How DID I kill Cortana?

There are 2 PCs - my Old PC and my New PC. Both are running Windows 10 v1809.
Old PC is running Home Edition, New PC is running Pro Edition

Somehow, I was able to completely remove Cortana from my Search App on Old PC. But I can't for the life of me remember how I did that. I want to do the same on New PC.

Before we jump to conclusions, it was not the Registry Edit Method of finding and changing AllowCortana value to 0. That has NOT been done on Old PC. I must have done something else.
Looking for suggestions.

On Old PC, when you look into Settings - No Cortana:



And my Search Box is nice and clean:



On New PC I have Cortana in the Settings:



And I have Helicopter Mom in my Search Box:



How did I kill Cortana??

Try this for 1809. (Not for earlier versions)
Open an Elevated Command Prompt. Type (or copy & paste):

Code:

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search" /v AllowCortana /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\FirewallRules"  /v "{2765E0F4-2918-4A46-B9C9-43CDD8FCBA2B}" /t REG_SZ /d  "BlockCortana|Action=Block|Active=TRUE|Dir=Out|App=C:\windows\systemapps\microsoft.windows.cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy\searchui.exe|Name=Search  and Cortana  application|AppPkgId=S-1-15-2-1861897761-1695161497-2927542615-642690995-327840285-2659745135-2630312742|" /f

Then reboot.

I'll give that a try tomorrow.
But I know that is not how I did it before. I would have remembered doing that.

I assume I can just use System Restore to undo it if I don't like it?

TV2 said:

I assume I can just use System Restore to undo it if I don't like it?

No you can't use system restore. You need a system image backup that you can restore.

EDIT: Or just manually delete the registry entries.

Yeah, that's whats interesting..... I checked my registry entries in Old PC and There is no "Windows Search" Key in the location from the tutorial.
And since this is Home Edition there is no Policy Editor.

Maybe I deleted the key?

But thanks for the link to the Tut. Since I am running PRO on New PC I will just try the Policy Editor method there. See if it works the same.
But what I did on Old PC still remains a mystery (to me).

i did the same, Brink pointed me to a tutorial in here. Bree mentions it I used option 2 -very easy

Ok, I did the Group Policy edit on New PC and that worked as advertised. Yay!

Interesting:
In the Registry on New PC, HCLM/Software/Policies/MS/Windows/ there is a Windows Search key, and AllowCortana is set at 0 (enabled) - after Group Policy edit and restart.

But on Old PC there is no Windows Search key at all:

Maybe you used wimtweak.exe to remove it?

No. Pretty sure I didn't.
I like to do manual registry edits and rarely use those batch files to do so. Maybe if it is 30 lines long I will, but normally I go old school.

It sure looks like I deleted an entire key.