Windows Utility in 2026 - Everything You Need to Know

Let's go over the Windows utility. In 2026, this utility has been around for six years. We have a ton of contributors. Over 200 people helped contribute make this project possible. Over 30 million runs, I think, at this point. Let's get into it. Show you what it's all about and all the changes that have been made over the years. So, uh, first off, how to run the utility. You can actually rightclick your start menu terminal withadmin and we're just going to do irmidis.compipeex. Uh we also have a donation if you go to cttstore.com you can also download the utility if you want an executable but you don't have to. You can run this on an online the executable is offline. So if you do have issues and you need to run it offline that's how you do that. Now, once you run this, it'll launch the utility, and you'll notice four tabs here. I'll quickly go over the features and changes that have been made over this past couple months. We have the install tab. You can actually select whatever ones you want to install here. We just try to have a more concise list of really big programs that a lot of people use. So then you can just select however many programs you want and then go through and go okay I want to install these four programs. You you click install. Boom. It would just install them and manage them completely for you which is great. This is uses Windgit. You'd also use chocolatey for this. Clear the selections. We actually u maintain and improved the categories here for the install. So let's say you just want browsers. you can now collapse and easily get in and out and and install much better. This has been kind of an ongoing thing for many years and I feel like we've finally struck the perfect balance of function for installing and uninstalling programs and uh this I think is great and you can actually get your installed it will actually query and then check all the programs that you have installed on your system right now. So, if you need to say, you know what, I'm going to uninstall a bunch of stuff. You can you can click this button here. You can see here I have 37 things installed right now. And I can go through and go, you know what? I'm going to get rid of like five or six of these programs. And I can just uncheck them or just go, you know what? Okay, I got all those. Oh, you know what? I don't use RDC man anymore. Let's just clear the selection. And we'll just set that and hit uninstall and it will uninstall that program. All right. Now, let's get on to the tweaks. Uh tweaks here, we got four different options here. Don't just check everything. These advanced tweaks down here are not really meant to be used by normal users. That's why they're called advanced tweaks and caution. [laughter] But if there is something in there, like let's say you don't want to install like Razer's uh software, Synapsis, and all that other garbage that comes with Razer devices, you can actually click this. It will block all Razer software from being installed, and you can still keep using their mice. Although the recent mice have uh a bunch of software assisted stuff and it's just gh gross at this point. I don't recommend any kind of Razer, but if you're the unfortunate person that bought Razer products, I would probably use this just to disable it. However, for the average user out there, just click standard tweaks, hit run. This will create a restore point that you can actually get to by launching system restore. Let's say these tweaks do something that you don't like. You can go to system restore, restore to that point or you can just click undo selected tweaks and it will undo everything that you selected here. So you got two different methods to revert the tweaks in case you run into problems. So the standard tweaks is my recommendation. Here's all the things that I would do on every system. It's very simple, hard to mess up. Uh big things here though, disc cleanup. I've had a couple issues like people are like, "Hey man, this takes forever to run." Well, if you have like a two or three year old system and you're running disc cleanup, this is a Microsoft utility that's baked into Windows, it cleans up Windows update. And if you run it, it will clear out all old updates and stuff that your system no longer needs. But on an old system, this could take 30 minutes. I've even seen it run up to about an hour, even two hours. So, it can take a long time. So, I'm not going to do that. And I'm not going to create a restore point today because I've done these tweaks a bunch on this system. So, we're just going to click run tweaks. It'll go through and in the background you can see everything that's changed and the tweaks are finished. So, you can see all the services that were changed on a new system. This gets you around 70 to 80 different processes running. Most of it's like the AI garbage for Microsoft other stuff like um [snorts] many other services that run, but it will not uh affect any Microsoft tools. So, it's not like an extreme debloat. It just is more of a sensible one. uh much like Windows 7 defaults from back in the day. Now, the config tab is more for advanced users, but uh maybe even if you've been using your computer for several years, there's just nice quality of life in here. Uh you have your old school control panel from Windows 7 in here. So, you can click that. Uh the printer panel I still use often to manage printers. I don't like how the modern uh settings in printers and how Windows manages them. It just doesn't have as many