Windows 11 Taskbar

SaiMorphX 

Here's another option worth considering, especially if you want the taskbar to just look like it did in Windows 10.

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Go to:
     HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

3. Click on Advanced

4. Find REG_DWORD titled TaskbarSmallIcons and set it to "1" (default is "0")

5. Then install ExplorerPatcher from GitHub:

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/releases/latest/download/ep_setup.exe

With those 5 steps I was able to finally get the taskbar in Windows 11 to look small, just like Win10.  And also hide the annoying date next to the clock (which made the taskbar too wide) and without any tray icons looking truncated!  Plus it even enabled me to get my QuickLaunch toolbar back.  For extra credit, I installed OpenShell (https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/) for a few of my older users who don't do well without their Win7 Start menu.

It's amazing how Microsoft thinks it's okay to tick off its customers at every version by forcing them to learn a new UI. It's fine if they want the default UI to look more like MacOS, but geez at least provide options so people can configure it back to their liking. Most of the so-called "hacks" that return Windows to a state of comfortableness simply make changes to keys that are already in the registry.

Yigael