MAKE WINDOWS LESS ANNOYING
Disable the features you don’t need
Some Windows features are so pointless, you don’t even notice them until they start annoying you. One we particularly dislike is Aero Shake, which is supposed to let you focus on a specific window (give the window a shake with your mouse and all other windows will minimise). However, this is far too easy to do by accident.
To turn it off, go to the Behavior section, select Disable Aero Shake, then tick the Disable Aero Shake box on the right – as with most settings in Winaero Tweaker, there’s no OK button, so the change takes effect immediately. In the same section, Disable Aero Snap lets you stop Windows automatically (and often inconveniently) resizing your windows when you drag them to the edge of the screen.
We also recommend visiting the ‘Ads and Unwanted Apps’ section and ticking ‘Disable ads in Windows 10’ (see screenshot above right). This removes all annoying adverts and pop-ups in Windows, including those that appear in Microsoft apps, the Start menu and your lock screen.
Speed up sluggish menus
Hover your cursor over a menu item – such as those that appear when you right-click a file – and there’s a small but frustrating delay before the sub-menu is displayed. You can reduce this lag with a registry hack, but Winaero Tweaker provides a much easier way to do it.
In the Behavior section of the program, select Menu Show Delay and drag the slider under ‘Change a delay before a submenu pops up’ to the left, to reduce the number of milliseconds a sub-menu takes to open. Tempting as it is, don’t set this to ‘0’ as menus will then open too fast, producing a nasty flickering effect as you move your cursor over the various menus. Instead, we recommend cutting the opening time from the default of 400 milliseconds (0.4 seconds) to between 100 and 200 milliseconds.