Last Updated on December 18, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake

The Windows 10 operating system offers numerous context menus when you browse around the place, such as one for the folders, another for the drives, a commonly used one for the desktop, and a separate one for all executable files as well. A context menu is a name given to a menu that you see when you right-click on an item or backdrop. Sometimes it can just be the background setting such as the desktop picture or white pace in File Explorer and other times it can be when you have the mouse pointer hovering over the files and other items, in general.

You can’t change the way these context menus work if you are using the Home edition of Windows 10, but you can choose to add or remove them if you have an edition of Windows 10 Professional, Enterprise or Education.

Note: You’ll need to be using a Windows 10 Pro, Education or Enterprise edition of Windows 10 for this guide to work. You can’t make policy changes in the Local Group Policy Editor using the Windows 10 Home. You can upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro by heading to the Settings application if you want to be able to make changes to group policies.

How to Add or Remove File Explorer Default Content Menu in Local Group Policy Editor

You can add or remove the File Explorer context menu in Windows 10 by using the Local Group Policy Editor. To do that, use one of the ways available to open up the Local Group Policy Editor, the quickest being by typing “gpedit.msc” into the search field in the taskbar at the bottom of your computer’s display, and then clicking on the result that comes up under the “Best match” section.

Now use the left side pane to navigate to the User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > and File Explorer and then look in the right side pane for the “Remove File Explorer’s default context menu” and click on it once to highlight it. Then you’ll see the “Edit policy setting” link available from the middle column for you to click on that brings up the policy window.

With the “Remove File Explorer’s default context menu” policy window open, click on the “Enabled” checkbox and then click on the “OK” button at the bottom of the window.

You might also be interested in checking out the “Help” section that goes into detail about what it means when you choose to enable it. The three settings—Not Configured, Enabled, and Disabled—are always relevant to how the titles of the policy are worded. So when the “Remove File Explorer’s default context menu” isn’t configured, then it won’t be removed. When it’s enabled, then it is taken away.

The context menus that are available in editions of Windows 10 are generally of use to everyone, which is why you won’t find the option available in the Home edition to remove any of them. But sometimes an administrator might want to revoke the permissions for people on the network so they can’t use the context menus, and that’s possible to do from the Local Group Policy Editor using the guide above.

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