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The Windows Feature Store

DANGER

This article covers the modification of core Windows components that can lead to instability or crashes. You may also encounter difficult-to-diagnose issues or make irreversible changes to your system. Proceed at your own risk.

What is it?

The Windows Feature Store (known internally as Velocity) is a component of Windows that toggles various functionality and experiments, known as features. A feature can be anything; from having a preview of fonts in File Explorer, to being able to download themes from the Microsoft Store, to having the Task View button on the taskbar.

Features are used by Microsoft for a few main purposes. It can help reduce the size of Windows Updates by including unfinished functionality in earlier updates, patching it incrementally and then enabling it once its ready. In the event that a feature is buggy or has a security flaw, it can be automatically disabled very easily. The Insider Program utilizes features for controlled rollout of experimental features. They're also used internally to quickly toggle unfinished functionality.

These last two points are what you're most likely interested in. Insider and Production builds of Windows usually have a lot of disabled features that contain new upcoming functionality, that either you weren't picked for in a controlled rollout, or has not been officially announced yet. By manipulating the Windows Feature Store, you can gain access to this.

How to interact with the Windows Feature Store

Features in the Store each have a unique ID, such as 17325319 or 6478855. Each ID can be in one of three states:

  • Default (0) - this is the normal behavior for this feature.
  • Disabled (1) - this will disable a feature entirely.
  • Enabled (2) - this will forcefully enable a feature.

Multiple community tools exist to allow the toggling the state of features. The most popular and well-known currently is ViVeTool. To set the state for a feature, use vivetool.exe /enable /id:<id> <state>. To remove the custom state, use vivetool.exe /reset id:<id>.

Other tools include mach2 which is an older application similar to ViVeTool, and ViVeTool GUI which adds a user interface to ViVeTool.

Where to find feature IDs

The developer of mach2 keeps an up-to-date set of feature IDs for each Insider build, as well as the changes between builds (useful for identifying new hidden features) here. Similarly, you can also use ViVeTool GUI to search through and toggle feature IDs from within the app.

Remember, not all feature IDs will have any noticeable change, or any change at all. Some will make permanent changes that you can't revert. Others might just break functionality or make your PC entirely unusable. Since these are used by Windows Update, changing certain features can put your device in an unsupported state that can cause issues. If you're choosing to experiment with the Feature Store, you should do so in a virtual machine first.

Below is a list of relevant features that may be of interest. Despite being listed here, they may still cause problems on your configuration, so enable them at your own risk. These may also require other feature IDs to be enabled before they work properly or at all - you'll have to experiment yourself.

Feature IDDescriptionMinimum VersionVariant(s)
36302090Modern "Open with" dialog22622.290
37634385Tabs in File Explorer21536
36354489Updated navigation pane21536
39145991Enable to use above features on Beta22621.160
37010913Move search button to left21536
37969115Show the desktop search bar25120
40887771Move new search box next to widgets25217
39072097New taskbar loading animation25179 / 22622.575
39072097Task Manager on taskbar context menu25211
38764045New system tray25211
34878152Animated Settings navigation panel icons25197
26008830Tablet-optimized taskbar25197
38652916Widgets settings menu25217
41670003 + 36390579New and fresh elements on "Going back" Dialog instead of Windows 8 Elements25247
41539325Suggested actions (ONLY US)25247
41314201Seconds on taskbar clock25247
39413510Studio Effects on quick actions on ARM64 devices25236
39427030 + 41249924Energy recommendations in Settings25231
40887771Search box in taskbar25252
38613007New Details Panel in File Explorer25276
41040327File Explorer "Gallery" Entry25272*
42295138 + 41040327XAMLFolderViewSupport25276
41162753WlanLocationPermission25281
39880030 + 40522394 + 41744267 + 41861575New Desktop Spotlight UI treatments25281
40268500New Desktop Spotlight UI treatments (ID's above are required for this)252810-3
29785186Taskbar never combine23466
23214784 + 41967741Turn off toast banner notification suggestions23466
43572692New taskbar search-on-hover experience23466
35262205Dynamic lighting settings23466
40950262Modern File Explorer navigation bar & command bar23466
40213648Full Emoji 15.0 support23466
44788892Windows Copilot23493
42058345 + 42058313Settings Home Page23493
46874360Copilot icon on the right side of the Taskbar25992 / 23585

*ViVe IDs for XAMLFolderViewSupport are required for the Gallery entry to work.

Not associated with Microsoft.