Ask Paul: April 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This is another monster set of questions with many deep-thought debates to consider. So buckle up, it's going to be a long ride.

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Before getting into this, I want to figure out a plan for the ideas I mentioned in the "Some questions for you" section of Ask Paul back on March 29. But these things can get lost when you bury them inside something else, so instead of writing that here, I'll put up a post over the weekend describing where I'm at based on the feedback to those ideas. But I'd like to get started on some reader interaction posts/videos/whatever. So more on that soon.

OK, let's dive in ...
Strata
jrzoomer asks:

Paul, as a Windows “power user”, do you go into the registry at all for anything? I’ve been going through your Hands on Windows series and haven’t seen it and curious to know if this is a thing anymore.

Interesting timing.

I think about this stuff in terms in layers, or strata perhaps. That is, you've got Windows, which is GUI-based. You've got the underlying registry settings and/or local/group policies, which is a hive of utter nonsense. And in the vast gulf between the two, you have various third-party utilities, some professional (Start11 and other Stardock products), some less so, and some very technical. And then you also have command line tools, built-in things like PowerShell and exterior utilities like ViveTool (the latter of which I don't discuss enough but often use myself; more on this in a moment).

Windows 11 is evolving so quickly (and unpredictably) that it's difficult to keep up. So from a content creation and coverage perspective, there's a bit of editorial decision-making going on here, whether I'm thinking about literal news for the site, commentary on whatever is happening, what I discuss on Windows Weekly, what goes in the book, and then what appears on Hands-On Windows.

The last two are tied together: I think of Hands-On Windows as an extension of the Windows 11 Field Guide, and had TWiT not offered me the chance to make that podcast, I'd have likely just made my own short videos for the book instead. And for the book, the editorial direction, such as it is, is to focus on what's new and unfamiliar in the product and point out when and where these things are useful.

But the problem with the book, as I've pointed out a few times recently, is that's incredibly long, longer than I'd like, and I still have a lot to add, with more coming in the near future. So moving past what's just in Windows 11, and mostly in the GUI, is daunting because it's another layer of material. And because it's technical and difficult, and I want to solve problems when possible, and certainly not cause them (such as what might happen when someone makes a mistake editing the registry).

I coincidentally wrote about this recently, but when I think about solving problems in Windows specifically, there are fixes and there are workarounds. And sometimes, maybe oftentimes, you need ...