I open the Start menu roughly forty times a day. Click, three letters, Enter, done. That loop took about a second on Windows 10. On Windows 11 it stretched toward two and a half, mostly because the bottom half is now a list of things I never asked for. I cleared it out. The job took fifteen minutes of clicking, no reinstall, no third-party tool. Here is the order I did it in, the one switch that hit hardest, and the one Settings cannot fix on its own.
Why the menu felt slower without me noticing
The thing I missed for a long time is that the Start menu did not change speed. I did. Somewhere in the 22H2 timeframe Microsoft bolted a Recommended section under the pinned apps grid, and the section has only grown. Recently opened files, frequently used apps, app promotions, and a Tips tile that points me at Microsoft Edge every time I wanted Firefox. None of those break the launcher. They just bury it.
I write this from the position of someone who spent two years slowly getting more annoyed and finally got around to fixing it. The fix is mostly toggles. None of it is irreversible. And the menu goes back to feeling like mine within the same session.
The whole job on a single page
If you only read one section, read this one. Every toggle below is reachable from Settings or from a built-in Windows tool. None of it needs a reboot between steps. None of it needs a third-party download.
- Settings, Personalization, Start, all five switches off. The four obvious ones plus “Show account-related notifications and prompts in Start.” The fifth one does more work than the other four combined.
- Local Group Policy Editor, Pro only, or Registry on Home. Enable “Remove recommended programs from the Start menu.” This is the only step that requires anything outside Settings.
- Settings, Personalization, Lock screen. Turn off “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen.”
- Right-click the taskbar. Open Taskbar settings. Kill the Widgets toggle.
- Settings, Privacy and security, Search. Turn off search highlights. This is the one that pushes trending topics above your real search results.
About fifteen minutes total. The Start menu goes back to being a grid of my pinned apps at the top and an All apps list at the bottom, with nothing in between trying to monetise the launcher. Below I explain why each step matters, in case you want to skip one on purpose.
The toggle that actually changed the menu
Among the five switches in the Start settings panel, one of them does most of the cleanup. It is the one called out separately in the Microsoft documentation as covering notifications and prompts, and it pushes the OneDrive sign-in nag, the Microsoft 365 upsell card, and the account avatar chip into the top corner of the menu. None of those help me open an app. They exist to upsell me something, and they live in the launcher.
If you sign in with a Microsoft account, there is also a small panel suggesting you tie your local profile to OneDrive storage. There is no single switch that hides that panel. To get rid of it, you either move to a local sign-in or edit Group Policy. The Pro path is the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc), under User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar, with the policy called out for removing recommended programs enabled. The Home path is the same setting, sitting inside the registry under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\PolicyManager\Current\Device. Back up the registry first. Most write-ups skip this step, which is why their screenshots still have a Microsoft account tile they pretend is not there.
The other surfaces that advertise at you
The Start menu is not the only place Windows tries to sell. There are three more surfaces doing the same job, and if you are cleaning one of them up you might as well finish the job.
- Lock screen. Settings has a lock-screen page where the fun-facts switch can be flipped off. After that the lock screen is just a clock and your wallpaper.
- Taskbar widgets. A weather tile and a news ticker live in the widgets panel. Right-click the taskbar, open Taskbar settings, and turn the widgets toggle off. The whole weather and news stack disappears in one click.
- Search. Open Settings, then Privacy and security, then Search. The switch labelled for search highlights is the one that puts trending topics above your real results. Flip it off and search goes back to being a search bar.
None of those three require anything fancy. After they are off, the only places left that advertise at me are the Edge browser start page and the OneDrive icon in the system tray, which I treat as separate problems because the fix for each is bigger than a Settings toggle.
The order I would do it again
If I were starting over, this is the sequence. It takes about fifteen minutes, no reboot required between steps, and it leaves a clearly cleaner menu when it is done.
- Open Settings and walk through the Start page, flipping all five switches off.
- If you are on Pro, open gpedit.msc and turn on the recommended-programs policy. If you are on Home, back up the registry and apply the Home version of the same setting.
- Open the Lock screen page in Settings and turn off the suggestions switch.
- Right-click the taskbar, open Taskbar settings, and turn off Widgets.
- Open Privacy and security in Settings, pick Search, and turn off search highlights.
The first step does most of the work. The second closes the gap that Settings leaves. The last three are tidying up the surfaces the Start menu cleanup naturally exposes.
Trade-offs
The recommendations are not pure waste. You give up a few things when you turn them off, and the honest version of this article is to name them.
- Quick access to recently opened files. I never used the Start menu for this. I use a free keyboard launcher called Flow Launcher. If you depend on the Start menu’s recent files section, you might want to leave one switch on.
- The weather tile. I check the weather on my phone. If the tile mattered, leave it on.
- Being told about new Windows features. This is the trade-off I am happiest to make. I do not need my operating system to walk me through its own updates.
- OneDrive sign-in prompts. You can still turn OneDrive on manually. You will just stop being nagged.
What you keep is the part of the Start menu that actually mattered in the first place: pinned apps at the top, an All apps list at the bottom, and nothing in the middle trying to monetise a launcher. For me that trade is obvious. For someone who relied on the weather tile or the recent files section, the calculation is different. The point is to do it on purpose, not to discover the consequences after the fact.
What I would tell past me
Three short notes to the version of me that lived with the bloated Start menu for two years.
- The Start menu is a launcher with a billboard stapled to the bottom. Treat the toggle hunt as removing the billboard, not as redesigning the launcher. The launcher is fine.
- The single switch that matters most is one row below the obvious four. It is the one labelled for notifications and prompts in Start, and skipping it leaves the menu feeling half-won.
- Settings alone is not enough on a Microsoft account. Plan for gpedit.msc or the registry edit. If you do not, the menu will still feel busy after a Settings-only pass and you will assume the fix did not work.
None of this is permanent. If you find you actually miss a switch after a week, turn it back on. The goal is a Start menu that is yours, not a Start menu that is bare metal.