The green check marks on your Windows Desktop icons show your sync status with cloud services, usually Microsoft OneDrive since it is built into Windows. Helpful as they are, they can also be distracting. This article explains how to remove these check marks and return the icons to their original state.
What Do the Green Check Marks on Your Desktop Icons Mean?
Desktop icons typically show two kinds of green check marks: a check mark with a green outline, or a solid green check mark. Each one is a visual indicator of a different sync status for your files with OneDrive.
Solid Green Check Mark on the Desktop
A solid green check mark appears on files you have marked as Always keep on this device (Luôn lưu giữ trên thiết bị này). It means a file is not only synced but also available offline in OneDrive.
Check Mark with a Green Outline
A check mark with a green outline means the file or folder is stored online only: it lives in the cloud, not on your local device. To access such a file offline, you need to download it to your device. If you later want to switch a file back to online-only and free up space on your device, right-click the file and choose Free up space.
How to Remove the Green Check Marks from Desktop Icons
Although the green check marks are useful indicators, they can be visually annoying. Below are three simple ways to remove them if you want to. Note that removing these green status icons does not affect your files.
1. Pause Syncing in OneDrive
You can temporarily remove the green check marks by pausing your computer's sync with OneDrive. This does not delete any data, but your files and changes will no longer sync with OneDrive (and so won't be available on your other devices) until you resume syncing. Here is how to pause syncing your files with OneDrive.
Then look at your desktop icons and see whether the green check marks are gone. For example, the author of this article originally had a green check mark on one of their desktop icons, shown on the right side of the screenshot below:
After syncing was paused, the check mark disappeared, as shown here:
2. Quit OneDrive or Unlink Your Account from the Service
Quitting OneDrive removes the green check marks and stops syncing. This is similar to pausing sync, except that OneDrive won't take any action until you open it again (which happens at startup if you have it set to launch every time you start your computer).
To stop the OneDrive service, click the OneDrive icon in the system tray.
From there, follow these steps:
- Click the gear icon in the upper right corner.
- Expand the Pause Syncing drop-down menu.
- Click the Quit OneDrive option.
If you have decided you no longer want to use OneDrive on your PC, you can unlink your Windows account from OneDrive. This disables the service entirely unless you sign back in to the OneDrive app and set up syncing again.
3. Use Registry Editor to Change Overlay Icon Settings
This method involves tweaking the Windows Registry, a powerful tool that controls many aspects of a Windows device. Here is how to remove the green check marks using Registry Editor:
Warning: Be careful with Registry Editor, because incorrect changes can affect system stability. To be safe, consider backing up the registry before you continue.
- Press Win + R, type regedit, and press Enter to open Registry Editor.
- Enter the following path in the address bar and press Enter:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerShellIconOverlayIdentifiers
Under the ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers folder, you will find a list of subkeys representing different overlay icons. Cloud storage services such as OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox typically add subkeys for their overlay icons here.
To remove the overlay icons, delete or rename the entries related to your cloud service. Say you are using OneDrive. To get rid of the green check marks on your desktop icons, rename the registry subkeys such as OneDrive1 and OneDrive2 so they appear at the bottom of the list. For example, rename them to "z_OneDrive1", "z_OneDrive2", and so on.
Alternatively, you can delete the OneDrive registry subkeys to remove the green check marks. However, deleting these subkeys may not be ideal, because you will no longer be able to tell the OneDrive sync status.
After you rename or delete the subkeys, restart your computer to apply the changes.
