How can I hide the new "Folders" list in My Computer on Windows 8.1?

Question

I recently installed Windows 8.1, and unlike Windows 8 this has added a new list of "Folders" in My Computer, above the drives and devices section as follows;

I am finding this to be both completely redundant (this same list of folders is also listed under "Homegroup" and "Libraries" on the left side of this window) and slightly annoying, since it means I need to scroll down to browse some of my disks and mapped network drives.

How can I hide the new "Folders" list in My Computer on Windows 8.1?

Answer 1

You can remove these folders from the File Explorer list by editing the registry.

In Regedit, navigate to

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

From there, you can delete any or all of the subkeys that refer to the folders:

• 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}

For more info, you can follow this guide on HowToGeek.com.

Answer 2

The subkeys are recreated after some updates. I had this issue several times. A solution can be to create a scheduled task to remove these subkeys at each boot. You can do that with the following command in an elevated command prompt:

schtasks /create /f /ru SYSTEM /rl HIGHEST /sc ONSTART /tn CleanFolders /tr "'C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe' /c \"for /f \"usebackq\" %I in (`reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace ^^^|find \"{\"`) do reg delete %I /f\""