

You can easily tweak which system icons appear in the Notification Area. The Notification Area (sometimes called the “System Tray”) holds system icons-like your Action Center and clock-and icons for various apps that run in the background. Hide System Icons in the Notification Area To save a little taskbar space and get rid of the button, right-click the taskbar and turn off the “Show Task View button” option. Simply press Windows+Tab to access the same interface. It also lets you work with virtual desktops and shows you your Timeline if you enabled that.īut you don’t need a button to do this. The “Task View” button provides access to a thumbnail view of all your open apps and windows. Right-click the taskbar and choose “Cortana > Show Cortana icon” from the pop-up menu.Ĭhoose the “Hidden” option to remove both the search box and icon or choose “Show Cortana icon” to have just the icon on the taskbar. You can remove the search box and leave just the icon, or you can remove both entirely. If you want to perform a voice search-normally accessed by clicking the microphone icon in the search box-you just have to press Windows+C on your keyboard instead. Even without them, if you press the Windows key and start typing, you’ll get the same search experience. The Cortana icon and search box take up a lot of room on the taskbar, and you don’t need either to do your searching. Configure or Remove Cortana and the Search Box You can, however, change the number of items shown on jump lists with a quick Registry hack. Windows 10, for some reason, does not have this feature easily accessible. In previous versions of Windows, you could increase or decrease that number easily through taskbar properties. A jump list for your browser might show favorite sites and provide actions for opening new tabs or windows.īy default, Windows 10 shows about 12 recent items in jump lists. Apps like Notepad or Microsoft Word show recently opened files. And of course, exactly what you see on a jump list depends on the app. All you have to do is click one of them to open that folder.

When you’ve pinned items to a jump list, those items appear separately from recent items.
