While Windows 8 has come up with new avatar of Windows OS, users cannot afford to take their eyes off the metro style interface, interesting apps, and various engaging features. In less than a year of its launch, Windows 8 has faced many controversial phases during its journey. A massive number of people found the OS appropriate for businesses, while some are just loving it for personal use, and the rest did not find it as magical as expected and decided to not upgrade.
Well, with abundant use of Windows 8, you now have a fair bit idea about its outrageous and prominent feature ‘Charms Bar’. The post is wholly dedicated to pose everything about the feature, including its offering with detailed description and the drawback it carries. In the later section, you will also be briefed about how to disable or enable the Charms Bar feature.
Charms Bar provides you an extensive coverage of five important components. When you move the cursor to either top or bottom right corners of your Windows 8 screen, the Charms Bar appears with the following:
- Search
- Share
- Start
- Devices
- Settings
The buttons appear on the right side and at the same time, you see a panel on the left side showing notifications, such as Date, Time, Battery Status, and Internet Connection availability. Moreover, you can have an easy access to Charms Bar from anywhere on your system and the hot key Win+C makes it a whole lot easier to access the feature. Each component of Charms Bar is described below, let’s explore:
Search
Reincarnation of the start menu that you found in the older Windows versions is ‘Search’ function in Windows 8 that allows you to search for any application, file, or control panel settings. However, the quick results and smooth functioning make it different from previous ‘search’ function. You just need to open the app (it can also be accessed by pressing Win+Q) and type anything that you want to search.
Share
As you can interpret by name that the ‘Share’ feature can be used to share stuff with friends over social networking websites or mail. However, things in desktop mode cannot be shared, rather you can use ‘Share’ with only those metro apps that have the permissions. The ‘Share’ feature can be accessed by using the shortcut key Win+H.
Start
‘Start’ button welcomes you to the Start Screen. However, the Start screen can also directly be accessed by clicking the screen’s bottom-left corner or by pressing the Windows key on the keyboard.
Devices
With ‘Devices’, you can change the settings of the peripherals connected to your computer. Win+K is the shortcut key to get access to ‘Devices’.
Settings
In addition to accessing additional PC settings, ‘Settings’ allows you to have access to the following basic system preferences:
- WiFi
- Audio
- Brightness
- Notifications
- Power
- Language
Moreover, the metro control panel can be launched by clicking on ‘more settings’. The component can also be used with the shortcut key Win+I.
So, its quite pleasing that the Charms Bar brings a lot to you. Unfortunately, it sometimes makes you annoyed nevertheless when you close tasks or any window by moving the cursor to the top-right corner, and suddenly Charms Bar appears. It seems to be interrupting you in this situation, and hence disabling the feature is the only option you can try. Below is how it can be done.
Note that the given procedure makes a registry tweak and will not disable the feature, it will simply prevent the Charms Bar from appearing while you move cursor to the bottom-right or top-right corners instead. You will be able to see it by moving the cursor to the top-right corner and then moving it downwards or by moving the cursor to the bottom-right corner and then moving it upwards. Moreover, the hot key (Win+C) will function as usual.
Carry through the following instructions to disable the feature:
- Open the RUN dialog box by pressing Win+R.
- In the box, type ‘regedit’ and press ENTER.
- A Registry Editor will open, use the given key:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ImmersiveShell\
- Create a key EdgeUI under the key ImmersiveShell.
- Select EdgeUI in the left pane.
- Create a DWORD DisableCharmsHint in the right pane and set ‘1’ as its value.
The Charms Bar will be visible only when you want to see it. However, you might also want to enable the Charms Bar feature again. It can simply be done by deleting the DWORD (DisableCharmsHint) that you created in the above procedure and by setting its value to the default, i.e. ‘0’.
As you saw that the procedure demonstrates the modification of registry, hence it is important to note that you need to carry out the task with sole attention.
