Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
Lately, most of the online discourse surrounding Microsoft Windows has been about its shortcomings, the tedious bloat of its services, and AI features that no one wants. I agree with most of the points raised, but the trouble is, a lot of the useful tools Microsoft ships with Windows 11 get lost in the noise.
I've been looking back at how much of my daily workflow runs on tools I got for free the day I installed Windows 11. Most people never find out these tools exist, so they type their problem into Google, reach for the first "sponsored" result, and sign up for a subscription that solves a problem that the OS already did. If you're on any version of Windows 11 and still paying for a screen capture utility, an OCR tool, or any antivirus at all, you're paying twice for the same thing.
I can't imagine my workflow without Snipping Tool
The screenshot app has been getting better all this time
The Snipping Tool has been a part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 7, but it has gotten a lot more capable and a lot more versatile since then. If you've only been using it to screen grab an item or another all this time, there's a chance you've missed a lot of the developments.
The designated screenshot app has turned into three apps at once, and the keyboard shortcut is still the one that most users who have ever used it are familiar with. Win+Shift+S pulls up the capture bar, whereas Win+Shift+R begins a screen recording of any region you draw. Win+Shift+T on the other hand, runs OCR on anything on the screen without going through the screenshot process.
What's gotten better, however, is that every single one of these tools has received some rather impressive quality-of-life improvements. OCR, for example, now features a Quick Redact button alongside it that wipes every email address and phone number out of a screenshot in a single click, which, depending on your workflow, can save you from five minutes to hours of work taking them out yourself.
The screen recorder borrows from the best bit of Clipchamp through Edit in Clipchamp after handoff, where your clip gets passed to the Captions tab and can be transcribed on the spot if necessary. Even the screenshot tool has gotten better, and that's something you'd have noticed if you ever complained about HDR captures looking washed-out or oversaturated, because Snipping Tool now runs a color corrector in the background.
Clipboard history is the Windows feature I talk about the least
And yet, I probably use the most
One of the most challenging aspects of working (which I believe, is compounded tenfold when you read and write for a living) with texts and links is that Windows only remembers the last thing that was copied to the clipboard, and if you accidentally copy something else, whatever you saved before has been replaced.
I imagine it's something that has sent plenty of users looking for third-party clipboard managers, and that's how utilities like Ditto and CopyQ have a market. Before you reach for third-party alternatives, though, it's worth knowing that Windows has had a perfectly functional alternative built into the OS since Windows 10.
With the combination Win + V, you can find your Clipboard History, which comes up as a searchable panel that keeps track of the last 25 copied items, including text, images, and all the hyperlinks that you lost while going over a dozen different tabs. What's even neat for someone like me who has two Windows 11 PCs is the fact that you can have the clipboard sync across devices, which means I can access copied items on my desktop as I resume work on my laptop.
The only antivirus I need is already on Windows 11
It's built in, always on, always free, and literally the best at the moment
The days of a Norton or Avira subscription being the first thing you put on a fresh Windows PC are long behind us, and yet, somehow, half the people I help with their PCs think that Windows' own security is something of a placeholder until they install a real antivirus that they must pay for.
Independent labs have been scoring Microsoft Defender against paid products that do the same job for many years, and the results have been the very same. Microsoft's built-in protection has been decimating its competition in the past couple of years, and there hasn't been a legitimate reason to look at paid alternatives.
In May and June this year, AV-TEST evaluated Microsoft Defender and gave it a perfect 6.0/6.0 score on protection, 5.5/6.0 on performance and 6.0/6.0 on usability, with a total of 17.5 out of 18, which earned it the "Top Product" award. In terms of protection, Defender caught 100% of 0-day malware thrown at it and 100% of prevalent malware reference set. Across 1.2 million legitimate software samples, it only raised a singular false alarm.
If you paid for Windows, you paid for all of this already
We've all been in a place where we're desperate for a certain feature or utility, and we're more than happy to just throw our credit cards at paid utilities to make the immediate problems go away. However, the more you know your way around your OS, the more you know what it can do for you, the easier your experience on it will be. With Windows 11, there are a lot of features at your disposal just one-click away, and all the utilities that I mention here have been more than enough to serve me as a power user. As always, it's best first to research first, and swipe your card after.