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Win10 Anniversary Update bug turns into “Turn off Cortana” feature

Posted on August 17, 2016 at 10:31 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

Remember when we were talking a couple of weeks ago about the bug in the Win10 Anniversary Update that kills Cortana?

Ends up that our idle speculation was correct – the registry setting that triggered the bug does, in fact, disable Cortana.

NetDef posted the original hack (although he fingered BingSearchEnabled as the key, uh, key).

Ed Bott just posted the definitive answer on ZDNet. In Win10 Anniversary Update, if you set HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search\AllowCortana to 0, Cortana disappears. Symptoms are the same as the ones I describe in my InfoWorld bug post from two weeks ago.

If it were anyone but Ed, I’d approach the tip with caution — there are lots of hacks that end up breaking things. But Ed has the eyes and ears of the Dev team behind him. Count on this being a good hack. For now, anyway.

Windows Patches/Security Disable Cortana

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