One of the new features of the Windows 8 operating system is the new start screen interface. It displays default apps that shipped with the operating system and applications that you have installed on it.
Apps are displayed as tiles on the start screen that can have a variety of sizes. Some applications in addition to that display live information on the start screen.
A news app may display constant news updates, a sports update the latest standings, or the photo app the most recent pictures that you have uploaded from your camera.
While that may be useful to some, it may add lots of noise to the start screen interface, especially if more than a handful of apps use the live tiles feature to display updates on the start screen.
You can turn off live updates for individual applications on Windows 8, or turn off the feature completely instead.
If you like it, you may instead be inclined to modify the feature's caching mechanism instead. What is meant by that is that you can delete the cached notifications on shutdown or logout.
You need to use the Group Policy Editor, or if the tool is not available for your edition of Windows, the Registry to modify the preference on the system.
Group Policy Editor
To launch the editor and modify the preference, do the following:
Registry
If you do not have access to the Group Policy Editor or prefer to use the Windows Registry instead, you can do so in the following way:
Windows will delete the notification cache whenever you exit the operation system from this point on forward. This means that the start screen will display "blank" icons for a second or two on start before the live tiles get updated.
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This is useful if you share a computer, but if you log in using a Microsoft account then there is no need to do this. All your apps and settings are saved on a user basis.
Unless you prefer to start with an empty start screen as well (empty meaning no initial updates).