options. And then of course the sound settings. You know, this is just such a a a by far the best sound uh settings that you can possibly find uh compared to what Microsoft's current sound management is. It's just terrible in comparison to the old. So, I like these old legacy panels a lot. I also have like a themed PowerShell. So, if you like that, I did a video a while back on it. You can just click install and get that. If there's any certain features like net frameworks. You can click this. It would be like enabling that feature through the enable features panel uh of old also like NFS setup. I have NFS drives here instead of SMB, but I know this is kind of advanced. So, those are the things I do. And if you get into trouble, there's a couple things here I want to kind of go over. Uh first, reset network. This is essentially uh netsh int IP reset, netsh wind reset. This resets the the network framework in Windows back to its defaults as it was when it was installed. So, if you get like a virus or something where it messes up your networking and you're not able to connect, this reset network is really beneficial. Uh, and it'll reset all those devices or specifically your network controllers. The other thing, reset Windows update, this will reset it back again to stock default. So, it'll reregister those DLS, restart those services, and make sure your Windows updates will run if you want to go with that. And then, uh, system corruption scan. You know, if you've been in it for a long time or done computer stuff, this is your SFC scan. Uh, and then your also dism restore health. These scans take a long time. They rarely work, but I went ahead and left them in because sometimes you just want to do a Hail Mary and and there there's occasionally like one in a 100 chance it could fix your system if you have corruption. Most times I just recommend backup and re reinstall, but that's it. And then if you have Windgit issues like uh that's what we use to install the programs and uninstall programs and let's say it breaks or whatever, this will help restore its health as well. So, the last tab, updates. This right here will manage your updates. If you're on Windows Pro, I highly recommend just doing security settings. This is how I've when I've managed businesses for 20 plus years. And when it comes to Windows, I always delay feature updates by a year, security updates by 4 days because Windows always releases updates on Tuesday. This will install the updates on Saturday. That gives Microsoft enough time to go, "Oh, oops, we screwed up this week." uh recall those updates before they actually get installed. So, if you want to stop being a guinea pig for Microsoft, I highly recommend security updates. You get sensible updates so you're not, you know, vulnerable, but also not installing a bunch of stuff that doesn't work or causes bugs. Uh but if you're on a home user or let's say Microsoft releases a really bad update like this past year when uh they were basically frying NVMe drives that were pretty full because I think it was like an invalid trim setting or something. um you can actually disable updates altogether. Now, if you do disable updates, remember I still highly recommend once those are patched to reenable them and update your systems. You can't just not update Windows for extended periods of time and think that you're safe because you've installed some antivirus. It's not how that works. So, if you disable updates, you do need to reenable them eventually or or use a Mac or or Linux, [laughter] you know, disabling updates and just thinking I'm going to be fine is not a a solution that I highly recommend. However, I want to give that control to you. So, there you go. And just default updates will reset everything back to defaults. Now, there used to be a fifth tab. Let's go over some of the changes. Uh micro win. I got a lot of issues on microin and I decided uh and talked with coding wonders who's been maintaining the project. Ki was the original one that created microin and coding wonders has been maintaining for the last year or two and we decided we're going to fork that project out. I talked to coding wonders and I think Caleum and a couple other people other contributors and they said they'd be okay taking that over. So I want to show that really fast. using PowerShell to manage all of this is uh slow. So the creation of ISO takes a lot longer and I think when you use async with C and you're writing these files, you could do it a lot better here. So I'm think I'm going to create another tab. Let me know in the comments down below if you want this. I can link to Microwin. Right now it's just in the first version, the alpha release of it, but it is a lot faster and that's the big thing here. and it's like its own separate project. Since Windows utility is meant to just tweak Windows, MicroWin is really meant to do a fresh install of Windows. And what I was getting was uh people that aren't familiar with how to maintain their systems. What they were doing was they were using Microin and then just like reinstalling Windows on top of Windows and it was just a big disaster. I really did not want new users or or you know naive users to use microw and not know what they're doing. So uh I think I might create like a fifth tab. Let me know in the comments if this is what you want where I could link to uh the microwin here. Tiny 11 builder if you don't want to use microw that's also uh made by indev which has made ISOs for Windows for 20 plus years maybe 30 years at this point. That guy's just a