When you first install Windows 11, you will probably see a new icon on your Taskbar — or, at least, it will be new if you haven’t been using Microsoft’s Teams collaboration app lately. If you float your cursor across the icon, which looks like a camera inside of a cartoon speech balloon, it will say “Chat.” Click on it, and you’ll be invited to “Meet and chat with friends and family” using Microsoft Teams.

If you’re already using Teams, or you’re okay with switching to it, you’re fine. After that, when you click on the Chat icon, you’ll be able to chat with friends, family, and colleagues using a pop-up box.

So what if you’re not interested in using Microsoft Teams?

There are several things you can do if you find the push to Teams irritating. You can stop Teams from automatically loading every time you start your machine. You can remove the Chat icon from the Taskbar. And, if you really want to go the whole hog, you can uninstall it.

Let’s take these one at a time.

It’s really simple to simply stop Teams — or any other app that you don’t need — from loading when your machine starts up. This not only gets your machine to start up faster, but it reserves your PC’s memory for the stuff you really want to use.

Toggle Teams off so it won’t automatically start up.

By the way, as long as you’re in the Startup menu, take a look at some of the other apps that automatically start up with your computer; there may be some others that you want to disable (for example, what if you don’t necessarily want to run OneDrive?). Go ahead and do that.

Even if you stop Teams from loading, you’re still going to have the Teams Chat icon sitting in your Taskbar. If you have no intention of using it and want to save your Taskbar for other apps, it’s simple to remove it, though it’s not quite the same process as most of the other apps that are pinned there.

You can easily remove Teams from your Taskbar.

If you really, really don’t want Teams around, you can uninstall it. There are actually two ways of doing this:

You can uninstall apps directly from your Start menu.

You can also uninstall apps by going to Setup.

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