Thursday 31 May 2018

Can I completely disable Cortana on Windows 10?


Windows 10 has Cortana, which I don't like. I disabled it as soon as I could. However, looking in Task Manager, the process for Cortana is still running, and can't be effectively terminated: ending the task simply results in the process respawning a few seconds later. Using the command


taskkill /IM Cortana.exe /F

has the same result: the process respawns.


Is there any way to disable Cortana so that the process doesn't keep running in the background, and doesn't respawn if terminated?



Answer



The easiest way to disable certain privacy aspects of Cortana is to use a third-party tool such as O&O Software's free ShutUp10.


Cortana in ShutUp10


Part of Cortana, though, is Windows Search, so there would still be an occasional Cortana process such as file indexing. However, there should no longer be any use of the internet by Cortana.


enter image description here


You can remove Cortana completely, if you wish, but that also removes Windows Search (though that might not be an issue if you use a third-party tool such as DocFetcher or Mythicsoft's Agent Ransack, which provide increased search functionality). That said, after a Windows 10 update, expect that Cortana would be reinstalled. Apparently, the only way now to permanently avoid Cortana is to use another OS, such as Linux.


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