Windows 11: Five settings you should change right now

 

Windows 11: Five settings you should change right now

Windows 11 brings a lot of visual and functional changes and going through all of them will take some time for most users. If you’ve recently updated to Windows 11 and want to make some productivity changes from day one, you might want to tweak some settings to make it more like Windows 10. Here are five settings you should check after upgrading or booting into Windows. 11.

Resetting the start button

The first thing you’ll see in Windows 11 is the macOS-like taskbar, which is now centered. All your pinned apps and the Start button are pinned to the center of the screen. However, you can change this and align your taskbar back to the left side.

You can move the taskbar back to the left, Windows 10 style. Here’s how.

To do this right-click on an empty area of ​​the taskbar and click the Taskbar Settings button. In Sections, you see, expand the ‘Taskbar Behaviors‘ section and in the Taskbar Alignment drop-down, select Left instead of Center.

Remove unnecessary items from the taskbar

The Windows 11 taskbar also integrates options like Microsoft Teams and a Task View button. If you do not use these options you can choose to remove them. To do this, go back to the taskbar settings by right-clicking on an empty space on the taskbar.

Here’s how you can remove taskbar items you don’t need.

Expand the “Taskbar Items” section and uncheck the apps you don’t want to pin to the taskbar.

Get back the old context menu

Right-clicking on any drive or folder in Windows 11 shows you a new context menu where many of the options you use frequently are hidden under a new ‘Show more options’ button. While this new style may work for some people, others may find that options are often hidden behind an extra click.

How to Change Windows 11 Expandable Context Menu to Old Style

To go back to the old style of context menu from Windows 10, do the following steps:

Step 1: 

Open Registry Editor by pressing ‘Windows Button + R‘ on your keyboard. Type ‘Regedit‘ and press Enter.

Step 2: 

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID and right-click on the CLSID folder and select New/Key. Name this new sub-folder ‘{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}‘ (with brackets).

Step 3: 

Now in the same way create a new sub-folder under the newly created sub-folder. To do this. Right-click on the {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} key and select New/Key and name it ‘InprocServer32‘. After creating it, double click on the ‘Default‘ key in the right panel and keep its value column blank, click ‘OK‘.

Restart your system and you should directly see the expanded context menu.

New window-snapping options

Windows 11 offers more window snapping presets instead of the usual 50-50 split. New options let you quickly snap three and four windows.

To use this feature, hover over the ‘Maximize‘ button (the button between Minimize and Close) on any window and you’ll see new options appear. Click on the layout of your choice and Windows will automatically arrange your open windows accordingly.

Title bar shake feature

The ‘Title Bar Shake‘ feature is a boon if you often work with multiple windows and programs open at the same time. When you have several windows open, click on the title bar of the main window you’re working on and quickly drag left and right a few times to quickly minimize all other windows.

However, you need to enable this feature first for it to work. To do this, navigate to Windows Settings/ System/ Multitasking and turn on the ‘Title Bar Window Shake‘ feature.