Windows 11 is fairly customizable even without reaching for external solutions. It’s just that Microsoft scattered many of its customization options all over the place instead of keeping them together in the Personalization tab. You can find some in other sections of Windows Settings, some are hidden away in places you have to go out of your way to access, and others can only be enabled via PowerShell.

Below, I’ll show you how to access various customization options that aren’t found in the Personalization tab. The common theme across all of them is that you don’t need any third-party tools—you can access and tweak every one of them on a vanilla Windows 11 installation.

Windows 11 still supports built-in screensavers

Setting one up takes just a few clicks

While built-in Windows screensavers have largely fallen out of favor over the last decade or so thanks to apps such as Wallpaper Engine and Lively Wallpaper, it’s worth noting that Windows 11 still supports them. The screensaver settings are still there and can be accessed by typing screensaver into Windows Search. Clicking the top result opens the same Screensaver Settings dialog that has barely changed in decades.

Windows 11 includes a handful of preinstalled screensavers, many of which date back decades. You can also download a number of classic Windows screensavers, all of which still run perfectly on Windows 11, if you’re yearning for that sweet nostalgia hit from the era when Windows truly felt like yours and The Matrix was the latest blockbuster.

The Windows Accessibility page hides a slew of handy customization settings

Enable live captions, disable animations, and more

The Accessibility tab in Windows Settings contains a wealth of customization options, most of which you won’t find anywhere else. Here, you can change text size independently of Windows UI scaling, adjust various mouse pointer and text cursor settings, enable different color filters (including a grayscale filter), apply contrast themes, and customize various visual effects, including disabling transparency effects and animations.

You can even enable Live Captions for audio and video files played on your Windows PC. I can confirm they worked with multiple audio and video files I tested on my PC, both local and streamed, and that they’re surprisingly accurate and relatively fast at detecting speech.

You’ll also find additional mouse and keyboard settings, more hearing-related options beyond Live Captions, voice access, voice typing, and much more. I recommend exploring every nook and cranny of the Accessibility tab because it contains a ton of useful customization settings you won’t find in the Personalization tab.

The Advanced menu in Windows Settings hides a few handy customization options as well

Customize File Explorer and add a very useful option to the context menu

If you open Windows Settings and go to System > Advanced, you’ll find two very useful customization options. The first adds an End Task option to the context menu when you right-click an open app on the taskbar. It’s especially handy because you won’t have to open Task Manager to force-close unresponsive apps anymore.

The Advanced menu also includes a few File Explorer customization settings, such as the ability to show hidden and system files, display file extensions, show the full path in the title bar, and a few others. If you want even more ways to customize File Explorer, we’ve got a guide that covers all the bases.

You don’t have to disable all animations

While you can disable animations in the Accessibility menu, that’s less than ideal because the toggle there disables every animation effect. If you only want to disable certain effects while leaving the rest intact, you can do so in the Advanced system settings dialog, which isn’t accessible through Windows Settings.

You can access it by typing Advanced system settings into Windows Search. Note that you shouldn’t open the first result because that one opens the Advanced page in Windows Settings. Instead, select View advanced system settings. This opens the dialog you need. The Advanced tab should already be selected, so all you have to do is locate the Performance section and click Settings. From there, you can disable individual visual and animation effects. Just don’t forget to click Apply once you’re done.

All it takes to enable it is typing a single command into PowerShell

If you, like me, prefer the look and usability of the Windows 10 context menu (right-click menu), you can bring it back in Windows 11 with a single PowerShell command. Just open PowerShell as an administrator and type or paste the following:

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve 

All that’s left is to reboot your PC. Once you reboot, you’ll be greeted by the good old—and much more usable, if you ask me—Windows 10 context menu. If you later decide to switch back to the Windows 11 context menu, you can restore it by typing or pasting the following command into PowerShell and then rebooting your PC:

reg.exe delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}" /f

You can also disable web results in Windows Search

Again, you can do this with a single command

While Microsoft has already released an update to Windows 11 Insiders that introduces a toggle for disabling both web and Microsoft Store results in Windows Search (you can find it under Privacy & Security > Search), as of this writing, the option isn’t available to regular users. Luckily, until Microsoft pushes the offline search update to everyone, you can disable web results with a single command. All you’ve got to do is open PowerShell as an administrator and type or paste the following command:

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f 

You shouldn’t have to reboot your PC for the change to take effect, but if you’re still seeing online results in Search, doing so should resolve the issue. Unfortunately, this tweak no longer removes Microsoft Store search results, but at least those usually appear at the end of the results, or aren’t shown at all if your search doesn’t match apps or games available from the Microsoft Store.

If you want to fully explore the customization options available in Windows 11, you’ll have to look beyond the Personalization tab in Windows Settings because Microsoft has scattered most of them all over the place. The good news is that many are available right inside Windows Settings or just a single search away, and even the ones that require a bit more work can usually be enabled with a single PowerShell command or a simple Registry edit.