Let's face it: Windows 11 's default interface gets boring fast. If you're tired of staring at the same interface every day, these tools will enhance your desktop experience.
Many people prefer static wallpapers. But when you want a change, Wallpaper Engine brings your desktop to life with dynamic and interactive wallpapers that react to music, the time of day, or even your system performance. This premium app, available on Steam and other PC game stores, is arguably the best live wallpaper engine for Windows.
What makes Wallpaper Engine special is its huge workshop library. With over a million community-created wallpapers, you’ll find everything from delicate animated landscapes to full audio visualizers. Many people especially like the parallax effect wallpapers that add depth as you move your mouse, and the interactive wallpapers that react when you click on them.
The app is also surprisingly resource-efficient. During setup, you can choose the wallpaper quality to optimize system performance. You can also set animations to pause when running full-screen apps or games, so they don’t affect performance when you need them most. If you’re a creative person, you’ll appreciate the built-in editor that lets you design your own wallpapers using images, videos, or even web content. You can also sync your wallpapers across multiple monitors, with different settings for each.
If you’re looking for a free alternative, Lively Wallpaper offers similar functionality without the cost. While it doesn’t have Wallpaper Engine’s massive workshop library, it supports videos, GIFs, and web wallpapers—and shows virtually no resource usage in Task Manager.
Want a beautiful live wallpaper that covers your entire screen, but are frustrated by your taskbar blocking part of your view? TranslucentTB fixes that with a simple trick. This free, open-source tool makes your taskbar transparent, creating a cleaner, more modern look that lets your wallpaper shine.
TranslucentTB offers more than just a basic transparency effect. You can set effects for different taskbar states. For example, you can have a taskbar that is completely transparent when it's in the background, but slightly opaque when you have a window open. Or maybe you choose a solid color when a maximized window is active.
Setup takes seconds. Just download it from the Microsoft Store or GitHub, launch the app, and watch your taskbar become transparent. The app sits quietly in the system tray, using virtually no resources. You can even customize the color and opacity level for each dynamic state, giving you complete control over how your taskbar looks in any condition.
3. Windhawk
Windhawk offers a collection of community-created Windows mods. While it adds some cool new features, it also lets you fix some of the annoyances of Windows 11. For example, you can restore the vertical taskbar that Microsoft removed, placing it on either side of the screen with adjustable width settings. The Taskbar Height and Icon Size mod fixes those annoyingly small 24x24 icons by letting you shrink them to a proper 32x32 size.
Windhawk has a number of other mods that can make minimal tweaks to default Windows functionality, such as adding a better dark mode to Notepad, restoring the classic context menu in File Explorer, or always showing the Start button on the left.
4. Rainmeter
All of the above customization options focus on one aspect of your Windows computer. Rainmeter, on the other hand, wants to do it all and more. This free, open-source platform lets you display custom skins on your desktop. From system monitors to weather displays and music visualizers to application launchers, Rainmeter lets you completely customize your Windows desktop.
Themes are at the heart of Rainmeter; there are thousands of them available online, and finding the perfect setup for your desktop can be a joy. Each theme is fully customizable via simple text files, allowing you to easily change colors, sizes, fonts, and behaviors (even if you’re a casual user).
5. Start11
Don't like what Microsoft did to the Start menu in Windows 11? For a fee, Start11 lets you tweak the Start menu to your liking. You can restore the classic Start menu styles from Windows 7 or 10, or create something completely new.
Whether you want a centered menu with rounded corners or prefer a full-screen launcher like Windows 8 (but with real functionality), Start11 makes it easy to design a menu that suits you. You can even have different Start menu styles on different monitors, if you're running a multi-monitor setup.
Unlike some Start menu replacements, Start11 plays nicely with Windows 11 features. Windows Search still works, and all your pinned apps carry over. You can even pin any folder, limited to the base folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) on the default menu.
6. Seelen UI
Seelen UI is a custom desktop environment for Windows, inspired by the user interfaces of Linux and macOS. This free, open-source tool offers a wide range of widgets, themes, icon packs, sounds, wallpapers, and plugins to customize your desktop.
