Windows 11 has an Easter egg where you can spin the Settings cog in certain parts of the interface.
The nifty spinning animation was highlighted by The Verge, who reported on the ability to do this in the Notepad app after a denizen of Reddit posted about it. Further additions to that Reddit thread include the observation that the ability is also present in the new Task Manager, at least in the dev and beta builds for Windows 11 testers.
Again, this is the same deal – bottom-left, there’s a cog icon that you can spin, and it’s a surprisingly addictive little extra.
Presumably we can expect more cogs to be fully spinnable elsewhere in the interface of Windows 11 in the future, too.
Analysis: Some Windows extras are pretty obvious, others not so much…
Hidden extras in Windows are nothing new, of course, and indeed they can go quite some time undiscovered. Very recently an enterprising user managed to find an Easter egg in the very first version of Windows, somehow, which comprised of a secret list of developers who worked on Windows 1.0 (one of them being a certain Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve).
So that particular nugget lay undiscovered for nearly 37 years before it was stumbled across. Makes you wonder if there are some incredibly well-hidden secrets in Windows 10 or 11 (or indeed other recent versions of Microsoft’s desktop operating system). We’re betting there are, somewhere…
- Check out our guide to Windows 11 problems and how to fix them
