The "Send To" context menu item is a very old command of the Explorer app. It might be familiar to every Windows user. Today, I would like to share a trick which will allow you to hide network and removable drives from the Send To context menu of Windows 10's File Explorer.
The Send To menu includes a list of removable and network drives available on your PC. If you do not use this feature, you can disable the hard drives in the Send To menu. It will speed up the menu a little and will make it less cluttered.
Table of contents.
- How to hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10
- How to hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10 for all users
- Temporarily hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10
How to hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10
- Open Registry Editor.
- Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Tip: How to jump to the desired registry key with one click.
If you do not have such a registry key, then just create it. - In the right pane, create a new 32-bit DWORD value named NoDrivesInSendToMenu. Set it to 1. Note: Even if you are running 64-bit Windows you must still create a 32-bit DWORD value.
- Close Registry Editor and restart the Explorer shell. In some cases, you might need to restart Windows.
Now drives will be hidden from the Send To menu for the current user account.
If you need to hide removable and network drives for all users, apply the same tweak under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key as described below.
How to hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10 for all users
- Open Registry Editor.
- Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
Tip: How to jump to the desired registry key with one click.
If you do not have such a registry key, then just create it. - In the right pane, create a new DWORD value named NoDrivesInSendToMenu. Set it to 1.
- Close Registry Editor and restart the Explorer shell. In some cases, you might need to restart Windows.
Tweaks mentioned above are applicable to Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Temporarily hide network shares and drives from the Send To menu in Windows 10
There is a change in Windows 10's File Explorer. It does not come with the extended Send To menu.
File Explorer had an extended version of the Send To menu in Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
To show it, you could press and hold the SHIFT key on the keyboard, then right-click the target file and select the "Send To" item in the context menu. I described this trick earlier in the following article: How to show the extended Send To menu in File Explorer.
With Windows 10, Microsoft changed the behavior of the Send To menu. If you try to open the extended Send To menu using the SHIFT key trick, the menu will get shrunk even more. It won't come with network and removable drives.
The regular Send To menu:
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You can also simply set the file attribute to “hidden”. Also works in Startup folder.