written that give you detailed instructions. And of course, if you have any questions, you're always able to reach out to me at any time, and we can go through your own particular scenario. Thank you, Katherine.