Windows 11 Start Menu Settings You Should Change Immediately

What you guys got another video on Windows 11 start menu settings, you should change immediately. If you've got the brand new start menu looking like this, it is a bit of a mess and it's also huge and you've got no control over what you're going to be doing with the start menu. Today, I'm going to show you how you can take back control of the start menu and make it more personal to you and your needs. But let's take a look at how we're going to be doing this in Now don't worry, I will be making one for people on home editions of Windows very soon. Let's go ahead and type GPO in the search to open up the group policy editor. And this is it right here. So let me just expand this so we can see it more clearly. And what we're going to do here is going to make changes to the start menu settings inside here. So inside computer or user configuration, whatever you want to set it up for, whether it's computer or user configuration, we're going to be setting it up in computer. We're going to go to computer configuration, administrative templates, then start menu and taskbar. Inside here, you're going to get a lot of the settings that you can configure to your requirements. Now, don't just copy my settings because everyone has different preferences for their needs, but I'll show you the settings and you can configure them the way you like. So the first one we're going to do is this one here, disable context menu in the start menu. If that's something you want to edit, then you can do. All you need to do is enable this feature and apply an OK. And that feature is now set. So next, we're going to go to the next setting here, and it's this one right here. So we're going to double click on this. And this is the remove the recently added list from the start menu. So if you want to remove that, you can enable this policy and it will no longer display the recently added list. So let's go ahead and do that right here. And next, we can move on to the next section. Let's click on the next one and we're going to double click on it. And this will open up this box right here. And this is remove the recommended section from the start menu. If you want to remove that from the start menu, just put the enable button in and then click apply and OK. And that will also add that option in. But let's now move on to the next one. And the next one is this one right here. We can double click on it and open it up and this will give us access to this one right here. Now, this is quite a big, long word here. It says remove personal website recommendations from the recommended section in the start menu. So if you want to do that, you can enable this feature and it will remove that feature from the start menu. So I'm going to apply an OK and apply that to our setting. So let's move on to the next one in the list. And it's this one right here. Double click on it and this will remove all programs list from the start menu so you can enable this feature. There is information on the right hand pane there. So have a good read of what they actually do. You can see collapse and remove and disable the setting and remove all and disable the setting. So depending on what options you want to select, just choose which one suits you. But all the information should be on the right hand panel right here. And you can read this and you'll know exactly which ones you want to enable. I'm going to enable this one just for the video. And what we're going to do is click OK here. Next, we can move on to the next section. And there's another one here that we can adjust. And it's this one here. So just double click on this option and this will open up the window. And now we can see remove pin programs from the taskbar. So if you want to remove all the pin programs from the taskbar, you can enable this here and all those pin programs will be removed from the taskbar and it will give you a nice clean look if you don't want any programs added to the taskbar. It will just be the start button. So let's go ahead and double click on this next one. And this is show or hide most used list from the start menu. Again, you can hide this right here if you want to, or you can set it to one of the other options. So just read all the options available and choose which one suits your needs. And then once you've done, click apply and click OK. And that option should now be set. Next, we're going to take a look at the hide the task view button. Now, yes, this is on the actual taskbar, but I'm going to cover this a little bit in here as well. So if you want to hide this as well, you can hide it by just enabling this feature if you didn't use the other setting, which hides all of the icons. So let's go ahead and do that one right here. And if you want to adjust any of the other ones, like remove notifications and action center, you can do that by double clicking on it and adjusting the setting here. So let's go ahead and quickly do that here while we're in this location. And you can see here there's some information on here, but you can enable this feature and it will basically disable that from the taskbar there. So let's go ahead and do that. And that's now done. Now, there's a few other ones inside here that are not configured. And if you want to configure these, you can do. I'm going to leave it at that point. But again, this is the location where you'd come to configure all of your settings for the start menu and the taskbar. So if you want to configure any more of these and just basically go inside here and double click on them and it should configure these. Let's move on to the next section right here. There's also another section in the user configuration, and you can go in here and configure this inside here as well. And you'll see there is a search feature