14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft introduced Cortana in Windows 10 build 9926, but it's no secret that some users still find it odd to talk to their computers, no matter if there's a personal assistant or not.
As a result, many people actually want to disable Cortana in Windows 10 build 9926, and although it might sound really cool to have a personal assistant on the desktop, it appears that, for the moment, the operating system becomes a bit slow because of this new feature.
Right now, disabling “Hey Cortana” or Cortana altogether appears to greatly enhance performance on build 9926, but there's no doubt that, if it's all because of bugs, that's going to change in future builds.
How to temporarily turn off Cortana support
Disabling Cortana is not at all difficult and Microsoft most likely saw this coming, so it offered such options right in the configuration screen of the personal assistant in order to make sure that everyone finds it easily.
So, if you want to disable Cortana completely, just launch the personal assistant, click on the small hamburger button in the top left corner and look for the option that reads “Do you want Cortana to work for you?” Simply choose “Off” and you're good to go.
Alternatively, you can also disable “Hey Cortana” from the very same menu and see if it makes any difference in terms of performance. We've received reports from users saying that doing this significantly improves system performance and this does make sense.
“Hey Cortana” keeps a process always running on your system to launch the personal assistant whenever you call her, so it's only natural to expect it to eat up some of your hardware resources.
Obviously, Microsoft will most likely greatly improve Cortana support in future Windows 10 builds, so all these performance issues, if there are any on your computer, should be fixed in the next updates.