10 EXPERT TIPS FOR WINDOWS 11

DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH REVEALS HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF THEM.

One of the major complaints from seasoned users about Windows 11 is that it veers towards simplicity rather than customisability. That’s true, but there are several ways to bend it to your liking if you’re willing to dig beneath the surface.

Here, we take you on a journey. We start with the potentially painful install process, including how to bypass the TPM and processor restrictions, before providing some quick advice on customising the taskbar and Start menu.

Then it’s time to fight Microsoft’s preferences, whether it’s uninstalling Teams or regaining control over the browser. Not everyone wants to use Edge for everything, after all.

Before you dismiss Widgets as a gimmick, it’s well worth taking some time to customise the new feed to your interests. We explain how.

And then we delve into some of the new tricks that Microsoft offers, whether that’s the snap layouts for active windows or playing around with virtual desktops.

Finally, we end on a couple of tips that may appeal to laptop users. First, a guide to gestures (they can be very useful!) and then some advice on extending battery life.

1 Get it now – even on unsupported hardware

Windows 11 has been gradually rolling out through Windows Update since October, but older systems may not be offered the upgrade until mid-2022. If your computer doesn’t have a TPM 2 chip or a suitably recent CPU, you may never be offered it.

This can be irritating, particularly if you have multiple computers that end up running different platforms – but there are ways around it. You can upgrade right now by downloading the Installation Assistant from tinyurl.com/APC505WINDL .

If your system doesn’t meet the official hardware requirements, you’ll get a warning that Windows 11 is unsupported on your computer, but if you’re willing to accept that caution you can still install it by making a simple Registry tweak – follow Microsoft’s instructions at tinyurl. com/APC505WINSTALL .

You can also download a bootable USB or DVD image and perform a clean installation of Windows 11, but remember the OS is free only if you’re upgrading from Windows 10. To activate it on new hardware you’ll need to buy a product key, or transfer one from a system you’re no longer using.

2 Move the Start button back to its proper place

Windows 11 moves all your taskbar icons to the middle of the screen, rather than ranging them to the left. This change breaks a convention that goes all the way back to Windows 95, so it takes some getting used to. It also makes it fiddlier to use the Start button – it’s much easier to swing the mouse down to the corner of the screen than to hit a freestanding icon, especially since its location changes depending on how many programs you have pinned or open.

This change is easy to undo. Right-click on the taskbar, open the taskbar settings, then scroll down in the window that opens and set taskbar alignment to left. You’ll see here that you can also tweak some other behaviours, and customise which icons appear on the taskbar.

3 Customise the new Start menu

The simplified Start menu in Windows 11 is easy to use, but you might be missing some of the links and features of Windows 10. You can restore some of them by opening the Settings app and going to Personalisation | Start. Click Folders and you’ll see options to add direct shortcuts to various predefined folders to the Start menu (you can’t currently add your own).

To remove an app from the main “Pinned” view, right-click it and select Unpin; to add one, find it (by searching or using the “All apps” list), right-click and select “Pin to Start”.

You can also get rid of the list of Recommended files. To do this, go back into the Settings app and turn off the switch labelled “Show recently opened items in Start, Jump Lists, and File Explorer”. Annoyingly, this doesn’t remove the Recommended pane – it just leaves it blank. Hopefully that will be tidied up in a future update.

4 Hide and disable Teams

Microsoft really wants you to use its Teams platform for all your chats and video calls, and to that end it’s made it an integral part of Windows 11. To be fair it’s not a bad system, but if you’re anything like us you don’t want Teams clogging up your Taskbar and taking up resources by running in the background.

The Settings page mentioned above lets you remove the Teams Chat icon from your Taskbar (it’s just labelled as Chat), but this doesn’t prevent the process from launching at startup. To do this, go to the Apps page in the Settings app, click on Startup, then find the entry for Microsoft Teams and toggle its switch to Off.

If you really want to be rid of Teams, you can uninstall it from the “Apps & features” page in Settings. Note, though, that if you haven’t hidden the Chat icon, clicking it will prompt Windows 11 to immediately reinstall and open Teams.

5 Get your favourite browser back

If you were using Chrome, Firefox or another third-party browser before upgrading to Windows 11, you’ll find that Microsoft Edge has replaced it as the default. In previous editions of Windows it was a slightly roundabout process to set a third-party browser as the default program for opening web pages and other content – and in Windows 11 it’s worse.

To make the change, open the Apps page in Settings, select Default apps, then click “Set defaults for applications”. Click on the browser you want to use. You’ll now see a list of file types that that program can handle, which will probably all be set to Edge; you’ll have to click on each one in turn and change it to the correct browser and click OK.

This tiresome process is obviously intended to discourage you from switching from Edge, but the good news is that you only have to do it once. At least, that’s the case unless you somehow end up opening Edge again, and inadvertently agree to the prompt that comes up asking to make it your default browser. Say yes and all those settings will be undone with a single click. How convenient.

6 Customise your Quick Settings panel

The widget pane that flies in from the left-hand side of the screen is completely new in Windows 11, so it might take a while to work out how to best take advantage of it.

Windows 11’s new Quick Settings panel provides one convenient place for accessing network settings, audio volume and other controls. The default selection of buttons might not quite match your needs, however: for example, you might not have much use for the Focus assist mode or the Accessibility menu.

Click the pencil icon at the bottom-right of the panel and you can unpin any buttons you’re not using – and if you click the “+” icon at the bottom you can add extras, including a handy shortcut to Battery saver mode, a quick switcher for selecting different keyboard layouts, and the Project menu, which lets you mirror or extend your desktop onto a second screen.

