The Live tiles feature of Windows 8 can be used to display all manner of information on the Start screen. This includes the number of unread emails you have in your inbox, news headlines, information about social networks and much more. If you would like to start with a clean slate every time you turn on your computer you can opt to clear all of the these notification at shutdown so you don’t see the same messages all of the time.

There are two ways to do this, and the first involves editing the registry. Press the Windows key and R at the same time, type regedit and press Enter — click Yes if a UAC dialog appears. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer — you may find that the Explorer key does not exist, in which case you should just navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows before clicking Edit > New > Key and then type Explorer before pressing Enter.

Select the Explorer key and click Edit > New > Dword (32-bit) Value, name the new item ClearTilesOnExit and press Enter. Double click the new entry and assign it a value of 1 and click OK.

That’s all there is to it! Should you change your mind and decide that you would like to retain notifications between restarts, you can simply change the value of ClearTilesOnExit to 0, or delete this key entirely.

If you would prefer to leave the registry alone, you can instead opt to use the Group policy Editor. Press the Windows key and R at the same time, type gpedit.msc and press Enter.

In the left hand pane, click User Configuration, double click Administrative Templates to the right and then double click Start Menu and Taskbar. Browse through the list of available settings, locate Clear history of tile notifications on exit and double click it — you should find it is towards the top of the list.

Select the Enable option and then click OK.

Should you decide that you would like to keep notification in place between restarts, work back through these steps, and select the Disabled option instead.