Windows 10’s Nearby Sharing feature can be easily enabled with one click in the Share dialog, but can only be disabled from the Settings app. Here’s how to hide the “Looking for nearby devices” message and stop incoming share notifications.

Launch the Settings app to get started. To do so, click the Start button and click the gear-shaped Settings button (or just press Windows+I).

Click or tap the “System” category in the Settings window.

Click “Shared Experiences” in the sidebar. Click or tap the toggle button under Nearby Sharing to turn it off.

If you don’t want to use Nearby Sharing with other people’s PCs, but you would like to use Nearby Sharing to share content between your own PCs, there’s a middle-ground option. Just click the “I can share or receive content from” dropdown and select the “My devices only” option. Nearby Sharing now will only work between PCs you’ve signed into with the same Microsoft account.

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Chris Hoffman is Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek. He's written about technology for over a decade and was a PCWorld columnist for two years. Chris has written for The New York TimesĀ and Reader's Digest, been interviewed as a technology expert on TV stations like Miami's NBC 6, and had his work covered by news outlets like the BBC. Since 2011, Chris has written over 2,000 articles that have been read nearly one billion times---and that's just here at How-To Geek.
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