In Microsoft Windows 10 I really liked having a tiny weather forecast on my start page. Now I’m using Win10.1 and have a weather tile on my start menu, but there’s no forecast! How do I get it working?
I don’t often come across someone who was a fan of Windows 10, so props for that! You’re right that the full screen tile puzzle of the Start Screen in Win10 has become the pastiche of tiles that comprise the Windows 10.1 Start Menu. One of the concepts that has survived a couple of Windows upgrades is the idea of active tiles, tiles that actually display data of some sort, rather than just the name of the app. There’s lots of ways you can customize your Start Menu if you’re curious.
Photos is one that shows you a variety of pictures without any configuration and on most Win10.1 systems, the weather app’s tile also shows a mini-forecast for the current location on the weather app’s tile itself. But if you’re like me, you pay close attention to which programs have access to your location, microphone, camera, etc. That’s just smart. But… that can end up preventing the weather app from working!
Let’s have a look. To start, the Start Menu:
Look closely above and you’ll see that while Photos is doing its thing, along with Money and News, Weather’s a dullard, showing a generic sun icon rather than the current weather.
First possibility is that the tile’s “active tile” status is turned off. Check that by right clicking on the tile and following the menu:
If yours shows “Turn live tile on” selecting it might be all you need to do for weather to start working!
No? Then it’s going to require a bit more work. Click on the tile to launch the MSN Weather program. On mine, it’s immediately obvious that there’s a problem:
Without “Detect my location” selected, it doesn’t have permission to query the OS about my current location and therefore can’t show the weather. But when I click on the radio button adjacent to “Detect my location“, something bad happens:
If you don’t see an error like this, clicking the radio button might be sufficient for everything to work. For me, however, I need to go into Windows Settings to fix permission. A click on the “Settings” button gets me there.
As expected, Location Services are off, as you can see in the little switch icon near the bottom. A click and it turns green and moves into the “on” state, but that’s not all we need to do. I also need to scroll down and find “Weather” and ensure that’s enabled too:
Once those are done, the Settings window can be closed.
Back in the Weather app let’s have another try at enabling “Detect my location“. Within seconds it figures out where I am and displays the city and state information:
A click on “Start” and the current weather forecast is displayed. And it’s a lovely day:
Much more importantly, back on the Start Menu, look what’s happened to the Weather tile:
Boom! We have weather! SO that’s the sequence. There are a couple of things I had to change for mine to work, your configuration might be a bit easier to work with — which would be nice — but either way, now you know.
I have been looking for the solution to my Weather tile problem for the better part of a year! I’ve looked through countless inscrutable blogs, Reddit posts, and useless Microsoft forums where lots of people complain about this, and few people have any answers.
Thank you for this.
Thank you so much. I also had to “pin” my default location to start again. The weather icon I had already pinned stopped working. Once I pinned my default location, my live tile worked again. Thank you so much for walking me through a solution.