Say goodbye to digital clutter

Do you prefer a clean desk? Does it help you to concentrate? Now even our desktops are online (thanks, Microsoft!), here are my top tips to clean them up.

I am often surprised when I see others sitting in front of computer screens that are filled with ads and popups. How can anyone work in such a cluttered environment with constant clickbait images fighting for your eyeball attention? If you are like me and want to clean your screen read on. Note – if you are an Apple user you probably won’t have this problem, as Apple don’t seem to be as keen as Microsoft to load your screen up with clickbait news items, ads and ‘suggested applications’ which are just ads in another guise.

What we are all victims of here is the Tyranny of the Default. Most of us just want to switch on and start working with minimum hassle. But software always has lots of settings, and Microsoft with its Windows 11 platform and its Edge browser cleverly sets all the default settings to make sure it has the maximum opportunity to distract you. Do nothing to change them and you will be forever distracted!

First take a look at your Windows settings. Thanks to PCMag for this really comprehensive and independent article which takes you through the steps to clean up your screen: https://uk.pcmag.com/migrated-3765-windows-10/150617/how-to-remove-the-most-annoying-ads-from-windows

?Having done what you can with Windows, let’s take a look at your browser. Here again, even if you have altered the default selection of the Edge browser to something like Chrome or Firefox , they will still exploit any opportunity for Edge to pop-up together with its Bing search engine full of ads or clickbait news in its default mode. Personally, I prefer to use Mozilla’s Firefox as Mozilla is not-for-profit, so not driven by the need to collect your browsing data or to push ads at you. Whatever browser you prefer, go into its Settings and search for pop-ups and disable them. Beware though that some websites use pop-ups as part of their normal function, so I always keep another browser (in my case Chrome) on my taskbar which is not normally used and not set to default, so if a website appears to be misbehaving I can quickly check using Chrome where I have not disabled pop-ups.

I set Firefox as my default browser and disabled pop-ups, but was annoyed to find Edge still popping onto my screen. Whatever browser you are using you will probably want to stop this. There is not one fix but several as there are many different trigger points for Edge in Windows, but this is the most comprehensive article I have found and lists the fixes from simple to complex, so whatever your confidence level you will be able to make some progress. Nine separate actions are noted here: https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-microsoft-edge-opens-automatically/.

Interestingly, the above article leads me onto my third and final step to that clean screen as it asked me nicely to disable my adblocker.?I actually don't mind enabling ads for some sites as I do acknowledge they have to fund themselves. But for most sites I visit I do want to block intrusive advertising, and that exactly what an adblocker does. I use AdBlock Plus and have done for as long as I can remember, and to be honest I don’t know why everyone doesn’t use these free tools which are probably the best way to remove all ads from both Windows and your browser. The most common Adblockers are AdBlockPlus https://adblockplus.org/ , AdBlock https://getadblock.com/en/ or UBlockOrigin https://ublockorigin.com/. They are really easy to install and I can recommend all of them. While they are free to use they might ask you occasionally for a donation.

Enjoy your clean screen!

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Mike Duff Ian Cross Tony Cross #windows11 #adblockers #edgebrowser #cleandesk