DISABLING THE LOCK SCREEN ADS

Thanks to Windows Spotlight’s lock screen ‘experience’, we now get ads on our lock screens shuffled in amidst the photos.

You can turn this off easily enough, although you’ll no longer get the Spotlight wallpapers. Head to ‘Settings > Personalisation > Lock Screen’. Change the background from ‘ Windows spotlight’ to either picture or slideshow.

‘NO’ TO THE ‘GET OFFICE’

If you’re not running the very latest version of Office, Windows 10 will pester you to do so, throwing up notifications constantly. You can shut these down in a couple of ways.

The easiest is to right click on a notification when you get one and choose the option to disable notifications for that app (you can also go to ‘Settings > System > Notifications & Actions’ and turn it off there).

You can also just uninstall Get Office — just right click on it in the Start Menu and choose Uninstall — though there’s no guarantee that Microsoft won’t throw it back on in an update.

While you’re at it, you can do the same with the other ‘Microsoft Consumer Experience’ apps that get installed on your system without your asking, like Minecraft, Flipboard and Twitter.

STOP SUGGESTED APPS

Microsoft sometimes likes to suggest apps for you in the Start menu — by which it means to advertise the hell out of things available in the Windows Store. This is another relatively easy fix. Just head to ‘Settings > Personalisation > Start’. There’s a switch there for ‘Occasionally show suggestions in Start’ that you can turn to ‘off’.

FINDING A BETTER SOLITAIRE

One of the cheesiest things Microsoft did in Windows 10 is add a subscription for its Solitaire games. A subscription. For Solitaire. Now to play a game that