These 14 tweaks will make your Windows 11 PC so much better (2024)

Windows 11 is a very versatile and capable operating system, and while it works pretty well out of the box, there are many settings you can change and tweaks you can make to improve your experience with Windows 11 that much more. These may be things you don't even know about, or they may be things you forget to enable for one reason or another.

So, if you're not sure where to start or you just want to learn something new, I've rounded up some of the best tweaks you can make to WIndows 11. Let's get started.

14 Turn off notifications and set up Do not disturb

Pop-ups are annoying

The first thing you might want to do upon setting up a Windows 11 PC is managing your incoming notifications. By default most apps are allowed to send you notificaitons, which appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. If you don't like that, you can disable notifications for specific apps in the Settings app. Simply open the Settings app and navigate to System > Notifications. You'll see a list of your apps and whether they can send notifications or not. You can also dive in deeper and turn off specific kinds of notification features, like sound, banners, and more.

Something else that can help with this is enabling Do not disturb. This feature allows you to block all incoming notifications, and you can set it up to be automatically enabled at certain times, or under certain conditions, such as while playing a fullscreen game or movie. You can find these settings on the same apge by expanding the Turn on do not disturb automatically field. Turn on these features to your liking to prevent unwanted distractions.

13 Turn off startup tasks

Save system resources

Whenever you boot up your PC, it's not just Windows starting up, there are a lot of other programs that like to start with Windows, too. Some of these can be essential, but not all of them are, so we recommend turning off some startup tasks to save your system resources for more important things. You can do this right after setting up a PC, but it's a good diea to check back after installing more apps, because tmany of them will create new entries.

To disable startup tasks, simply right-click your taskbar and choose Task Manager. In Task Manager, select the Startup tab, and you'll see a list of your apps with registered startup tasks, and whether they're enabled or not. Simply click the app you want to disable, and then choose Disable.

12 Change the theme color

Make it your own

By default, Windows 11 comes with light mode enabled and uses a blue accent color for certain parts of the UI. But you can change this to your liking if you want a different look. Right-click the desktop and choose Personalize, and the Settings app will open. Here, click Colors and you'll have a slew of options to change.

First, the Choose your mode option lets you change between light and dark modes for Windows and your apps. Below that, you have the Accent color option, which changes the color shown to highlight certain elements, like links. If you want the accent color to be more prominent, you can also enable the options to Show accent color on Start and taskbar and Show accent color on title bars and window borders, which can be found towards the bottom of this page.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Windows 11 customization, but it's a good place to start.

11 Set up a Dev Drive

This one's for the developers out there

Most of these tips are valid for almost any Windows 11 user, but this specific one is more specific to developers using Windows 11. If you want to get the best performance possible for your development projects, it's a good idea to create a Dev Drive, which is a new feature in Windows 11 version 23H2.

A Dev Drive is a specific partition on your PC that's used to store your project files, and it's marked as secure storage in the eyes of Windows Defender, which prevents Windows from running security checks on it. In turn, this increases performance, so your projects should load a lot faster. Beware, though — you shouldn't store any downloaded files in a Dev Drive.

10 Set up Restore Points

Just to be safe

The system restore feature has long been one of the more useful tools in Windows, though it's been a bit downplayed in Windows 11. This capability lets you go back in time to a previous state your PC was in. This can be really useful if you ever run into an issue with your computer, as you can easily bring it back to a working state.

This capability is disabled by default in Windows 11, but if you open the Start menu and search for restore point, you can find it. Select your main drive and click Configure, then enable system protection and choose how much space to allocate to restore points. Windows 11 will start creating restore points automatically before major changes are made to the system. Alternatively, you can create a restore point yourself by coming back to this dialog whenever you need to. DOing this regularly helps ensure that even if you have to restore your PC, you won't lose a lot of files in the process.

9 Set up Storage Sense

Clean unnecessary files automatically

Windows can pile up temporary and unnecessary files over time, and every now and then, it's a good idea to delete them. However, doing this manually can be tedious, so it's a good idea to configure Storage Sense to do this automatically. In fact, this is already set up automatically, but maybe you want to change those settings.

Open the Settings app and go to System > Storage, and then choose Storage Sense. Here, check the Run Storage Sense option, which is set to run when disk space is low by default. You cans et it to run every month, every week, or every day. There's also the option to delete files in your Recycle Bin automatically if they've been there for some time. The default setting is 30 days, but if you want to save space faster, you can lower this to happen daily.

8 Replace the Start menu

The default one is very limited

Another pain point many have with Windows 11 is the Start menu, which is a lot more limited than previous iterations. Thankfully, there are plenty of replacement options you can use to spice up your Start menu and make it that much more useful. A personal favorite of mine is Start11, but StartAllBack is also great. Both of those are paid options, but they're well worth the money for the flexibility you get.

Or, if you don't care about the Start menu at all and you like using the keyboard, just use Flow Launcher. This is a search bar that can open all your apps, but it can do a whole lot more than that, too. It has a lot of plugins that allow you to search the web, YouTube, and much more.

