How to Restore the Old Windows 10 Context Menu in Windows 11 [Guide]

One of the major new features of Windows 11 is its new redesigned context menus. Although, it looks great with its mica material theme and fluent design language, the old context menu that offers way more options is now more or less hidden under the “Show more options” menu which introduces one extra step in case you prefer the older context menu.

However, thanks to this new registry hack it is now possible to restore and use the old Windows 10 context menu permanently in Windows 11 as detailed in the steps below:

• Navigate to Start, type Registry Editor and open the first search result that appears on the screen.
• Inside Registry editor, navigate to the following path:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID

• Now right-click on CLSID and select New > Key.

• Name the key: {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} then press Enter.
• Right-click the newly created key, select New > Key again.

• Name the key InprocServer32, then press Enter.
• Double-click on the (default) REG_SZ file that can be found under InprocServer32 and set its value to blank before clicking Ok.

• Now go ahead and restart you PC.

Once rebooted, whether you right-click on the desktop or a file/folder in File Explorer, you will see the classic context menu appear instead of the modern menu.

Alternatively, if you want to revert to using the modern context menu then you can do so by deleting the {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} key that we created earlier and restarting your PC.