I like Cortana, but I don’t like it taking up so much of my Windows 10 Taskbar on my Desktop. Is there some way to minimize or even eliminate the “Ask Cortana” box entirely?
Uh oh, don’t tell Cortana that you don’t like her, she’ll get cranky and your computer will never run properly again! Just kidding. Mostly. 🙂
More seriously, you can indeed either minimize or completely remove Cortana from your Taskbar and the world of Microsoft Windows 10, but there’s a cost to removing it entirely as that’s your fast interface to the search system in Win10 and you really don’t want to eliminate that entirely as search is darn helpful!
Well, let me show you the options and you can draw your own conclusions.
To start, here’s a typical Windows 10 Taskbar with the Cortana search box:
“Ask me anything”, but if you ask “How do I get rid of you” it doesn’t offer up a good answer. A missed opportunity!
A click on the search box and the Cortana menu pops up:
Still no indication of how to modify the Cortana footprint on your system, though.
Instead, right-click on the Taskbar itself…
Ah, who knew? An entire submenu about Cortana settings!
I suggest you start by choosing “Show Cortana icon”, which reduces the search box to just the circle:
Just another icon. But if you click on it, you can still get to Cortana and the Windows 10 search system, useful!
Remove Cortana entirely and, well, it’s gone:
The problem with this is that it’s really gone. Even the Win10 menu lacks a way to get to Cortana:
Not sure why Cortana or search doesn’t show up on the lower left set of options in this scenario, but…
So go back and right-click on the Taskbar to change Cortana to just have its icon show up, and then you can click and learn about things like the weather in Hawaii. Because it’s better than your weather 🙂
Now, if only I were writing from Hawaii and that was my local weather…
I want this piece of crap removed from my web site , why is there such a problem with dumping Cortana