5 Ways to Customize the Windows 10 Start Menu

 

Organize, Edit, Delete, or Add New Items to the Apps List

You can easily get to the Start menu’s folder structure on the hard drive to edit, rearrange, or even add new items. This also gives you the benefit of being able to search for these new shortcuts that you create. And yes, you can do this by dragging items around individually on (or to) the Start menu, but rearranging via File Explorer is much quicker if you have a bunch of things you want to change.

It’s worth noting that the Start menu folder won’t show Universal apps you have installed, so you’ll need to deal with those just using the menu itself. For the most part, you can uninstall any app—except for some built-in apps—by right-clicking them in the Start menu and choosing “Uninstall.”

Resize the Start Menu

You can quickly resize the Start menu by dragging the top or right edge of the menu with your mouse.

Resizing vertically works just as you’d expect. When you resize horizontally, you can increase the Start menu by one full column of icon groups at a time—up to four columns. Unfortunately, you can only narrow the menu down to one column.

You can also set Windows to show a few extra tiles in each column. Just head to Settings > Personalization > Start and turn on the “Show more tiles on Start” option.

With the “Show more tiles on Start” option on, you can see that the tile column has expanded by the width of one medium-sized tile.

Note that if you do turn on the “Show more tiles” option, you can still resize the Start menu horizontally, but only up to three columns of icon groups instead of four.

Pin and Unpin Tiles

You can easily pin and unpin tiles by right-clicking on each one and selecting “Unpin from Start.”

If there’s an app that isn’t pinned, but you want a tile for it, just browse through the list of apps on the left side of the Start menu. When you find what you’re looking for, right-click the app and choose “Pin to Start.”

Resize Tiles

You can change the size of a tile by right-clicking it, pointing to “Resize,” and then picking the size you want.

Four small tiles fit into a medium tile. Four medium tiles fit into a large tile. And a wide tile is the size of two side-by-side medium tiles.

Unfortunately, the tiling can be a little weird, so if you have an odd number of small tiles, you’ll end up with blank space.

Turn Off Live Tile Updates

If all those flashing tiles end up annoying you, just right-click on them, point to “More,” and then choose “Turn live tile off.”

Compared to the example above, you can see that the News tile is back to being a regular tile button.

For the most part, we find live tiles a little busy for our tastes, but they can be useful for tiles like Weather or Calendar where it’s nice to have some at-a-glance info.