I received a phone call from a client who said that her laptop was running exceedingly slowly \u2014 even more so than usual. So I remoted in to take a quick look. I found a new icon on the taskbar that looked like a fat, folded Sunday newspaper. By way of definition, the taskbar contains the Start button, icons for pinned and running applications, and a system tray area that contains notification icons and a clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I hovered my mouse over the icon, the tooltip said it was the Windows 10 News and Interests<\/em><\/strong> news feed. Once clicked, it opens a pane that displays various widgets that contain current news, weather, stock prices, and more based on your location. The initial download of all this \u201cstuff\u201d caused my client\u2019s perception of slow response on her laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I searched Google and after reading several articles, I learned how to eliminate this icon from appearing. Therefore, I am writing this article to teach you how to do the same thing when it \u201cmiraculously\u201d appears on your computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But first, let\u2019s be clear about one thing. Not one of you went and asked the folks at Redmond to install this. You didn\u2019t explicitly agree to get the news, weather, and more on your desktop. And you certainly shouldn\u2019t need to try \u2014 on your own \u2014 to figure out just how the heck to get rid of this intrusion. I don\u2019t know what they were thinking. (Can you tell I\u2019m annoyed by this nonsense?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are the steps you can take to get rid of this and regain control of your taskbar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I\u2019ve read reports that the icon just shows up again after the computer is restarted. If you experience that, please let me know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While you\u2019re at it, if you see an icon that resembles a wristwatch, right-click that and select Hide. I don\u2019t believe anyone needs the Meet Now<\/em><\/strong> function, a Skype quick meeting setup feature. If you still use Skype, you are usually talking to one person. When you need to engage with more people for discussions, you are most likely using Zoom (or Microsoft Teams).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I received a phone call from a client who said that her laptop was running exceedingly slowly \u2014 even more so than usual. So I remoted in to take a quick look. I found a new icon on the taskbar that looked like a fat, folded Sunday newspaper. By way of definition, the taskbar contains …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,56,46,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-everyone","category-how-to","category-microsoft","category-windows-10"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}