Over the time, we have seen the evolution of start screen in Windows, the leading operating system by Microsoft. But the start screen in Windows 8 or 8.1 is one of the best innovation by the company developers. It appears with its tile-view as soon as you log-on to your system. It also allows resizing the tiles, changing the background image etc. Apart from that, you can pin your favorite websites, apps etc. to the start screen. Isn’t it great?
Though it provides a great way to access a lot of information like weather reports, social updates, emails and many more at a glance, it is still far behind from the perfection. The start screen may get cluttered over the time; specially when your computer is used by multiple users. So, you might want to delete all unwanted things from the start screen and simply revert back to the default one. Microsoft did not keep any ‘Reset’ option for the Windows 8 start screen. But you can still get it done.
Note: Additionally, you can make the Windows 8.1 start screen static so that no one can make it ugly or fill with useless tiles. We’ll discuss about this in our next article.
How to reset the start screen in Windows 8.1
It is not so hard that it sounds! A couple of simple DOS commands can get this done for you.
Start by opening the elevated command prompt. You can do this either from the Start Screen or the Desktop. To open elevated command prompt from the start screen, place the mouse pointer at the right-hand corner and click the ‘Search’ option when it appears.
Simply, type ‘CMD’ and hit the ‘CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER’ combination from keyboard.
This will open the elevated command prompt. To do the same from desktop, press ‘Win key + X’ and click ‘Command prompt’.
Both of the above will open the command prompt for you. Now run the following commands one-by-one.
1. del %LocalAppData%MicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms
2. del %LocalAppData%MicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak
Finally, execute the following.
3. Tskill explorer
You could avoid the third command and simply reboot your computer. however, the above commands will revert your start screen back to its default state – exactly same as you seen just after installing Windows 8.
Final thoughts:
This command prompt tricks to reset the start screen is quite handy as you won’t have to manually unpin the useless tiles. The only thing that you need is running the command with accuracy. It is not so hard and does not need you to call for any tech support.
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