Go Settings → Personalization → Start and uncheck “Occasionally show suggestions in Start” Go Settings → Personalization → Lock Screen and uncheck “Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lockscreen” Here’s detailed guide how to do it: Getting rid of system-wide ad and “suggestions” I also removed all the icons from my desktop (as I have Explorer icon in tasksbar) and placed the Recycle Bin in taskbar. There is also the other way, I will talk about it later. The search icon works the same as the search input field, also, you can access search with Win + S shortcut. Right click on taskbar → Search → Show search icon. Right click on taskbar → uncheck “Show People on the taskbar” My suggestion is disable it system-wide through Group policy: Right click on taskbar → News and Interests → Turn off Right click on taskbar → uncheck “Show Cortana button” Here you can easily switch off/on the folders you really need. This could be easily done by going to Settings → Personalization → Start → Choose which folders appear on Start As a developer, I don’t need these folders, but I would like to see my main user’s folder there (I’m not frequently accessing it from start menu, but it would be handy anyway). Now it looks much cleaner and streamlined.Īlso, there are Documents and Pictures folders on the left side, pinned by default. As the last gone, I was able to resize the menu to look more like the start menu from older version of Windows. I’m not a fan of this, so I just moved all the apps I really need to taskbar and removed all the tiles by right-clicking each one and choosing “Unpin from start”.

With all these big tiles moving and taking place. The initial look of start menu is a bit overwhelming. Getting rid of excess Streamline start menu Of course, all the points are subjective, the best setup is one that works for you.Īll the tweaks are related to Windows 10 as I don’t have an access to Windows 11 at the moment. in VMs), but also can help some Windows users to make some things more convenient. I think it can help not only Mac users who need to use Windows environment (for ex. In this article I would like to talk about some tweaks I made to make my experience smoother.

Hi! As a developer who was forced to move from Mac to Windows (temporary) I found some things a bit confusing.

Autohotkey on mac