right here, but we're going to do it on the computer level because I don't want to do it on the user level. I want to do it across the board for the whole computer. So let's go back onto the computer configuration section, Windows components, then come down and let's go to search. Now, this is an area where you can configure all of the search feature inside Windows, which is obviously on the taskbar. You can completely hide it. You can completely turn it off and you can turn off all of the Cortana cloud search, all of the web search results and all of those things from this location. So all you would need to do is you can see right here, configure search on the taskbar. If you wanted to hide it completely, you can do if you just want the search icon showing, you can do it like so. And that will basically just show the search icon on the taskbar. That's how I prefer it. Some people like to hide it completely. And if that's you, then you can obviously leave it like that. So let me go back into the search again. And what we're going to do here quickly is adjust a few more of these just to show you. So you've got allow cloud search here, allow Cortana, and there's a bunch of other ones here, like fully disabled search UI. This will hide the whole search box on Windows 10 and Windows 11. You can completely hide it and it will disappear. So if you wanted to do that, you would enable that feature and the whole search box will be gone. It will be hidden from the taskbar. But I like to have just the search icon. But if you are one of those people that want that option, then by all means, configure that setting right there. Now you can see here, do not allow web search. If you want to disable the web search, you can do that right here as well. And you can just basically enable that feature and it will basically turn off the web search, which is annoying. Now, Microsoft have added a rocker button inside the settings panel on 26H2, I think it is, which will be coming soon. It might even be 25H2, I can't remember, but it will allow you to turn it off with a rocker button if you're on a home edition or on Windows 11 Pro and above. So I'm just going to enable that to turn that off. And there is quite a few other ones inside here that you might want to go through slowly. I'm not going to cover all of these because I've done some of these before. And if you want to see a full in-depth tutorial on how to configure your system using Group Policy, then have a look at my channel because I've done it for Windows Home and Windows Pro editions and above of Windows 11. So let's restart the PC. And once we get back to the desktop, we'll be able to see the results of what I've set up here. Now, this might not be for everyone. So bear in mind, you might want to have different settings for yours, but you can see I've got a start button and I've got a search icon. That's how I like to have mine. But if you like to have more stuff on your taskbar, then obviously don't enable some of them features. You'll see the way it's set up here is just pinned icons. And that means I can go in here and just pin all my favorite programs to the start menu. And it just cleans up all that clutter. If you want more control and you want more categories, then obviously choose some of the options that were available in that section, which I've shown you in this video. Because if you don't want this look that I've got right here, then you'll need to change some of the settings to suit your needs. Some people like to just have all the programs list down on the start menu. Some people like to have the category boxes there. It's entirely up to you how you configure your menu, because everyone has different needs. You can even hide the search box on the very top right here as well if you want to and you have no use for it. So again, all you need to do here is right click and click pin to start. And this will pin all of the objects that you want or programs that you want on your start menu. And you can just go through and have all your favorite games and whatever it is you want to have on your start menu, just like I've got right here. And I just think it tidies the whole start menu up because it is an absolute eyesore. It's massive and it's just full of boxes and and icons. Now, they are working on a new start menu, according to Microsoft. I don't know when that's going to be fully released to the general public, but this should help you set that up for the time being. Now, the start menu policy settings are all listed on Microsoft's website. I'll leave a link for that in the video description and it will tell you whether it works with CSP or GPO and you'll see the check marks right there and it goes right away through and it shows you exactly what is adjustable and it will even show you the path to where those locations are. So if you couldn't quite grasp what I was showing you inside the video, I will leave a link for this in the video description and this will actually show you the paths to all of those locations and it will give you a much more better breakdown inside this document where you'll be able to see what settings do what. And you can see here disabled context menus and there's loads of other information right here on how to take full control of your start menu and taskbar inside Windows 11. So hopefully this video has been some sort of help to you. If it has, then give the video a thumbs up. It really does help with the YouTube algorithm. My name has been Brian from brightechcomputers.co.uk. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit that subscribe button and it does also help the channel grow to get us to 1 million subscribers. Big shout out to my YouTube members. I do appreciate the support and I shall catch you in the very next video. Thanks again for watching. Bye for now.