If you made a mess with your start screen tiles on Windows 8.x and want to cleanup start screen and restore to default layout and tiles. Here you will see how to reset tiles to default. Resetting tiles will remove all extra tiles from Start Screen except default ones.
See also: Add Shutdown button on Start Screen
Restore Default Start Screen Tiles
Start screen items data is stored in a file and this file is located in Windows App Data folder. We can restore start screen tiles by removing this file, so lets open this folder, remove this file to reset tiles.
We can open folder path from run command, to open Run Window press Windows +R keys and type or Copy/Paste the following command it it and hit the Enter key from keyboard.
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows
This Run command will open the Microsoft Windows App-data folder. Scroll down and here you will find these two files. One is original item-data file and the second .bak is just item-data backup file.
Select both files to delet, right-click on it and select Delete option to send it to the Recycle bin. Don’t press Shift to delete it permanently, let it go to recycle bin. On the safe side you can make a backup copy of these two files on another disk location.
Once you have deleted files, Restart your PC or log out and log in again. Now you will see Windows 8.x Start Screen reset to default tiles. Now re-arrange the tile as you want and new tiles will also be created automatily when you install any apps from Store.
Revert your Start Screen Tiles
If anything went wrong and you want to revert start screen tiles to your tiles. restore item data files from recycle bin or from the location where you backed up to the Windows app data folder. I didn’t delete files permanently and restore them from recycle bin.
