Customize W10 Start-Menu Start Tiles & Taskbar

Customizing Windows 10 Start-Menu and Taskbar is quite simple, all you need is a reference machine and some Powershell skills.

First thing you want to do is to set up your reference machine with the customizations you want to create. Go ahead and Pin some items to your start, and name the Groups as you would like your users to see them. Here’s an example:

After customizing your Start-Menu, run powershell as administrator and run the following command:

Once you have created the XML, you can freely edit it with notepad.

The XML will look similar to this:

From the XML, you can resize the tiles, or add more rows with other programs. The good thing with this is, that the same XML allows you to edit the Taskbar as well. If you want, you can remove the built-in Taskbar Icons and replace them with your own icons. Just remember to use the “Replace” command in the XML. See below:

The way I have used this for example in an OSD deployment through SCCM, is to run this in the last step of the Task Sequence with a Powershell script. The script simply imports the modifications to the default user profile, so it automatically imports it to everyone, who logs in to the computer after installation.

This can be also deployed through Group Policy.