One thing that has really annoyed me about the new UI with Windows 11 was the way they grouped together the Sound, Volume and Battery icons in the system tray and removed the action center. Another annoyance was the fact that they dumbed down the right click context menu and added a “show more” option to see the traditional context menu with all of the options. Since I work in enterprise, it is annoying having the “Map Network Drive” option buried in the context menu overflow.
I get it. They want to make it more tablet friendly be more like Apple. But now there are extra clicks that slow down your productivity and make you have to learn the new workflow. I have 2 Windows 11 systems at work and 3 at home so I eventually got tired of this annoyance and looked for solutions.
Ungrouping the Network, Sound and Power system tray icons
For myself, I find myself adjusting the sound volume far more often than I join a wifi
network or change the battery options. I don’t believe in those third party UI hacking programs that are out there. So thinking logically I used my Google-fu to find a solution. My solution was to edit the pop up that you get when clicking the combined icon. If you click the icon when the pop up opens you’ll notice a pencil icon in the bottom right corner of it. Click this pencil to edit which buttons are displayed in the pop up.
Click the push pins to remove all the optional buttons, leaving only the brightness and volume control sliders. This essentially makes the pop up more like the traditional Volume control pop up from previous Windows versions. To choose your audio output or see sound settings you click the arrow to the right of the volume control slider. You can still access your network settings by right clicking the volume/sound/battery icon in the system tray.
But this then makes it harder to connect to wifi on tablets or laptops. But there’s a solution to that as well.
Create a one click shortcut to connect to Wifi
Right click your desktop and choose New > Shortcut . When prompted to enter the location of the item enter the following:
ms-availablenetworks:
Click next and give the shortcut a name. I named mine “Connect to wifi”. Click Finish and find your new shortcut on the desktop. Right click the shortcut and choose “Pin to Taskbar”.
This will create a shortcut that you can click that will pop up a window showing available wifi networks, much in the way it used to work in Windows 11 when you clicked the Wifi icon in the system tray.
Show the full right click context menu by default
I’m still holding out hope that in a future update Microsoft will change this setting by default. Since I work in enterprise there are tasks that are repetitive for me 
and my productivity was affected when one click becomes 2 or 3. No more is this evident than where Microsoft decided to dumb down the right click context menu to have less options. You then have to click “Show more options” or press shift +F10 to get the full list of options. There are things that are missing from the dumbed down menu that are needed. My example is, the option to map or disconnect a network share. So I went googling again and found the fix for that one as well.
You just have to add a registry key and reboot to make all of the options show up in the right click menu by default. To add the key, the simplest way is to run an elevated command prompt/powershell/windows terminal. To do that Right click your start button and look for the corresponding option. Enter the following command and press enter:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /ve /d "" /f
Reboot your computer to make the changes take effect. If you change your mind you can enter this command an
d restart the PC to revert the changes:
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32"Savvy IT techs will know how to save these commands in a batch file for use on multiple computers, or how to make them
manually using regedit.
