One of the functions that Microsoft loudly announced during the presentation of Windows 11 was the widget panel that comes out from the left side of the screen. It displays news, weather, currency quotes and other information.
In theory, this panel can be quite useful. But in practice, as often happens, Microsoft forgot to include support for third-party widgets. Therefore, you will have to be content with only the information that the corporation has prepared for you.
BeWidgets also allows you to add more widgets to the system, which will be slightly more useful than standard ones. With the help of the program, the clock, date, contents of your gallery, weather, finances and links to applications will be displayed on the desktop. It will be useful for those who want to make the system interface more informative.
If the capabilities of BeWidgets are not enough for you, install Rainmeter. This application is a real monster of desktop customization.
Rainmeter will allow you to add a wide variety of panels and widgets to your interface: weather, CPU and memory usage, network speed, RSS news, Google search ... In addition, third—party developers over the years of the application's existence have spawned mountains of additional widgets - both simple and minimalistic, and fancy and fancy. Open the official Rainmeter galleries on Reddit and DeviantArt, and see for yourself.The program contains an incredible amount of settings and may seem complicated for an inexperienced Windows customizer, but it can be used with pleasure and with default settings.
One of the most annoying features of Windows 11 has become an inconvenient context menu that appears when right-clicking on files and folders. Previously, in order to perform certain manipulations with files, it was possible to use the items "Copy", "Cut" and "Paste". Now, obscure icons have appeared instead of them.
The Windows 11 Classic Context Menu program can fix the situation. It will return the classic context menu to the place you are used to with one click. It may not be as beautiful as the new one, but it is much more convenient.
Windows 11 Classic Context Menu →
In Windows 11, the appearance of the search bar on the taskbar has been updated, but, in fact, it is still the same Windows Search from the "Top Ten", which does not bring anything new.
Fluent Search is an example of what a search engine should look like in a modern system. It allows you to find files and programs, open tabs and make requests in the browser. And also searches for the necessary pages in the settings.
The program resembles Spotlight from macOS, but it is designed in the style of the Windows 11 interface and fits perfectly with it.
Not everyone liked the new Windows 11 interface. Enthusiasts wanted to return the "Start" and taskbar as in the "Top Ten", but to leave such advantages of the new system as the dark mode and an improved settings menu. Many programs like Start10 or StartIsBack offer this opportunity, but there is a nuance: they all ask for money.
ExplorerPatcher provides similar services, moreover, completely free of charge. After digging a little into the program parameters, you can return to Windows 11 the start and context menu, taskbar, and taskbar menu as in the previous version of the system. This is a very useful tool if you are having a hard time getting used to innovations.
The only thing is: there is no Russian language in ExplorerPatcher. However, it is not difficult to understand the parameters at all.
Standard Windows 11 backgrounds are getting old very quickly, and Wally allows you to fix this problem. The program is able to change the wallpaper by downloading images from the popular service Unsplash. With it on your desktop there will always be beautiful views of nature, pictures of cities, as well as original photos of people, animals and objects.
You can save your favorite pictures to the "Images" folder so that after a while you can put them back on the desktop.