7 Change the taskbar alignment

Miss Windows 10?

One of the big changes people were skeptical about with Windows 11 was the taskbar icons moving to the center of the screen, but before you get too worried, you can change it back and have the Start menu where it's always been. This is fairly easy to do. Simply right-click an empty area of the taskbar and choose Taskbar settings. Expand the Taskbar behaviors section and change the Taskbar alignment dropdown menu to Left instead of Center. It's that easy.

6 Disable taskbar icons

Who needs them?

While we're on the taskbar, something else you might not like is how many icons WIndows 11 puts on your taskbar. Some of the initial pinned icons are just apps, so you can easily remove them by right-clicking the icon and choosing Unpin from taskbar. But some of them are Windows icons, and in those cases, you have to disable them in a different way. For that, right-click an empty area of the taskbar and choose Taskbar settings. You'll see a list of icons you can disable right at the top.

The list of icons will depend on your version of Windows 11, but generally, you can turn off Task View, Widgets, and Search here (the latter actually has a few options). In some versions, you may also see Copilot, though this is being removed with upcoming updates.

5 Uninstall apps you don't need

It may seem obvious, but...

Even before you start using it, Windows 11 already has a ton of apps installed. Between Microsoft itself and the manufacturer of your PC, plenty of apps are included by default. Some of them are necessary, but a lot of them aren't, so it's a good idea to go through your app list and just uninstall anything ou find useless. If you regret it, you can probably install it again later anyway.

You can do this manually, but there are also apps like O&O AppBuster or Win11Debloat that are designed to remove multiple apps in one go.

4 Use the Windows 10 classic context menu

It has a lot more options

One of the things you might now like about Windows 11 is that the new context menu for File Explorer has nowhere near as many options as it did back on Windows 10. Microsoft even includes a Show more options button to open the old context menu. But if you want to access this menu more quickly, you can just hold Shift while right-clicking to go straight into the old context menu.

Is that still too much work? Well, with some registry tweaks, you can make this the permanent context menu. Here's how:

1. Open the Start menu and search for Registry Editor and select the first option.
2. In Registry Editor, navigate to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID using the pane on the left.

   

3. Right-click on the CLSID directory and choose New > Key. Name the key {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}.

   

4. Right-click this new key, and create another key called InprocServer32.
5. Open the (Default) variable on the main pane on the right and click OK (don't make any changes).

The old right-click menu will be back when you restart the PC.

3 Disable privacy-invasive features

Windows is tracking what you do

Windows 11, like many other operating systems, relies on tracking the user's behavior for many things, including advertising and recommended content. A lot of these invasive features are enabled by default, and it's a good idea to look into it to see what you're not comfortable sharing.

Once you've set up your PC, open the Settings app and go to the Privacy & security section. There are a lot of options here to navigate through, so take your time to check them out and disable what you deem unnecessary.

2 Turn on Night Light

Save your eyes from harm

Computer screens can be pretty bad for your eyes, especially if you're looking at them late at night. Some studies have even indicated that blue light from screens can interfere with your circadian rhythm, messing up your sleep. While that hasn't been fully proven yet, saving your eyes from strain is certainly not a bad thing, and the Night Light feature in Windows 11 does exactly that.

By reducing the amount of blue light your screen emits, Night Light makes it much easier to use your screen in dim lighting. You can turn it in the Settings app, under System > Display, and if you open the Night Light page, you can even schedule it so it automatically kicks in at sunset. It's a great way to keep your eyes healthy and it might even help you sleep better. You might want to disable it if you do color-sensitive work, though.

1 Disable OneDrive folder backups

It's a bad feature

Microsoft loves enabling unnecessary features by default and implementing them in the worst way possible. And that's exactly what's happened with OneDrive and its folder backups. OneDrive is prelaoded on Windows 11, and in an attempt to keep your data safe, it automatically backs up your Documents, Pictures, and Desktop folders to the cloud. It's not a terrible idea, except this will eat up your OneDrive space quickly, especially if you don't have a Microsoft 365 subscription with extra OneDrive storage.

What's more, it just doesn't work well. It automatically syncs your desktop icons, but those icons lead to apps that aren't backed up. So when you set up a new computer, you're left with a bunch of broken icons on your desktop. And if you install those apps again, those icons will be duplicated on your desktop and in OneDrive. It's just a mess, and it's crazy that it's enabled by default.

If you click the OneDrive icon in the taskbar, you can go into its settings and manage your backups, then turn them off entirely. I always recommend doing that.

Make your Windows PC better

It's true that Windows 11 makes a lot of annoying decisions, and having to change all of these things can be frustrating, but if you have a bit of patience to make these changes, your time with Windows 11 will be a lot better. You may have known about some of these, but a lot of the tips here can be easily forgotten or fly under the radar, so it's always a good idea to remind yourself to do them.