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 to access the Group Policy Editor in Windows Home.
Open Windows Search and type gpedit to find the Group Policy Editor. You don’t need to select Run as Administrator. In the Local Group Policy Editor pane, navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel. In the right-hand pane, double-click on Settings Page Visibility. Change the setting from Not Configured to Enabled. In the Options section of the pane, type hide: followed by the name of the settings page, using the URI label. For example, hide:signinoptions. You don’t need to type hide: for every page you want to hide. Instead, you can combine several into one command. e. g. hide:storagesense;signinoptions. If you need to hide most of the settings pages, it can be easier to use the showonly: command. Here’s an example, showonly:network-wifi;language. After you have added all the pages you want to hide, click the Apply button.
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:
Open Windows Search and type regedit and click on Registry Editor. In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Right-click on the Explorer key and select New > String Value. Name the new value SettingsPageVisibility and click Ok. Double-click the new SettingsPageVisibility key, and in the Value Data field, type hide: followed by the page you want to hide. For example, hide:windowsupdate. You can combine pages into a single string to hide more than one, for example, hide:windowsupdate;network-wifi. If you want to hide most settings, you can use showonly: command instead. For example, showonly:network-wifi;windowsupdate. When you have added all the settings you want to hide, click OK and close 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 about how 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 is windowsupdate, but the URI for “Set Up a Kiosk” is assignedaccess.
Fortunately, you can find a complete list of settings page reference names on Microsoft 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.
