Getting rid of the items you don’t use can be helpful in navigating the sidebar—a cluttered navigation pane can make it more difficult to find the items you do want (especially if you have more than a few libraries). Technology blog Ghacks has put up a quick guide to hiding them, and all it requires is a bit of minor registry editing.
Windows Explorer’s sidebar comes with a few entries in it that not everyone uses, such as Homegroup or Libraries. If you’d rather keep your sidebar clean (or populate it with more useful items), here’s how to hide the defaults.
We’ll use Homegroup as an example. To hide it, start up Registry Editor (by hitting Start and searching for “regedit”) and navigate to HKEY_CLASSES>ROOT\CLSID\{B4FB3F98-C1EA-428d-A78A-D1F5659CBA93}\ShellFolder. Before you edit anything, you’ll need to get permission to do so. Right click on “ShellFolder” in the navigation pane and hit Permissions. Select the current user and check the “allow” box under Full Control. Hit OK and go back to the editor. Double click on “Attributes” in the right hand pane and change the value from b084010c to b094010c. Click OK, exit the registry editor, and log out. When you log back in, Homegroup should be gone from Windows Explorer’s sidebar. If you prefer, you can manually kill the explorer.exe task and restart Windows Explorer to apply the changes instead of logging out.
The process for the other items is the same, except you use the following keys:
Libraries: change b080010d to b090010d in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{031E4825-7B94-4dc3-B131-E946B44C8DD5}\ShellFolder
Network: change b0040064 to b0940064 in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F02C1A0D-BE21-4350-88B0-7367FC96EF3C}\ShellFolder
Favorites: change a0900100 to a9400100 in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{323CA680-C24D-4099-B94D-446DD2D7249E}\ShellFolder
To hide Computer, you’ll need to create the Attributes key since none exists. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\ShellFolder and right click somewhere in the right pane. Go to New > Dword 32-bit, name it Attributes and give it the value b094010c (to make Computer show up in the sidebar again, just delete the Attributes key).