- To personalize and tightly control your Windows 11 experience, I highly recommend installing Wintoys on your PC.
- Wintoys is a fantastic app that allows you to tweak crucial system settings and get the best performance out of your PC.
- You can optimize, debloat, repair, and tweak Windows 11 settings and process, all through a user-friendly GUI interface.
Unlike in the past, you no longer need system tuners and optimizers for Windows 11. Microsoft has optimized Windows 11 well. That said, if you are a power user, you’d want to tightly control your PC experience and get the best performance out of the machine. Thankfully, Wintoys lets you fine-tune the Windows 11 experience by bringing all of the vital system settings and tools into one place. It’s a fantastic utility, and I love using Wintoys, especially on new machines. With that in mind, let’s go ahead and explore its standout features.
Wintoys: A Modern Control Panel for Windows 11
While Microsoft is migrating Control Panel settings and tools to the Settings app on Windows 11, power users feel that the Settings app lacks system management tools and advanced features. Enter Wintoys (Download), a modern Control Panel replacement for Windows 11. It’s a beautifully designed app with WinUI 3 elements and acts as a central hub to tweak key settings and manage your PC effortlessly.
The home page displays system information in a user-friendly manner with various system cards. You can check out details about your motherboard, processor, graphics card, memory, Windows version, and more here. Recently, we learned that Microsoft is redesigning the “About” page on Windows 11 with friendly cards, which I think is likely inspired by Wintoys’ UI.
Apart from that, like the old Control Panel, you can run the Windows System Assessment Tool and get a Windows Experience Index (WEI) score using Wintoys. It lets you evaluate how your Windows 11 PC is performing overall. Furthermore, you can monitor apps, processes, services, CPU, GPU, and memory usage. The best part is that Wintoys brings a real-time internet speed meter as well. In a way, it also acts like a solid alternative to the Task Manager on Windows 11.
Uninstall Apps with Wintoys
Wintoys has a dedicated “Apps” section where you can filter apps and uninstall them swiftly. It even lets you remove system apps and packages. Generally, in the Settings app, the “Uninstall” option is greyed out for system apps, but that’s not the case with Wintoys. You can simply click the 3-dot icon and remove the app right away.
The important thing is that it lets you quickly open the program folder location, even for MSIX packages, which is helpful. Not to mention, you can filter apps based on storage used, name, and date of installation. Besides that, you can separately list out Win32 and Microsoft Store apps and remove programs that you no longer use.
Manage Windows Services Safely
Besides active apps, many services run on Windows in the background. Some of these services may consume hardware resources and slow down your PC. While you can disable services on Windows 11, Microsoft has made the process needlessly complex for general users. You wouldn’t know which service is critical to the OS and which ones are unnecessary.
Thankfully, Wintoys solves this by defining unnecessary services (green label) as “Safe to disable” for your Windows 11 PC. You can learn about each service, select them all in batches, and disable them right away. You can even filter out “Useless” services and turn them off from running in the background. Plus, you can list third-party services, Microsoft-related services, active services, and more.
Overall, Wintoys makes the entire process of managing services on Windows 11 seamless and easy.
Enhance Windows 11 Performance with Wintoys
Wintoys features a “Performance” tab which houses key system settings to improve Windows 11 performance. With a single click, you can change the power mode on Windows 11 to unlock ultimate performance. Then, you can enable “Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling,” which makes the GPU scheduling between applications more efficient. Of course, it requires newer GPU cards with support for the WDDMv2.7 driver (or later).
After that, you can choose to disable VBS to improve gaming performance on Windows 11. However, I suggest keeping it turned on since it blocks untrusted drivers and keeps your PC secure. Next, you can disable startup apps, background apps, activity history, and more. If you have a low-end PC, you can reduce visual effects for better performance, and turn off search indexing as well.
As for gamers, you can adjust settings for Game mode, background recording, and Windows mode optimizations. You can also disable the Superfetch service, which often causes high disk usage on Windows 11. Basically, under the Wintoys Performance tab, you will find all the vital system settings that can improve Windows 11’s performance significantly.
Improve Windows 11 Health with Wintoys
Under the “Health” section in Wintoys, you will find crucial system settings to keep your computer responsive and healthy over time. You can enable Fast Startup and Hibernation for faster boot time, even after a full shutdown. Then you can turn on Drive optimization for periodic retrimming of the disk and enable Storage Sense to clean up temporary files, and more.
The best part about Wintoys is that you can run command-line tools such as DISM, SFC, and CHKDSK and repair your PC by using the GUI interface. No need to launch the Terminal and run the commands manually. Following that, you can run a memory diagnostic to check for memory-related problems. You can also delete junk files and cache to free up storage instantly.
Moreover, Wintoys lets you disable Windows updates and background app updates. One unique feature is that you can detect which scheduled task is waking up your PC from sleep and terminate that task right away. Finally, you can restart the Graphics driver if your PC is freezing and rebuild the icons cache if the Taskbar icons are missing or blurry.
Essential Wintoys Tweaks
Wintoys offers several system tweaks to improve the overall Windows 11 experience. You can restore the classic context menu on Windows 11 with a single click and remove Bing search results from the Start menu search. It also lets you improve privacy by disabling services such as Telemetry, location, camera on the lock screen, etc.
Next, you can disable ads on Windows 11 such as lock screen tips, suggested notifications, Windows welcome experience, Tailored experiences, and more. Finally, you can show the clock with seconds, enable God mode on Windows 11, turn on mouse acceleration, etc. There are many such tweaks in Wintoys to enhance the PC experience, and you don’t need to play with Registry settings or Group Policy. Everything is just a click away.
What I particularly like about Wintoys is that it houses system settings and tools that are safe to use and have been tested extensively. It’s a simple-to-use fusion of Windows Settings, Control Panel, Task Manager, and various Windows tools. If you need just one tool to effortlessly personalize and manage your Windows 11 PC, Wintoys would be my top pick along with PowerToys, among all the system tuners out there.