Seelen UI is also highly customizable. You can rearrange toolbar elements, move the dock to any side of the screen, and even enable Tiling Window Manager, which automatically snaps windows side by side depending on the application on your screen. However, many people still prefer Windows Snap Layouts for its ease of use.
Error code 0xc0000098 in Windows causes a blue screen error on startup. The ACPI.sys driver is often to blame, especially on unsupported versions of Windows 11 like 23H2 or 22H2 or Windows 10.
In some cases, sometimes you start your computer in Safe Mode and the computer freezes. So how to fix the error in this case, please refer to the article below of WebTech360.
Snipping Tool is a powerful photo and video capture tool on Windows. However, this tool sometimes has some errors, such as constantly displaying on the screen.
Every network has a router to access the Internet, but not everyone knows how to make the router work better. In this article, we will introduce some router tips to help speed up the wireless connection in the network.
If the results seem slower than expected, don't be too quick to blame your ISP - mistakes when performing the test can skew your numbers.
In the article below, we will introduce and guide you to learn about the concept of QoS - Quality of Service on router devices.
Windows has a built-in Credential Manager, but it's not what you think it is—and certainly not a replacement for a password manager.
Microsoft charges for its official codecs and doesn't include them in Windows 10. However, you can get them for free without pulling out your credit card and spending $0.99.
While having trouble accessing files and folders can be frustrating, don't panic—with a few simple tweaks, you can regain access to your system.
After creating a USB boot to install Windows, users should check the USB boot's performance to see if it was created successfully or not.
Although Windows Storage Sense efficiently deletes temporary files, some types of data are permanent and continue to accumulate.
You can turn off Windows 11 background apps to optimize performance, save battery and reduce RAM consumption.
When a computer, mobile device, or printer tries to connect to a Microsoft Windows computer over a network, for example, the error message network path was not found — Error 0x80070035 may appear.
We can block Internet access for any application or software on the computer, while other programs can still access the network. The following article will guide readers on how to disable Internet access for software and applications on Windows.
Instead of paying $30 for a year of security updates, keep Windows 10 safe until 2030 with this simple solution.
Error code 0xc0000098 in Windows causes a blue screen error on startup. The ACPI.sys driver is often to blame, especially on unsupported versions of Windows 11 like 23H2 or 22H2 or Windows 10.
In some cases, sometimes you start your computer in Safe Mode and the computer freezes. So how to fix the error in this case, please refer to the article below of WebTech360.
Snipping Tool is a powerful photo and video capture tool on Windows. However, this tool sometimes has some errors, such as constantly displaying on the screen.
Every network has a router to access the Internet, but not everyone knows how to make the router work better. In this article, we will introduce some router tips to help speed up the wireless connection in the network.
If the results seem slower than expected, don't be too quick to blame your ISP - mistakes when performing the test can skew your numbers.
In the article below, we will introduce and guide you to learn about the concept of QoS - Quality of Service on router devices.
Windows has a built-in Credential Manager, but it's not what you think it is—and certainly not a replacement for a password manager.
Microsoft charges for its official codecs and doesn't include them in Windows 10. However, you can get them for free without pulling out your credit card and spending $0.99.
While having trouble accessing files and folders can be frustrating, don't panic—with a few simple tweaks, you can regain access to your system.
After creating a USB boot to install Windows, users should check the USB boot's performance to see if it was created successfully or not.
Although Windows Storage Sense efficiently deletes temporary files, some types of data are permanent and continue to accumulate.
You can turn off Windows 11 background apps to optimize performance, save battery and reduce RAM consumption.
When a computer, mobile device, or printer tries to connect to a Microsoft Windows computer over a network, for example, the error message network path was not found — Error 0x80070035 may appear.
We can block Internet access for any application or software on the computer, while other programs can still access the network. The following article will guide readers on how to disable Internet access for software and applications on Windows.
Instead of paying $30 for a year of security updates, keep Windows 10 safe until 2030 with this simple solution.
