Windows 11’s newest Easter egg is a real time-waster – in a good way

Interactive cog icon makes Notepad a lot more fun

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Windows 11has an Easter egg where you can spin the Settings cog in certain parts of the interface.

The nifty spinning animation was highlighted byThe Verge, who reported on the ability to do this in the Notepad app after a denizen ofRedditposted 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 forWindows 11testers.

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 anEaster 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 inWindows 10or 11 (or indeed other recent versions ofMicrosoft’s desktopoperating system). We’re betting there are, somewhere…

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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