The livetiles are the continous updated info apps, such as news, mail, social etc. Instead of launching the start screen like in 8 you just click start and the menu shows you your apps and stuff. Also in Win8 you could only use applications from the store on the start menu Win10 fixes that by allowing all apps to be used in a window.
Is there an easy way to disable live tiles in Win 8 and Win 10? I really don’t care about live updates like that and it wastes system resources. On my Win 8.1 machines I have metro hidden with Classic Shell so I never see those tiles. I’m sure the system is still wasting resources on that even though I do not see it and just want ti disable it completely.