In this tutorial, we’ll tell you how to manually hide or remove desired pages or sections from Windows 10 Settings app. You may want to remove any particular page or whole section from Settings app to restrict other users from accessing them. Or you may want to remove some pages as you don’t use them and want to make the Settings app clutter-free.
Windows 10 Creators Update and later versions allow users to hide or remove any page or section from Settings app using following 2 methods:
- METHOD 1: Using Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)
- METHOD 2: Using Registry Editor (regedit)
If you also want to hide any desired page or section from Windows 10 Settings app, following steps will help you:
METHOD 1: Using Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)
1. Press “WIN+R” key combination to launch RUN dialog box then type gpedit.msc and press Enter. It’ll open Group Policy Editor.
2. Now go to:
Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Control Panel
3. In right-side pane, look for “Settings Page Visibility” option. This option can be used to hide pages from Settings app.
Following is its official description:
Specifies the list of pages to show or hide from the System Settings app. This policy allows an administrator to block a given set of pages from the System Settings app. Blocked pages will not be visible in the app, and if all pages in a category are blocked the category will be hidden as well. Direct navigation to a blocked page via URI, context menu in Explorer or other means will result in the front page of Settings being shown instead.
4. You can hide pages from Settings app in 2 ways:
- Specify which pages to hide
- Specify which pages to show
If you specify which pages to hide, Windows will hide only those specific pages and all other remaining pages remain visible in Settings app. If you specify which pages to show, Windows will show only those specific pages and all other remaining pages will become hidden in Settings app.
5. Double-click on the “Settings Page Visibility” option, select Enabled radio button and in “Settings Page Visibility” textbox, enter any of following text strings:
hide:page_URI;page_URI;page_URI
showonly:page_URI;page_URI;page_URI
Here page_URI is the “Uniform Resource Identifier” of a page which works like an unique address to identify the page in Settings app. To specify more than one page URI, you must separate them using a semicolon (;).
To know the URI of all pages present in Settings app, check out following article:
List of Commands to Launch Specific Settings Page Directly in Windows 10
You don’t need to give the whole page URI with hide: or showonly: tags. Remove the ms-settings: part from the page URI and only specify the remaining string.
For example, if you want to hide Background, Themes and Start pages from Personalization section in Settings app, use following value:
hide:personalization-background;themes;personalization-start
You can also do the opposite, you can use showonly tag to mention which pages to show and other pages will automatically get removed.
showonly:display;about;colors;lockscreen;taskbar;windowsupdate
Windows will only show specified pages in Settings app and all other pages will become hidden.
PS: In future, if you want to reset it and show all pages in Settings app, double-click on “Settings Page Visibility” option, set it to Not Configured.
METHOD 2: Using Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
If you are using Windows 10 Home edition, you’ll not be able to run gpedit.msc command because this edition doesn’t come with Group Policy Editor. But you can enable Group Policy Editor in this edition using this tutorial.
If you can’t use or don’t want to use Group Policy Editor, you can take help of Registry Editor for the same task. Just follow these simple steps:
1. Press WIN+R keys together to launch RUN dialog box. Now type regedit and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.
2. Now go to following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer
3. In right-side pane create a new string SettingsPageVisibility and set its value to same as mentioned in STEP 5 of METHOD 1.
For example:
hide:personalization-background;themes;personalization-start
or
showonly:display;about;colors;lockscreen;taskbar;windowsupdate
PS: In future, if you want to reset it and show all pages in Settings app, delete the string SettingsPageVisibility from Registry Editor.