Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the Cortana stuff from loading, though: http://www.getblackbird.net/documentation/
I highly recommend Blackbird for stopping Cortana and the other stuff it does (telemetry / tracking blocking + stopping W10 mandatory updates). I basically run this + https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 on new W10 installs at minimum. https://chocolatey.org is also a big improvement for Windows if you don’t already know about it.
Thanks so much. I will definitely try these out. It's a shame to have to resort to third party tools to have an acceptable experience for such a basic OS use case as finding and launching applications. I don't know what the hell they're doing over there at MSFT anymore, but they're missing several basic building blocks of a good OS.
You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB.
There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the Cortana stuff from loading, though: http://www.getblackbird.net/documentation/
I highly recommend Blackbird for stopping Cortana and the other stuff it does (telemetry / tracking blocking + stopping W10 mandatory updates). I basically run this + https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 on new W10 installs at minimum. https://chocolatey.org is also a big improvement for Windows if you don’t already know about it.