I discovered a new way to access your phone from your PC. This post is very off topic because the solution does not use Microsoft Phone Link in any way. I'll outline what you need to do to make this work, but you'll almost definitely need to do web-searches to accomplish each step.
The solution involves "mirroring" your phone's display onto your PC using a PC app called SCRCPY. Here is a link where you can download SCRCPY to your PC.
Before you download and launch SCRCPY, you need to install the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on your PC and enable wireless Debugging on your phone.
Here's a link for downloading ADB to your PC.
To enable wireless Debugging on your phone, you must first enable Developer Options under Settings->System. Do a web-search to find out how to enable Developer Options. Once enabled, do this:
- Settings->System->Developer Options->Stay Awake
- Settings->System->Developer Options->USB Debugging
- Settings->System->Developer Options->Wireless Debugging
Now that you've got the phone and PC setup with ADB, SCRCPY, and Wireless Debugging, you need to use ADB to connect your PC to your phone. The ADB download link has an extensive set of instructions about how to accomplish the connection. You have to read that and make it happen.
Also, you'll need the IP address of your phone. I forced my home network router to always assign my phone to IP address 192.168.1.99
I created a .bat file on my PC that makes the PC to phone ADB connection and launches SCRCPY. Here's what's in the .bat file I launch from Windows Explorer on my PC:
adb kill-serveradb start-server
REM Add your device's IP address on the line below if you want to auto-connect when you launch this fileset ip="192.168.1.99"if %ip% EQU "" set /p ip="Enter Android Device IP Address (eg. 192.168.1.43): "echo.echo Connecting adb over TCP/IP on IP: %ip%...adb connect %ip%:5555
scrcpy
Here's what pops up on my PC when I run the .bat file: