Windows 11 has noticeably less bloatware than Windows 10 — but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. There are a lot of annoying features out of the box that most people won’t like on a new Windows 11 PC, although thankfully, Candy Crush is not one of them.
Turn off the Sticky Keys popup
This helpful report on Sticky Keys has plagued Windows users for decades. You’ve seen it, your grandmother has seen it, and even aliens secretly profiling human behavior have seen it.
Criticism doesn’t mean that Sticky Keys don’t have their place – they certainly do. Enable hotkeys to change how the Control, Shift, Alt, and Windows keys work. Instead of a button that is only active when pressed, they act more like switches that stay on until they are turned off. For some people, this is an invaluable quality-of-life feature that makes accessing hotkeys much easier.
The problem with the Sticky Keys popup is how easy it is to accidentally launch it. Fortunately, you can disable the popup completely in the accessibility options. Click the Start button, type “sticky keys” in the search box, and then click “Sticky Keys” or “Open”.
You can also open the Settings app and go to Accessibility > Keyboard > Hotkeys to find these options.
Click the switch next to “Shortcut for hotkeys” to “Off”.
That’s it – the Sticky Keys popup will no longer appear, no matter how hard you tap the Shift key.
Disable extra telemetry
In Windows 11, you cannot opt out of all data telemetry unless you completely disconnect your Windows computer from the Internet. You can limit this quite significantly in the Settings app. Click the Start button, type “Diagnostics and Feedback” in the search box, and click “Open.” It is also accessible through the Settings app under Privacy & Security > Diagnostics & Feedback.
There are several separate options for restricting different types of diagnostic data.
You will have to go through and disable them individually. Start with “Diagnostic data”. Click the arrow (small arrow with no tail) to the right, then click the switch next to “Send optional diagnostic data” to the off position.
Repeat this process for “Handwriting & Typing Enhancement” and “Customized Experiences”.
Then, open the “Delete diagnostic data” section and click “Delete” to delete any additional data that Microsoft has already collected.
Finally, scroll down and change “Feedback Frequency” to “Never”.
You will not send any unnecessary data to Microsoft and you will not be prompted for manual feedback.
Remove Bing from the Start Search menu
Bing search results have been included in Start menu search queries for several recent versions of Windows. But does anyone want it? Is it really necessary to send searches for local files and programs to Bing?
A few minutes of registry editing can disable Bing in the Start menu forever. Alternatively, we’ve also included a pre-made registry key that will do the job in seconds.
Slide the Start button back
Windows 11 has quite radically redesigned the taskbar and the Start menu. The Start button has been moved to the center of the bottom of the screen instead of being located at the bottom left. People who are used to macOS or some Linux distributions (with the GNOME desktop environment) might like the new taskbar in Windows 11, but long-time Windows users will probably like it less – the Start button is located at the bottom left. corner for almost 27 years.
Microsoft has changed or removed a number of features that were present in Windows 11. Fortunately for everyone, the ability to move the Start button back to its historic home is not one of them. To do this, right-click on an empty space on the taskbar and click “Taskbar Settings”.
Note: You can also open the Settings app and then go to Personalization > Dashboard.
Scroll down until you see the section called “Taskbar Behavior” and expand it if necessary by clicking the small arrow (like a tailless arrow) on the right side. Click the drop-down box next to “Header Alignment” and set it to “Left”.
The Start button will immediately move back to the left corner and all will be right with the world again.
Remove the new menu with the right mouse button and put the old one back
The Windows right-click menu is another long-standing feature that got a major overhaul in Windows 11. Instead, it replaces the classic copy, cut, paste, and rename options for text with icons. The new menu is on the left in the image below and the old is on the right.
New right-click menu appearance pretty good, but not necessarily more usable than the old one. The icons at the top resemble something you’d encounter in a user interface designed for touch devices like a mobile phone or tablet, rather than a mouse and keyboard. Fortunately, you can bring back the old context menus with a quick registry hack.
RELATED: How to get old context menus back in Windows 11
Bring back the old marked icons on the taskbar
The taskbar icons that Windows 11 requires to use have one thing in common: they’re minimalist, and there’s a certain elegance to minimalism. However, this comes at the cost of efficiency. Microsoft has disabled (or inadvertently broken) the LastActiveClick registry hack in Windows 11 and completely removed marked icons from the taskbar, so if you have multiple instances of the same program open, you’ll be stuck when you hover over the icon and click on the desired instance.
This is hardly efficient – it’s faster to just search for the instance you want and click directly on it. Stardock filled the gaps for Microsoft, just as it has for decades. The company has released Start11, which allows you to restore taskbar labels in Windows 11.
Note: Start11 is not free; it costs $6. It’s worth it if you don’t like Windows 11’s taskbar and Start menu.
Fix the Start menu
Windows users are notoriously sensitive to changes in the Start menu. Windows 8’s Start menu was famously poorly received. Windows 10 learned from this mistake and took some aesthetic inspiration from it. Windows 11’s Start menu was arguably a step back from the utility it offered Windows 10 users. Start11 comes to the rescue again.
Start11 lets you choose how your Start menu will look – you can choose between Windows 7 style, Modern style, Windows 10 style or use the default Windows 11 look. Just click on the one you like and it will be applied automatically.
They all work well, and the Windows 10 option lets you bring back the information density that makes Windows 10’s Start menu so handy.
Enable dark mode
Windows has had an official dark mode since the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, but Windows 11 still comes out of the box with a blinding white user interface (UI). Dark modes or dark themes are all the rage these days, so why not enable dark mode in Windows 11?
RELATED: How to Enable Dark Mode for Google Chrome
Right-click an empty space on your desktop, click “Personalization,” and then click “Colors.” You can select “Dark” from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
RELATED: How to Enable Dark Mode in Windows 11
Enable DNS over HTTPS
DNS Over HTTPS started to enter the mainstream in 2020, but Windows 10 still lacks official support. Windows 11 corrected this deficiency – the option of DNS over HTTPS was present in the operating system from day one.
DNS Over HTTPS encrypts your DNS server requests, so third parties like your ISP can’t see what websites you’re requesting from your DNS server or perform a man-in-the-middle attack against you.
Microsoft has integrated DNS over HTTPS right into the new Settings app, so enabling it in Windows 11 is a breeze.
RELATED: How to enable DNS over HTTPS in Windows 11
Customize your widgets
Windows has had widgets since the Windows Sidebar was introduced in Windows Vista, although back then they were called widgets, not widgets. Microsoft has tried several variations of widgets since then, and Windows 11 is no exception. It offers a variant of the News & Interests widget in Windows 10. Pressing the widget button opens a window that displays your local weather and a few items that Microsoft thinks you’ll be interested in.
If you’re not a fan of widgets at all (or at least this implementation), removing them is simple. Go to Settings > Personalization > Dashboard, then click the switch next to Widgets.
Tip: You can also click the Start button and type “dashboard” in the search box. Click on the result and you will be taken directly to the page.
If you want to customize the content, you can – just click the little plus button on the top right.
You can add a few predefined items, or you can click “Manage Interests” at the bottom and manually select the interests that will appear in the feed.
Note: Click on “Manage Interests” to go to the MSN website.
Change your default browser
Microsoft made it unreasonably difficult to change Windows 11’s default browser when the operating system was released, and then doubled down on it by experimenting with features that actively blocked workarounds. Unexpectedly, this was not a particularly popular move – Microsoft ended the streamlining process in response to user feedback.
The first thing you need to do is install the browser you want to use, be it Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or another option.
RELATED: How to change the default web browser in Windows 11
Then open the Settings app, click on the “Applications” tab and click on “Default apps”.
Scroll through the list of programs until you see the browser you installed, click it, and then click “Set Default” at the top of the page.
Despite some changes that weren’t very popular, some good things came with the release of Windows 11. For example, the new Settings app is significantly sleeker and more user-friendly than the version in Windows 10. There’s also plenty of reason to be optimistic about the future of Windows 11 — 22H2, a major update likely to be released sometime in the second half of 2022, has a lot of great features.
RELATED: What’s new in Windows 11 22H2 update: Top 10 new features