How to Disable Cortana in Windows 10

At first I thought "Great! Kill her now!" Unfortunately, however, it doesn't work. After following the indicated steps, Task Manager still shows Cortana and its subtasks; kill them, and they restart as always.
 

stdragon

Admirable


I'm assuming you rebooted after making the changes in registry? Anyways, it's only a matter of time before M$ does something silly like fuse her to the kernel. Her and the OS will soon be one in the same, inseparable...always spying!
 

Math Geek

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cortana is still disabled despite being in task manager. the local search feature is still active and that service is under the cortana umbrella, so it's listed as such. beat my head against the wall for a long time before i figure this out.

if you kill all the search completely, then it'll go away. but since the local search can be useful i leave that turned on.
 

sadsteve

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Mar 6, 2013
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You can stop Cortana by clearing the 'executable' permission (for all users) on the SearchUI.exe file. On my machine this file is in this directory: "C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy". You'll have to take ownership of the directory before you'll be allowed to change the permissions on the SearchUI.exe file. You can then stop the Cortana processes via the task manager and they won't come back. You'll may need to redo this after windows updates occur.

Search the web for the registry change that will give you a 'Take Ownership' selection on the Windows explorer right click context menu.
 

daglesj

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Jul 14, 2007
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Only way I've found is to find the active folder it's in from task manager, rename the folder to .old (whatever) and end the Cortana task and save the folder change in the second you get before Cortana service fires up again.
 

Math Geek

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good old command line let's you uninstall all that junk. or just use autoruns to disable it all at start-up. won't run if you don't ask it to after that :)
 

g-unit1111

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