Did your Cortana Search box turned white? Here are some options you can try
Yesterday Morning when I turned On my Computer and using it for some time, I felt something looked weird in Screen. A rough glance automatically pointed out the culprit- My Cortana Search box had turned white. I thought that there must be some settings which I must have changed accidentally. I ignored that and went to my Office.
What I see after reaching my office that Cortana Search box had turned to white there as well. Confusing! I Was pretty sure that I didn’t change anything in my Office. Anyway, I thought it is better to leave that issue aside and do other important works pending.
After some time watching my Twitter Feed, I noticed that one Insider that I follow had the same issue as well. He was asking Microsoft for help. So, this made me think, that this might be a server-side change. The next step I took was to go to Microsoft community to see if there are some other reports, I saw a large number of threads on the same issue. I was convinced that Microsoft had changed something from their end
The problem with this change is due to the following conditions that were generated:
- When the Taskbar is black, The white colour looks weird.
- There was no notification by Microsoft on this.
There are a number of workarounds circulating over the Internet to fix this and I will try to cover them in the article:
- Change the Theme to Dark: Dark theme seems to be unaffected by this change.
- Navigate to Settings>Personalization>Start.
- Under Choose a theme, choose Dark.
- Cortana is now grey 🙂
- Switch Back and forth between regions. One of my machines had solved this by Changing the region to one where Cortana isn’t supported like North Korea and back to where you are currently. For this,
- Go to Settings>Region and Language.
- Change region to any country of your choice where Cortana isn’t supported.
- Open the Cortana and she will greet you with the message that she is not available.
- Choose your current Region from Settings again.
- Do a Registry Modification: You need to set some values:
- Open Registry editor by typing in regedit in run dialog box.
- Navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSearchFlighting
- On the Right side, change the following DWORD Values:
- Current to 0 and RotateFlight to 0.
- Also, Add a DWORD value in the path :
- HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionSearchFlighting SearchBoxText Value 0 for black. Sign out and in again.
One thing is sure that this is done by Microsoft itself by some server-side change. We are yet to know stance of Microsoft on this. But, these are the current solutions I have. If you know any other, please let us know in comments.