Surface Pro 3 Pen Button Windows 10 Bug

Reading Time: 2 minutes

So I've got this lovely shiny Surface Pro 3. The Screen being al touchy, the OS being all Windows 10 Pro, and the pen button starting up the modern OneNote App. However, ,in windows 8.1 I had a choice between the modern App version and the Desktop version of OneNote. A quick review of the interwebs gave me nothing. So…

Let's investigate…when pressing the blue button, the modern OneNote App pops up…but I want the desktop OneNote App to start.

Let's remove the modern App since I am not going to use it anyway.

There is a nifty powershell command just for the purpose of uninstalling things that windows does not want you to uninstall. (Does not work for Edge)

Start Powershell as an Administrator and run the following:

Get-AppxPackage *OneNote*

If it generates output as in the screenshot it is installed, and piping the command to Remove-AppxPackage should remove the app.

Now, when pressing the button, a Windows store Dialog informs me of the fact that nothing can run an OneNote-cmd and I should consider installing a program that can. But wait…everything is in the registry. A quick search in the windows registry for 'OneNote-cmd' finds it here:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\onenote-cmd\

It was Empty. So adding the following keys: Shell\Open\Command. At the default I set the following: "C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~1\Office15\ONENOTE.EXE"

And presto, pressing the blue button opens OneNote for Desktop. You can also start other executables this way.