legend. Uh, and Tiny 11 Builder also creates an ISO using official media and then also probably Nite. This has been in the game for a long long time since Windows XP and you can really highly modify Windows ISOs with it as well. So those are like the three things if you want to do a fresh install of Windows, what I'd recommend from a tool perspective. Uh but that's kind of the rationale for removing it from uh the Windows utility and then kind of forking it to make a better project. And we can still link to it if you guys really want. We can make it even auto download and run. Um there's a lot of different ways to go from here, but I wanted to get all that code out of it because the big thing here if you look at the releases is we're really bringing Windows utility down to a minimal clean state. And I wanted it not to blow it up because as it's been six years maintaining this project, uh the one thing my job is is to make sure we don't get feature creep and it just blows out of control and then all of a sudden you're running, you know, a 20 30 40,000line PowerShell script to do these utilities tweaks. I I don't want that. It would be slow and it would just not be worthwhile for that. Uh you need a a full-blown program at that point. So, that's why I wanted to minimize this and fork some of these things out. But, I also want to leave you with this. For those that have contributed uh and and bought the utility either on cttstore.com uh or I think there's even a link on sometimes on YouTube, I wanted to show you something that I've kind of been building in the background that will replace the offline utility. Now, this is like the first like alpha release. So, I still got to replace the toggles here on the tweaks tab, uh the install tab. very much the similar thing. I'll probably remove this banner, clean this up a little bit. Uh the updates tab. I was kind of wanting to um add more features into this style of thing while maintaining the same functionality as the PowerShell scripts. The cool thing here is you'll notice when util tweaks version all of this is written in F and also usesNet libraries instead of PowerShell. Don't worry, I'm not going to geek out too much here. But the big thing I wanted was all the development from win util to carry over to the offline.net implementation. And how I did that was I pulled all the tweaks and all the settings everything. So as Windows utility gets updated, it can also update this. The only difference between the two is let's say you want to go select essential tweaks and apply the tweaks. It applies pretty fast because we're directly interfacing and not going through PowerShell at all to set any of these settings. And right now I have a pretty verbose output on that. But I just kind of want to showcase that. That's in the future. Probably I'm shooting for next month to finish that programming out. But also that that's it for updates. I just want to update everybody on the Windows utility. We're hard at work. if you want to check in the active updates. I do live stream on Tuesday and Thursday here on YouTube and also on Twitch if you want to follow me over there. And that is it. Let me know your thoughts. I look forward to the comments. I know some people were disappointed like removing the microw tab, but trust me, here in the next month or two when it all comes out, we have uh all those as separate projects and you run them, you're going to understand this is a great change and it's just uh so much easier to maintain and also you get a better product at the end of the day. So, thank you all for all the support and I'll see you in the next

The Windows Utility is back and better than ever! After 6 years, 200+ contributors, and over 30 million runs, here's everything that's new, changed, and coming soon. In this video, we cover: - How to run the utility (online & offline) - Install tab improvements & better categories - Tweaks tab walkthrough & what to actually use - Legacy control panel, network reset & repair tools - How to manage Windows Updates the smart way - Why MicroWin was removed & where it's going - A sneak peek at the new offline .NET app — no PowerShell needed! ⚠️ Not sure which tweaks to run? Stick to Standard Tweaks — they're safe, reversible, and recommended for most users. 📥 Run the Utility: irm christitus.com/win | iex 🛒 Offline Executable: https://cttstore.com 📺 Watch me live every Tuesday & Thursday on YouTube and Twitch! 🔔 Subscribe for more Windows tips, tools, and tutorials. 👍 Like the video if this helped you out! 💬 Comment below — should MicroWin come back as its own tab? #Windows #WindowsUtility #WindowsTweaks #PCOptimization #Windows11 #Tech #PowerShell 00:00 - Windows Utility 6 years, 30M runs 00:22 - How to launch the utility 01:02 - Install tab: select & install programs 01:59 - Query & uninstall existing programs 02:26 - Tweaks tab walkthrough 03:16 - Standard tweaks recommendation & restore point 05:00 - Legacy control panel & sound settings 06:05 - Reset network & Windows Update tools 07:11 - Managing Windows Updates safely 08:31 - Disabling updates warning 09:19 - MicroWin removed, forked separately 10:38 - Why MicroWin was dangerous for beginners 10:57 - Alternative ISO tools recommended 12:42 - New offline .NET app 13:26 - Faster tweaks, no PowerShell needed 14:02 - Live streams Tuesdays & Thursdays. ►► Digital Downloads ➜ https://www.cttstore.com ►► Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/christitustech ►► Twitch ➜ https://www.twitch.tv/christitustech ►► Website and Guides ➜ https://christitus.com