Cortana is a digital assistant bundled with Windows 10. You can ask Cortana to look up information using your speech. On a mobile phone, it makes sense to use such a feature. However on a PC where your microphone is far from your mouth and you have a full keyboard at your disposal, it doesn't make sense to use Cortana. If you do not plan to use Cortana, here is how to disable this feature in Windows 10 Creators Update version 1703.
In Windows 10 Creatrors Update, there is no option to disable Cortana. In the previous release of Windows 10, which is known as 'version 1511' or 'Threshold 2', the user could click the gear icon in Cortana and quickly disable it:
Advertisеment
But not in Windows 10 version 1703.
To disable Cortana in Windows 10 Creators Update 1703, you need to apply a Registry tweak. Here you go.
- Open Registry Editor.
- Go to the following Registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search
Tip: You can access any desired Registry key with one click. If you don't have such a key, then just create it. In my case, the Windows Search is missing. To create it, right-click on the Windows subkey and select New - Key in the context menu.
Name your new key as Windows Search.
- Right-click on the right and select New - DWORD (32-bit) value in the menu as shown below.
Create a new 32-bit DWORD value here named AllowCortana and leave its value data as 0. Note: Even if you are running Windows 10 64-bit, you need to create a 32-bit DWORD value. 
Now, restart Windows 10 and you are done.
Cortana will become disabled. While the SearchUI process will remain in the process list, Cortana won't be functional and won't consume system resources.
To save your time, you can use Winaero Tweaker to disable Cortana:
You might also be interested in disabling web search in Windows 10.
Tip: Alternatively, you can remove Cortana completely. If you are interested in uninstalling it, please read the following article carefully: How to uninstall and remove Cortana in Windows 10.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
If you like this article, please share it using the buttons below. It won't take a lot from you, but it will help us grow. Thanks for your support!
Advertisеment
This works from the first edition of Windows 10, but isn’t that effective as Cortana and SearchUI.exe continue to run in the background and use resource. The same principles as turning of privacy and telemetry they still run from tasks and other processes. I find renaming SearchUI.exe and putting a dummy in place, then removing reference from the registry truly disables Cortana :D
Sergey, I did disable Cortona via winaero but still it running in task manager.
The process “SearchUI” remains active.
The registry edit had zero effect on stopping Cortana in Win 10 Creators Update. It still shows up as a background process, AND if you kill it, it just pops right back up.
There are many little things that affect security/privacy that it appears MS decided enough was enough and made them to completely ignore the registry and the other ways to shut down the spying.
Cortana is so integrated in the window search feature that even when you disable Cortana completely it still runs the windows process. If you do the next step past this article and make it not run, then the search bar stops working, and you can’t even type in the name of an installed app. I just disable it so it doesn’t collect or report data, and let it run so I can type things in the search bar.
This is the method to disable Cortana AND search:
1. Change your Locale fron US to anything else. Cortana will stop but SearchUI is still running.
2. Do the old trick: Right click on SearchUI, Open file location and rename the containing folder. Before that, you have to stop SearchUI and hurry back to rename the folder, because the process will start again in a few seconds. After renaming the folder, SearchUI cannot start again and Cortana is completely off.
3. You can change your Locale back to US, if you want.
This no longer works, and causes a SaaS crash (as of version 1709.)
Please guys help me i cant `ENABLE` cortana