And definitely back up the Registry (and your computer!) before making changes. If you’ve never worked with it before, consider reading about how to use the Registry Editor before you get started.

This is a simple hack that anyone can do, as long as you stick to the instructions. Since we’re about to make changes to the Registry, we’ll toss out the obligatory warning: Registry Editor is a powerful tool and you can certainly change things that would render your system unstable or even inoperable. While it isn’t the easiest way, you can edit the registry yourself without downloading or running any extra sofware. You can also use the Registry to bring back the oversized arrow from the Windows Vista days, just in case you like really ugly things. These methods should work in Windows 7, 8, and 10. Removing those little arrows requires a tweak to the Windows Registry, but there are a few different ways of going about it.

Fortunately, they’re pretty easy to remove. Even though the arrows are smaller than in some previous versions of Windows, they aren’t terribly attractive.

In Windows, icons for shortcuts have little arrows to remind you that what you’re looking at is a shortcut.

How to remove shortcut arrow windows 10