How to Hide Specific Pages in the Windows Settings App
Windows allows you to restrict access to certain parts of the operating system. You can even hide pages in the Settings app to stop other users from making unwanted changes.
As such, if you want to stop people from poking their noses within your system’s settings, here’s how to hide select pages in Windows.
How to Hide Windows Settings Pages in the Group Policy Editor
The Group Policy Editor is an administration tool that lets you control the Windows working environment for user and computer accounts. It is usually not available on Windows Home, but there is a way toaccess the Group Policy Editor in Windows Home.
If the Settings app was open when you applied these steps, you need to close it and reopen it to see the changes. You can’t use this method to hide entire sections of Settings, such as Accounts. You can only hide individual pages.
To reveal the Settings pages, change the Settings Page Visibility setting back to Not Configured.
How to Hide Windows Settings Pages via the Registry Editor
An alternative route to hiding settings pages is through the Registry Editor:
Close and reopen the Settings app to see the changes you just made. As with the previous method, you cannot hide the main settings categories, only the individual pages.
To revert the changes to the Settings app, delete the new SettingsPageVisibility key you created. You will see a warning that deleting registry entries can affect how your computer works, but it is not a problem in this case. If you are unsure, learn more abouthow to edit the Registry.
Where to Find System Names for Windows Settings
To hide settings pages using either of the methods detailed above, you need to know how the system refers to those pages. Unfortunately, what to call pages isn’t always obvious. For example, the URI for the “Windows Update” page iswindowsupdate, but the URI for “Set Up a Kiosk” isassignedaccess.
Fortunately, you can find a complete list of settings page reference names onMicrosoft Docs. When looking at this list of URIs, you only need the second part, after ms-settings.
Hiding Specific Settings Pages in Windows
The ability to hide specific settings pages in Windows has more applications than you might think. The most useful is preventing other computer users from making changes that may affect how well Windows operates. If a page is not visible in Settings, changing those settings becomes much more difficult for the average Windows user.
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