Touch2Know

How to Remove the “Folders” From My Computer in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 bought some of the more common folders to the top of the “This PC” window. Having used Windows since its inception, we find this looks odd and sought to fix it.

Press the Win + R keyboard combination to bring up a run box, then type “regedit” and press enter.




When the registry editor opens, navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\

You can see in the above screen shot that there are several registry keys with convoluted names. Most of them are mapped to one of those folders you see in the explorer Window. We managed to figure out which is which through trial and error, here are our findings:

Desktop Folder – {B4BFCC3A-DB2C-424C-B029-7FE99A87C641}
Documents Folder – {A8CDFF1C-4878-43be-B5FD-F8091C1C60D0}
Downloads Folder – {374DE290-123F-4565-9164-39C4925E467B}
Music Folder – {1CF1260C-4DD0-4ebb-811F-33C572699FDE}
Pictures Folder – {3ADD1653-EB32-4cb0-BBD7-DFA0ABB5ACCA}
Videos Folder – {A0953C92-50DC-43bf-BE83-3742FED03C9C}

To remove the folders from the explorer window, simply delete the corresponding registry key using the information provided above.

That’s pretty much all there is to it