Windows 11’s ads are way too pushy. These 9 settings fix the worst
Tired of Microsoft pushing ads throughout Windows 11? Credit: Yan Krakau/Pixels Remember back when Windows 11 first came out and Microsoft gave everyone a free pass to upgrade? In this case, it’s all the ads that are being added to Windows 11, going above and beyond what we’ve seen in previous versions.
- ▪Tired of Microsoft pushing ads throughout Windows 11?
- ▪Credit: Yan Krakau/Pixels Remember back when Windows 11 first came out and Microsoft gave everyone a free pass to upgrade?
- ▪In this case, it’s all the ads that are being added to Windows 11, going above and beyond what we’ve seen in previous versions.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | PCWorld |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcworld.com/article/2545435/windows-11s-ads-are-way-too-pushy-these-9-settings-fix-the-worst-of-it.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T15:43:41.789Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T15:43:41.789Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NtIv_OMJSJuT · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Tired of Microsoft pushing ads throughout Windows 11? Here are the settings you need to tweak. Credit: Yan Krakau/Pixels Remember back when Windows 11 first came out and Microsoft gave everyone a free pass to upgrade? On the surface, it was a generous move; in actuality, it was a ploy to lure us away from Windows 10. get windows 11 pro for cheap Windows 11 Pro Price When Reviewed: 199.99 Best Prices Today: $59 at PCWorld Store – Win 11 Pro Upgrade Only | $79.99 at PCWorld Software Store Obviously, if Microsoft was giving something away, it was going to come with a catch. In this case, it’s all the ads that are being added to Windows 11, going above and beyond what we’ve seen in previous versions. Fortunately, we can disable those ads… for now, at least.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCWorld.
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