Saturday, November 11, 2017

Organising the Windows 10 Start Menu - Cannot move (or delete) Groove Music icon

On my new Windows 10 (v1803) PC there are a bunch of strange pre-installed applications, like Groove Music. These clutter up the Start Menu > All Apps list with no hierarchy, just all on the same level. I'd like to organise these icons into separate, logical folders on the Start Menu.


Groove Music icon creating clutter


Searching online I've found several articles describing how you can (attempt to) uninstall these Windows Store applications, but nothing about how to move or remove the icons. I'm not (yet!) looking to uninstall the app, just to organise the Start Menu into something more logical and less cluttered.


In previous versions of Windows, a user could create a folder called (say) Windows Stuff in the appropriate path. Then you could drag the icons into this folder. After acknowledging the UAC prompt the icon has moved. Great! With these new Windows 10 "Universal" applications, however, I can't seem to do anything with them.


Things I have tried:



  • Navigated to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs. No icons or .lnk files for these Windows metro apps are visible.

  • Navigated to C:\Users\[ME]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs. Likewise, none of these metro apps appear.

  • Used WIN+R and then shell:AppsFolder to actually view installed applications. Here I can see the ZuneMusic application (see below), but I can neither delete, uninstall or move it.


ZuneMusic application



  • Tried grabbing the icon directly in the Start Menu and dragging it...but a No Entry symbol appears and the icon cannot be moved or removed.

  • If you right-click the icon there is no option to Move or Delete the icon (nor even to Uninstall the application, although this is not what I'm looking to do).


How do you get control over the Start Menu in Windows 10 (in a similar way to Windows 7 or Windows XP)?


Update


After many different searches, I stumbled on this old article which suggests organising these strange "Universal" Windows Store apps may not be possible.


The article is ~3 years old and from an earlier version of Windows 10 so hopefully (a) Microsoft have fixed this in v1803 and/or (b) any reader knows the technical steps required to organise these applications that the original author did not.

No comments:

Post a Comment

hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...