This post is by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a few pointers on how to make it a bit more useful. If you use your computer a lot, a few simple customisations might make all the difference to your user experience, and may even improve your productivity!
Task Bar
The task bar is the bit at the bottom of your screen and is possibly the first thing you will notice is different. Personally, I like to keep the taskbar free of unnecessary icons. You can pin often used icons to the task bar with a right click too.
The first thing I do is right click and go to Taskbar Settings
Turn off the things that you don’t need to use, such as the search bar, taskview, widgets and chat (the Chat is for Teams Personal so if you use Teams via Microsoft 365 that’s the one to pin).
You can also move the icons to the right hand side if you prefer them there as in Windows 10 and earlier versions under Taskbar Behaviours.
System Tray
The system tray is often overlooked as a useful place to see other running applications. There’s not a lot to do here, but I like to keep my security icons and OneDrive visible (the latter is really useful to keep an eye on to check for sync errors – see What Do The OneDrive Sync Icons Mean? for more info)
Start Menu
Not a huge amount you can do here, but it’s worth getting rid of the some of the default icons and replacing them with ones that you use most often.
- Right click to see Start Settings, where you can change how many icons vs recommendations you can see
- Right icons to remove them. Similarly, search for an app and right click the result to pin that to the Start Menu or Taskbar for quick access
- Drag icons over each other to put them into folders of similar things, like Office apps.
Colour Scheme
Under Settings > Personalisation you can customise the general appearance of Windows. You get 2 main choices of Light and Dark. I like to have a mix, so choose ‘custom’ and you can then choose to have a dark theme on the start menu and taskbar, while keeping the apps background light.
You can also set other options such as whether transparency is used or change the accent colour of buttons.
Background and Lock Screen
Microsoft love their own artwork, and it can be pretty good, but personally I prefer to set my own backgrounds. Simply find the picture you want, right click, and choose desktop background.
You can also do this under Settings > Personalisation, and there’s the option to also set the lock screen image there too.
Startup Apps
Windows tends to add a few things to startup which open when you log in. These are designed to make opening certain apps more quickly, or just open them for you when you log in. You can turn off a few that don’t need.
Right click on the Windows icon in the taskbar and choose Task Manager. You can’t disable everything, like certain security services or drivers for audio, but can you can disable applications or features, such as Cortana. Having lots of applications run on startup can slow down the login process, so by removing things you don’t need to start straight away, you can speed that up to get working faster.
Explorer
Windows Explorer is the file browser. You may have noticed that the left hand side often displays folders you have accessed recently. You can pin folders you access frequently here too, just select it, right click, and choose Pin to Quick access to keep it there. You can see which folders are pinned by the little icon next to them.
Focus
If you need a bit of quiet time away from notifications from Outlook and Teams to focus on some project or admin work, there’s a great feature for that. Click in the bottom right of the System Tray to display the calendar, and you’ll see a button called ‘Focus’.
That opens up the Timer App and you can suspend notifications for a period to allow you to concentrate on the task in hand.
Other Useful Tips
Hopefully this has given you a few useful ideas on how to improve your Windows 11 experience, and also helped you find some of the other useful changes you can make too.
Keep your disk space free of clutter using Storage Sense: Free Up Space On Your PC using Storage Sense
Lots of useful tips for using OneDrive
