Reset Windows 8 Start Screen

If you are using Windows 8 from a long time then you must know that as you start installing different app or programs on your machine its shortcut or you can say they pinned themselves on your Start Screen, It good as you can easily access them but when you have large number of programs then your Start Screen could be messy and you might desire to rest it.

If you ant to rest your Start Screen and make it like when you had used it for very first time them here is a simple way.

Here you can take a look at my messy Start Screen :-

And here’s resetting it :-

How to do it :-

Actually all these settings are saved in 2 files present on your Windows, if you delete or rename it then Windows wont be able to find it and create new files with default settings.

So to reset :-

• Open command prompt with Administrator privileges, or Just press Windows Key + X and then press A and on UAC screen click on Yes
• Now we need to provide some commands so that Windows can rename those files (We are not going to delete as we might need them to restore in future)

ren "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms" "appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bk1"

ren "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak" "appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak2"

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

start explorer.exe

• Provide above commands one by one and you will find your default Start Screen.

How To Restore :-

• Again launch your Command prompt with Administrator privileges and provide following commands one by one

del /F /S /Q /A "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms"

del /F /S /Q /A "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak"

ren "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bk1" "appsFolder.itemdata-ms"

ren "%userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsappsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak2" "appsFolder.itemdata-ms.bak"

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe

start explorer.exe

• That’s it

If you don’t wanna mess with your command prompt and looking for a simple way then please download Batch files and launch them as your needs :-

Download

Related Tip : Stop Applications From Auto Pinning To Start Screen In Windows 8