Can we disable the charms bar in Windows 8?

Anonymous
2013-01-22T14:37:05+00:00

Old Title: when I move the mouse around the right hand side bar keeps appearing, when I don't want it to.

I recently bought a new computer with Windows 8 and have managed to work with it OK.  The thing is that when I move the mouse around, the right hand sidebar with the Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings buttons (and the date and time, bottom left),  keeps appearing.  It is so frustrating as I keep having to click to get rid of it. Ironically, when I am ready to close the computer down, I have to fiddle around with the mouse trying to get the damn bar to appear so that I can get the settings button to shut it down. Are there any solutions for this?

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Anonymous
2013-06-05T09:31:15+00:00

"I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any option to disable the Charms Bar in Windows 8."

OMG, when I pay hundreds of my hard-earned dollars, especially in this economy, I expect to customize my product after purchasing. Did Microsoft have regular people try Win 8 for awhile before releasing it?

Got it!!! Its simple, go to control panel, synaptics touchpad and disable side swipe function, simples. it was really beginning to annoy me.

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Anonymous
2013-01-23T10:24:36+00:00

Hi Deborah,

Thank you for choosing Windows 8 and posting your query on Microsoft Community Forums.

It seems that you are not happy with the “Charms Bar” in Windows 8 as it always appears when you move the mouse pointer to the right hand side of your computer screen and would like to know if we can disable it.

I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any option to disable the Charms Bar in Windows 8. I can definitely forward your suggestions to the concerned department.

Microsoft has designed it for making things faster and easier. The charms bar help you do the things you do most often, like search, share links and photos, connect devices, and change settings without any difficulties.

For more information, please check this link:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/charms#1TC=t1

Hope this information is helpful.

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Anonymous
2013-07-31T18:02:19+00:00

"I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any option to disable the Charms Bar in Windows 8."

OMG, when I pay hundreds of my hard-earned dollars, especially in this economy, I expect to customize my product after purchasing. Did Microsoft have regular people try Win 8 for awhile before releasing it?

Got it!!! Its simple, go to control panel, synaptics touchpad and disable side swipe function, simples. it was really beginning to annoy me.

This issue was driving me crazy with my new week old inspiron 7720 windows 8.  I even spent time on the phone with tech support who suggested using an external mouse. I followed your suggestion to disable side swipe function and it worked perfectly.  Thank you.

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-08-24T15:22:22+00:00

    Still using a (paid for) Microsoft OS anywhere?

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-08-24T14:51:59+00:00

    "I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any option to disable the Charms Bar in Windows 8."

    OMG, when I pay hundreds of my hard-earned dollars, especially in this economy, I expect to customize my product after purchasing. Did Microsoft have regular people try Win 8 for awhile before releasing it?

    Got it!!! Its simple, go to control panel, synaptics touchpad and disable side swipe function, simples. it was really beginning to annoy me.

    And unfortunately this only helps if you have a synaptics touchpad

    As for "did they have regular people try it?" I doubt. Some MS mid-upper manager was BSing on reddit about how they did extensive research to make 8.1 have the optimal user interface.

    Either he was full of it, or those supposed studies were totally worthless. The results were probably either totally meaningless (which means anyone can use them to support any pet agenda they might have) or the studies were designed specifically to support the decisions someone had already made.

    Yes we did studies (after we made the decisions) and see how they "proved" our decisions were right?

    I settled for windows vista and 7 over Linux because 1) I didn't want to dual boot, 2) I wanted to play certain games without taking a sysadmin refresher course in linux in order to play them

    And overall windows 7 worked out pretty well. I could do what I wanted without too much ridiculous extra steps (gee you want to do something simple? lets force you to person 27 different actions to achieve that result) and windows 7 was moderately customizable.

    Now we have windows 8.1 which is almost not customizable and has a lot different options completely removed, all to push the magical modern UI that everyone is going to love so much they'll do tons and tons of free development to build apps that MS management knows are needed but is too cheap or greedy to spend money on without then charging their customers 10X or most the cost (and probably pushing the "price" win81 so high that even the most avid of mac/linux haters would switch from MS to one of the alternative)

    The metro ui is good enough for certain physical interfaces, like tablets, and for doing very simple tasks. But it is not capable of supporting serious or complex tasks yet without a much amount of time/manpower investment. And it looks very much like someone at MS really thought the users would give MS their time and effort and build nice base of user developed apps.

    *sigh* I've semi-ranting for too long already.

    It's just a sign at how fed up I am at being almost stuck with MSWin81.

    Once I get some warranty repairs on my laptop, I'm voiding the remaining warranty to put in an SSD AND install either open bsd or linux.

    That's how sick I am of it.

    Before they had a solution that wasn't perfect but did provide more than token amount of choice to the user AND it was pretty reliable.

    They took that, stripped out most of the choices and stripped out at lot of the usability, and replaced it with a new interface that they were hoping someone else would finish for them, for FREE.

    Wow, talk about a winning strategy.

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