4 Windows 11 settings to turn on immediately

4 Windows 11 settings to turn on immediately

Windows has accumulated many features over the years—some of which are buried or even turned off by default—that can really enhance how you use your PC if you just know where to look for them. Things like precision window snapping, a full-featured clipboard manager, a tool that can give you back gigabytes of storage, and a brilliant volume mixer that lets you specify where audio output happens on an app-by-app basis, are just some of the tools available in Windows that are difficult to find but genuinely makes your PC feel more powerful. Let's look at some of these buried tools and how to use them.

Volume Mixer lets you pick audio output on a per-app basis

Your background audio can play on external speakers

Chances are you might be playing multiple sources of audio at the same time. A classic example is using Spotify or YouTube Music (which is better for background music), while browsing the web. If you want to, you could have your music play on an external output device, like a Bluetooth speaker, wireless headphones, or even hard-wired speakers that run through one of the ports on your device, while the audio from the web (like a YouTube video) plays back on your laptop's built-in speakers. With Volume Mixer, Windows treats each output device as a separate output device, and then you can go app-by-app to specify where the audio should play.

To do this,right-click on the volume control in the taskbar >volume mixer > apps > click the down arrow > choose output device.You have to first connect other speakers to your system to see the output devices listed in this menu, or else you'll just see "default" which are for your built-in speakers. From here you can specify where audio should play on a per-app basis.

Clipboard history keeps track of everything

No need for a third party clipboard tool — this one opens quickly with keyboard shortcut

The clipboard manager in Windows 11 is actually really useful, and is accessible from any text input field if you press Win + V. Doing so will give you a preview of the last 25 items you copied, including images (where you'll see a little screenshot). The clipboard history has an individual item limit of 4MB, which applies to text, HTML, and screenshots. Anything that exceeds this size won't be saved.

If you want items on your clipboard to survive a restart, you can click the pin icon on the clipboard manager. On the contrary, any non-pinned clipboard items will be deleted if you restart. If you are trying to keep the clipboard history limited, you can click the three-dot menu to delete an item to make room for others.

Storage Sense keeps your PC running lean

Automatically delete files you don't need

Windows 11 has a great utility called Storage Sense, which is off by default for some reason, that can automatically take actions to free up disk space.

You probably have multiple gigs of files sitting in the Downloads folder on your PC — Storage Sense can empty your Downloads folder automatically based on how long it's been since you opened the files within.

You can pick 1, 14, 30 or 60 days to delete unopened files from your Downloads folder. I picked 14 days, which freed up nearly 1GB of space from my PC given that my Downloads folder has a bunch of installation files I used once and forgot about.

You probably also forget about emptying your recycling bin on a regular basis. Storage Sense, by default, will delete files that are older than 30 days. Again, for me, that amounts to another 1GB of space that slipped my mind, but that Storage Sense helped reclaim.

And lastly, there's the Storage Sense utility itself, which you can either run on-demand (I recently ran it and freed up 200MB of space in the span of two minutes), or it can run automatically when your free disk space gets low. What is it doing? It's deleting temporary files like Windows upgrade log files and temporary app files. To manually run Storage Sense, go to Settings>System>Storage>Storage Sense>Run Storage Sense Now.

To turn on Storage Sense, which automatically deletes downloads and empties the recycling bin, plus runs the cleaning utility when your storage space is low, go to Settings>System>Storage>Storage Sense>On.

Snap Assist arranges your windows to perfection

One of the most useful Windows 11 features

Finally, Windows lets you more easily control the layout of windows, which is a dream if you're running an external display, or if you just want to maximize the screen space on any display by placing apps side-by-side, in quarters, or any combination thereof. Relative to other operating systems, Windows' snapping window feature is far superior and gives you precision control over how you arrange apps on your screen to maximize productivity.

Using this tool is easy. Just hover your cursor on the Maximize buttons and Windows will suggest layouts. Click on the space you want your app to fill, and Windows will prompt you to fill the other spaces.

Windows has great tools built in, though they are often buried or off by default

Windows has a lot of great tools built in if you know where to find them. What other tools do you use in Windows that are either buried or off by default?