One of the things that changed the most in Windows 10 was the start menu . Microsoft took advantage of the evolution of the operating system to create a completely renewed start menu that mixed, on the one hand, the list of installed programs, and on the other hand the modern applications, or Live Tiles , of Windows 10. And this has liked and disliked equal parts to users. Especially because of the few customization options that Microsoft has offered in this new start menu, especially in the list of installed programs.
When we install a new program in Windows, it creates a shortcut within the list of programs on the start menu. So far there is no problem, since Windows has always worked like this. The problem is that Microsoft does not control what is added within this menu, and some programs create folders and add elements to the start menu that break with its aesthetics.
Having the Windows 10 search engine, which allows us to find and run any program or application instantly, the list of programs on the start menu has lost much usefulness. Therefore, there are users who prefer to remove it to make this start menu more practical and tidy.
Remove all apps from Start Menu in Windows 10
Hide the program list from settings
By default, the Windows 10 start menu is configured to show both the program list and the Live Tiles panel. If we remove all the Live Tiles, this part on the right will be hidden, but we can’t do anything similar with the list. Unless we configure it manually.
For this, we must open the Windows Configuration menu and go to the “Personalization> Start” section and here we will see a switch called ” Show applications list in the start menu “.
If we disable this switch, the list of programs will be hidden in this start menu. But it will not disappear, but we can easily open it again by clicking on the new icon that has appeared on the left side of the menu.
Remove startup programs from the registry
If we also do not want the programs to be grouped within the previous icon, and thus completely eliminate the list of programs from the Windows start menu, then we must resort directly to the registry.
We must open a Regedit window in Windows 10 (with Administrator permissions) and we will navigate to the following directory:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER>SOFTWARE>Microsoft>Windows>CurrentVersion>Policies>Explorer
In case the registry key “Explorer” does not exist, we must create it by right-clicking> New> Key.
Once we are inside the “Explorer” key, the next thing will be to create a new 32-bit DWORD value. Again, we right-click on a blank space and choose this option. We will give this new value the name of “NoStartMenuMorePrograms”, and we will assign the value “1”.
We restart the computer, so that the changes take effect, and voila. Now, when we open the Windows start menu we can see how it has changed, we only have the Live Tiles and we cannot access the list of programs in other ways.
We will have total freedom to configure and customize Windows Live Tiles. We can even delete them all to leave the start menu empty, although it is still going over, since the truth is that it is not much use.
We can change the value of “NoStartMenuMorePrograms” (the registry entry) by the values “2” and “3” to get a different effect when hiding the items in this menu.
How to remove unnecessary items
If disabling the list of programs seems too drastic a solution and we don’t want to get there, we have an intermediate and 100% manual option: eliminate the unwanted elements ourselves. These cannot be removed by right-clicking as it could be done before, but we must do it from its own directory.
To do this, what we must do is open a Windows File Explorer window and go to the following directory:
C>Users>usuario>AppData>Roaming>Microsoft>Windows>Start Menu>Programs
We will also find other elements (those shared with other users) in the following directory:
C>ProgramData>Microsoft>Windows>Start Menu>Programs
And from here we can remove all the elements that we do not want to appear on the start menu. Ideally, remove all shortcuts to programs from their respective folders and paste them at the root, removing all other files and these folders. And then delete any shortcut that is unnecessary or is no longer installed on the PC.
This process may take some time. But when we’re done, the list of programs on the start menu gets a totally different look. Only the icons of the programs that we have installed will appear, nothing more.
Of course, we must bear in mind that when we install a new program, it may create a new folder in this menu. And therefore we will have to carry out this task again.