Hide Items in Control Panel Using the Registry
For some items you won’t be able to easily delete the CPL file if it’s a Windows system file or in use. You could use a program like Unlocker, but we can tweak the Registry to hide items in Control Panel.
Note: Remember before making any changes to your computer’s Registry back it up first. Tweaking the Registry can lead to an unstable or unusable system.
Open the Registry Editor by typing regedit into the Search bar in the Start Menu and hit Enter.
Then navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
and create a new DWORD Value.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
and create a new DWORD Value.
Name it Disallow.Cpl and give it a value of 1.
Next create a new key and also name it DisallowCpl.
Now within the DisallowCpl key, create a new String value for each of the items you don’t want showing in Control Panel.
For example, here we’ll remove the icons for Sync Center, Sound, and Speech Recognition.
So for each String Value name and Value data field, enter the item you want removed and close out of Registry Editor. Actually you can give it any Value name you want, but keeping it the same makes things easier to find later.
You should be able to see the results by closing and reopening Control Panel, but if not, log off and back on again. Here you can see we no longer have the items listed in Control Panel. Go through the above steps for whatever you want removed from Control Panel.
