Ask Paul: July 3 ⭐

Happy Friday! And Happy 4th of July if you're celebrating. Let's kick off the holiday weekend with some great reader questions.
"Malware found spreading through sponsored ad on X"

At least it's true to the platform it's on
📋 Getting Winget
Alex Strickland asks:

I’ve been catching up on past episodes of Hands On Windows and loved the episode on the Winget UI. I regularly use Winget to install one-off apps or to quickly rebuild my setup after a clean Windows installation. I’m curious: how do you personally use Winget? Do you rely on a custom PowerShell script to automate the commands, or do you have a different workflow you prefer?

First, a convoluted story demonstrating one way I use winget (the Windows Package Manager). Because, in an interesting coincidence, I started typing my response to this question, and having just switched late yesterday to the next review laptop and still being used to the keyboard on the previous laptop, I inadvertently tapped the Copilot key. Copilot didn't open because I'd uninstalled it. But the Settings app did appear, displaying the Bluetooth & devices > Keyboard page because this key wasn't assigned to do anything. This told me that I'd not yet installed PowerToys (because I use its Keyboard Manager utility to remap that key), had installed PowerToys but not yet configured Keyboard Manager, or that PowerToys just wasn't running for some reason.

To find out which it was, I tapped the Windows key and typed power. And PowerToys did not come up in the results, meaning I had not yet installed it. So I opened a Terminal window and typed this from memory:
winget install Microsoft.PowerToys --silent
That installed PowerToys, of course. And so I ran the app, enabled Keyboard Manager, and configured it so that will never happen again. Is this a good/efficient way to install an app? Yeah, it is. Especially if the goal is to minimize or eliminate your use of a Microsoft account (MSA) and apps and services, like the Microsoft Store, that rely on that account. I wrote about this most recently in Switcher 2026: Minimizing the Microsoft in Windows 11 ⭐. And that represents the way I've been doing things for the past month or two.

This maybe isn't the most typical way to use winget, which exists for automation purposes. To that point, I've also written about winget a lot, and about the ways I've used it. And yes, the primary use case has been to batch automate the installation of all the apps I use in a single run using a script. When I wrote Improving My Winget Bulk App Installer Script (Premium) over two years ago, I was leaning into getting as many apps as possible from the Store, as winget supports both Store and web repositories (sources) for the apps it can install. And at that time, most Store apps took advantage of the Store's auto-update capabilities and other perks.

But things have changed a bit since then. Thanks to Microsoft's ever-looser Store policies--aimed at getting more apps in...