How do I toggle "Highlight newly Installed Programs" on Windows 10 Preview?

If you open regedit.exe and add "Start_NotifyNewApps" as a DWORD (32-bit) Value with a value of "0" to the following path and reboot, it should disable the highlighting:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Since this is the first preview with the new Start Menu I wouldn't be surprised if many of the features form the old Start Menu don't have analogs yet.

Having said that the newest app/program installed gets highlighted automatically by default, but there currently no way to disable that. Here's a screen grab, I just installed the Netflix app...

enter image description here

Downside: This only seem to show the last one or two apps installed, and when you view All Apps, there is no highlighting.

So it obviously still needs some work. :) Perhaps report it to MS (via the Windows Feedback app in Win10) so they know people want it (back).

An alternative for now is to go back to using the Start Screen and, like in Windows 8.1, click "All Apps" where new apps will have a "New" tag, and/or you can sort it "by date installed" to get the newest ones at the beginning.


In Windows 10: Switching off "Show recently added apps" doesn't de-highlight Programs apparently, "Show Most Used apps" does:

  • right-click Desktop->Personalization->Start
  • Slide to "off": "Show most used apps"