The World According to Mitch

I remember sitting in a MCT Airlift for Windows 7 when we were introduced to Aero Shake. I was a huge fan of Shake, which allowed someone with a very busy desktop to take the title bar of the window they were using, shake it, and all of the other open windows (desktop clutter) would minimize. It is one of those features that not a lot of people seem to have used, but I was always a big fan. I used it almost daily.

The other day I was working on my very busy Windows 11 desktop and I decided to clear the clutter. I took hold of the title bar of my main window, gave it a shake, and… nothing. Nothing at all happened. I gasped! Was Aero Shake a casualty of Windows 11?

No… it is not. It is, however, disabled by default. To enable it, follow these simple steps:

1) Click on Start. In the Start Menu type Settings and open it.

2) In the Settings taskbar select System; then in the main window click Multitasking.

3) Click the circle next to Title bar window shake and switch it to the On position.

It really is as simple as that. You can shake once to minimize everything, and then shake a second time to restore the previously minimized windows.

Note that Microsoft no longer seems to use the Aero branding for anything. I don’t mind what they call it, as long as they let me use it!

Conclusion

Certain features have been removed from Windows over the years for whatever reason; some features that do not get used very often might be turned off by default, but unless there is a good reason to remove the code for them completely, chances are that feature you long for is still there… somewhere!