Here’s something I didn’t know, that you may not have known, either. Wallpaper images for both Windows 10 and 11 live in a separate folder hierarchy under C:\Windows\Web. That hierarchy appears as the lead-in graphic for this story. The parent folder spec is C:\Windows\Web. In Windows 11 each of the four subsidiary folder contains 2 or more images, all suitable for wallpaper use. When I say Windows wallpapers live elsewhere, I mean they live in their own private directory, as indicated.

If Windows Wallpapers Live Elsewhere, Visit Them

I spelunked around the four-folder hierarchy and found 37 images therein. Many of them are based on those twisting laminar surfaces that have come to stand for Windows 11. I copied all of them into a single directory so I could find them all in one place. The next screencap shows a listing of those images by filename. You’ll probably want to set a similar view to Extra Large or Large icons, so you can identify them by visual content (I did it this way for compactness).

What to do With Windows Wallpapers

Overall, they’re an astonishing collection of images and graphics. Microsoft operates an image service named Spotlight, that curates over 4,000 high-quality professional images of nature, cities, objects, and more. All of these work well for desktop backgrounds and lockscreen images. I have an older app from Timo Partl (no longer in the Store, alas) that does a great job of visiting the Spotlight connection and downloading anything I don’t already have locally to a target directory. For those of you who, like me, like lots of variety in your lockscreens and backgrounds, this provides a trove of beautiful eye-candy of amazing variety and great quality.

I’m adding these wallpapers to that collection. I assume that means they’ll show up occasionally, as the forces of random selection dictate. Check out the 11 wallpapers and feel free view them as and when you like. Cheers!

Note Added Nov 4

I got a great tip from my fellow WIMVPs about this–namely Shawn Keene. He observes that if you open the Run box (WinKey+R) and type “web” into the box, then hit OK, it will open a fresh instance of File Explorer to that directory. Very handy!

Oho! I just learned something interesting from Martin Brinkmann over at Ghacks.Net. It seems that in Windows 11, MS has re-jiggered the way default application selection works. In Windows 10 one could grab an application and associate it with all typical file or link types in one go. Alas, managing Windows 11 defaults gets tricky, because you must now choose them one at a time.

MS also supplies various defaults by default so to speak, which explains why Microsoft Edge shows up so persistently when opening web-related file types. Thus, for example, I count 22 such entries in Settings → Apps → Default apps → (Browser name here). I chose Google Chrome as my example in the lead-in graphic above. If you really want to make Chrome the overall default, you must jump into each of the 22 associated file or link types and pick Chrome from the pick list for each one.

Why Say: Managing Windows 11 Defaults Gets Tricky?

Maybe I should have said “labor intensive” instead. But “tricky” makes for a more compelling headline, so I’ll admit to taking just a wee bit of artistic license here. Truth is, as long as you know that this is how Windows 11 works, it’s the kind of thing you need to do once for those applications you want to make default when Microsoft supplies something different. This takes time and a little effort, but it’s not the end of the world as we know it by a long shot.

I’m hoping Nir Sofer reads this blog post, though, and whips out a Windows11Default tool to help automate this task. Seems like it should be fairly straightforward for someone with the right understanding of Windows internals to make this happen. I see a fascinating thread on this topic in the Spiceworld Forums that explains that GPOs and an XML file can do the trick. I’ll be noodling around with this for a while and see if I can figure something further out. Hopefully, Windows 11 and 10 work the same way in this regard. Stay tuned, and I’ll find out…

What with Windows 11 looming ever closer on the horizon, more Windows 10 users will want to check TPM status on their PC. TPM is, of course, the Trusted Platform Module that provides hardware-level credential caching and encryption to protect systems from snooping and takeover. Today, I’ll show you how to check Windows TPM status 2 ways. One way uses a PowerShell cmdlet, the other way runs a Microsoft Management Console snap-in (an .msc file).

How to Check Windows TPM Status 2 Ways

Naturally, both methods require admin privileges. That is, you must run the cmdlet in an Administrative PowerShell session. Alternatively, you must be logged into an administrative-level account to access the proper MMC snap-in.

Way 1: PowerShell

Prosaically enough, the necessary cmdlet is named get-tpm. As its name portends, it provides detailed information about the presence and state of TPM on the target system upon which it is run. Go ahead, take a look:

Note all the details about TPM presence and status. Source: my i7-6700 PC, which has no TPM.

Way 2: Run TPM.MSC (MMC Snap-in)

To take this path, simply type tpm.msc into the run command box or the Windows search box. It does not provide as much detail as the PowerShell cmdlet, but it is a little faster and easier to run. That said, here’s what its output looks like:

The TPM plug-in for the MMC just provides basic presence/absence information, though more data appears when a TPM is present (see next screencap below)
[Click image for full-sized view.]

TPM Info from Win11-Ready System

For comparison purposes here’s a side-by-side rendition of the PowerShell cmdlet (left) and MMC snap-in (right) from my 11th generation Lenovo X12 Hybrid Tablet PC. It meets the Windows 11 hardware requirements and tells its story about the TPM capabilities present on that machine. Note: 11th generation Intel CPUs provide TPM 2.0 emulation in firmware, rather than in a separate TPM chip.

Click image for full-sized view.