Turn off ads in Windows File Explorer

Posted on Thursday March 23, 2017

Advertisements are invading every corner of our digital lives, but if there were one place users thought they'd be safe, it'd be Windows' File Explorer. But that's no longer the case. Microsoft has started advertising products inside the window users access to navigate their hard drive. Thankfully, we know how to disable these ads.

Who is getting these ads?

Right now, we're still unsure of how widespread Microsoft's new advertising strategy goes. Not every Windows workstation has started displaying File Explorer banners, and based on some overwhelmingly negative reactions online, the campaign might get shut down before it even reaches your desktop.

However, even if you have yet to be targeted, you can quickly and easily disable these ads right now.

How do I turn them off?

At the moment, these pushy promotions show up only in Windows' File Explorer window, so that's where we'll begin. After you've opened a new window, there are only five steps to boot them off your screen:

1. Select View from the ribbon along the top of any File Explorer window.
2. Click Options on the far righthand side.
3. In the new window select the View tab.
4. In the Advanced Settings window pane, scroll down and deselect ‘Show sync provider notifications'.
5. Click Apply and close the Folder Options window.

That's all it takes! Keep in mind that we highly recommend the services Microsoft chose to advertise with this move. Office 365, OneDrive, and others are all great cloud platforms for safely working and collaborating from any device in any location -- we just don't want to see advertisements for them when we're hunting down sales records.

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