You can also click the cogwheel at the bottom of the panel to open the main system Settings app – it’s a handy two-click shortcut, though you can get the same effect even more quickly with the Windows-I keyboard shortcut.

7 Customise your widgets

The widget pane that flies in from the left-hand side of the screen is completely new in Windows 11, so it might take a while to work out how to best take advantage of it. One thing that will help is tailoring it to show the information you’re most interested in. Each widget has a three-dot menu at its corner that lets you adjust its size, tweak any relevant settings, or remove it if it’s not of interest.

You’ll also notice an “Add widgets” button in the widget pane above the news feed. Microsoft currently offers only a limited range of home-grown widgets, but the selection could well grow in the future. Once you’ve enabled the widgets you want, you can drag them around by their title bars to arrange them how you like.

The one thing you can’t hide is the news feed, but this can be tailored too: click on the three-dot menu in the bottom corner of each story and you’ll see options to request more or fewer similar stories, hide individual news sources, view and manage the topics that Windows thinks you’re interested in, or bookmark a story for later perusal.

8 Get to grips with snap layouts

In Windows 10 you could easily snap a window to fill half of the display, by either dragging it there or holding down the Win-Alt keys and pressing the left or right cursor key. Windows 11 takes this further: you can now drag a window to any corner of the screen to have it resized to occupy a quarter of the desktop.

After you’ve done this, you can click on the thumbnails that appear to snap other windows into adjacent zones, or click away (or hit Esc) to leave other windows where they were.

You’ll see more options if you hover over a window’s Maximise icon (the square one next to its close icon), allowing you to divide the screen into even or uneven thirds; just click on an outline to snap the window into your chosen zone within a particular layout. If you then hover over a snapped application’s icon in the taskbar, you can see the whole group that it’s part of, and maximise and minimise all windows at once.

If you don’t like the way all this works, simply open the Settings app, go to System | Multi-tasking and click the arrow next to Snap windows to expand the options; here you can toggle individual elements of snap layouts, such as the taskbar thumbnails, or turn snapping off altogether.

9 Mastering virtual desktops in Windows 11

If you find yourself getting mixed up amid all your different desktops, you can give them different backgrounds, so you can see at a glance which workspace you’re looking at.

If you’ve ever had two tasks on the go at once, you’ll understand the appeal of multiple desktops, especially if you don’t have a multi-monitor setup. Rather than cluttering up a single desktop with a whole load of different apps and windows, Windows lets you switch between up to eight separate workspaces, to keep relevant items together and out of each other’s way.

Multiple desktop support was introduced in Windows 10, but Windows 11 makes it much easier to use. Hover over the new Task view icon on the taskbar and an overview of all your active desktops immediately pops up; with a click you can switch views, create new desktops and close any that you no longer need.

It’s simple to move windows between workspaces, too. When you click on the Task view icon (or press Win-Tab), the desktop overview comes up once more, with the upper part of the screen showing thumbnails for all the windows on the current desktop. You can right-click on a thumbnail and select “Move to...” to send a window or application to a specific desktop – or you can just drag it.

The right-click menu also lets you specify that a selected window should be shown on all desktops (handy for a page of notes or a messaging app). By default, Windows only shows taskbar icons for windows and apps that are open on the current desktop, but you can have all icons appear on every desktop by going to the Settings app, navigating to System > Multi-tasking and selecting your preferred behaviour from the dropdown menu in the Desktops pane.

If you find yourself getting mixed up amid all your different desktops, you can give them different backgrounds, so you can see at a glance which workspace you’re looking at. To do this, either open the Settings app on the relevant desktop and browse to Personalisation > Background, or right-click on a desktop thumbnail and select Choose background. Sadly, there’s currently no way to make workspaces open with unique backgrounds; new desktops always appear with the same background as the one to their left in the thumbnail list.

10 Try out new gestures – and create your own

If you’re running Windows 11 on a touchscreen device, you can now swipe in from the left-hand edge of the screen to bring up the widget view, or from the right to see the Notifications pane. You can also swipe down on the screen with three fingers to minimise all apps, and do the same upwards to bring them all back – something that previously only worked on a touchpad.

It’s now also possible to swipe left or right on the touchpad with three fingers to cycle between windows, similar to using Alt-Tab, while swiping up with four fingers brings up the desktop overview screen.

If you don’t find those behaviours useful, you can change them: Windows 11’s gesture settings go well beyond the preset options in Windows 10. To find them, open the Settings app, then go to Bluetooth & devices > Touchpad > Advanced gestures. You’ll see a drop-down menu for each three- and four-finger tap and swipe action, allowing you to choose from a long list of predefined actions, or select “Custom shortcut” to trigger a keyboard shortcut of your choice.

11 Manage your battery

In finest Spinal Tap style, here’s where we turn it to 11 with our bonus tip for laptop users. Let’s say you’ve got heavy work to do and want to sacrifice some battery life in favour of maximum performance. Or you might want to dial down the power to eke out a few more minutes of life.

Windows 10 made this easy with a slider that popped up when you clicked the battery icon, but in Windows 11 that control has gone. Instead, to select power efficiency or performance mode, you must burrow into the Settings app, under System > Power & battery.

On the same page you’ll find a new graph tracking your battery level over the past 24 hours, and if you click the “View detailed info” link above it, an expanded view will open with the option to review battery usage for the whole previous week.

Below it sits a neat breakdown of all apps that have been consuming battery power. For some apps, you can click on the three-dot menu and select “Manage background activity”: this option is mostly for Store apps and Windows components, but if it’s there then you can block any particularly power-hungry apps from running in the background. ■