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If you’re anything like me, you’ve got definite ideas about how, when and why to set up Windows 10. But the OS — or perhaps the MS engineers behind it — have some ideas about this, too. That’s why you see a screen like this following a clean install, after a feature upgrade, and at various times afterward if you don’t turn it off yourself. Personally, I always click “Skip for now.” I also find it annoying that MS has decided to drive users through these steps by default (notice the “Let’s go” button is pre-selected). Thus, I’m delighted to learn from Martin Brinkmann at Ghacks.net that there are two relatively easy ways to turn this thing off.

But first, here’s a screen cap of what I’m talking about:

If you don’t turn this thing off, you will see it in Windows 10 at specific times, and occasionally forever afterward.
[Click image for full-sized view.]

Two Methods to Turn the Screen Off: Notifications and the Registry

You can get to this item via Settings → System → Notifications & actions, in the checkbox items at the head of the notifications section. Here’s what you’ll find there (with a minor highlight by way of annotation):

Uncheck these two checkboxes to turn off the screen following clean installs and feature upgrades (lower item) and periodically thereafter (upper item).
[Click image for full-sized view.]

This approach is easy, fast and straightfoward, and worked fine for me on a machine-at-a-time basis.

Admins who want to build a canonical image for deployment can do this with some registry edit files. Brinkmann has a link to enable/disable .reg files to do just this. I’ll simply explain that one must edit a Registry key named

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UserProfileEngagement

It needs a Dword value named ScoobeSystemSettingEnabled defined within that key. Assigning a value of 0 turns the feature off (what you want to do). Assigning it a value of 1 turns it back on. Remember, after editing the Registry, you must restart the PC for the change to take effect.

Great tweak! Nochmals vielen Dank, Herr Brinkmann. (English: Thanks much again, Mr. Brinkmann.)

Author: Ed Tittel

Ed Tittel is a 30-plus-year computer industry veteran. He’s a Princeton and multiple University of Texas graduate who’s worked in IT since 1981 when he started his first programming job. Over the past three decades he’s also worked as a manager, technical evangelist, consultant, trainer, and an expert witness. See his professional bio for all the details.

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