After all, there is still an advertisement for Office, a link to the Feedback Hub, and an icon for Cortana. It was not until I rebooted the computer that I was able to see the changes.Īs you can see in the figure above, the Start menu is a lot cleaner than it was, but it may not be perfect. It is worth noting that when the debloating process completed, Windows looked the same as it did before using the tool.
In case you are wondering, the image below shows what Windows looks like after running the Windows 10 Debloater tool, using the default options.
There is no “are you sure” prompt, so be careful not to accidentally click one of the Remove buttons. When you click the button to begin removing bloatware, the begins stopping services and removing applications right away. Still, if you find that the Windows 10 Debloater tool does something that you don’t like, it is probably going to be better to simply reinstall Windows than to undo a registry change. Incidentally, the Revert Registry Changes button can help you to put things back in order if you make a mistake. Once you have selected the applications that need to be removed, you can click on the Remove Bloatware with Customized Blacklist button. You can choose what is removed and what is kept by selecting and deselecting the various checkboxes. As you can see in the next figure, clicking on the Customize Blacklist button brings up a screen displaying everything installed in the Windows operating system.
Rather than giving the tool free reign over the system, you might consider using a customized blacklist. For example, I personally find the Microsoft Whiteboard app to be handy, but the Windows 10 Debloater considers it to be bloatware.
Of course, in some cases, you might want to keep some of the items that the tool considers to be bloatware. If you want to use the quick and dirty approach to getting rid of bloatware, just click the Remove All Bloatware button. The primary options for dealing with a system’s bloatware reside in the Debloat Options section shown in the figure above. The figure below shows what happens when you run this script. The Windows10DebloaterGUI.ps1 file is just such a script. Even though PowerShell almost always functions as a text-based environment, it is possible to build PowerShell scripts equipped with GUI interfaces. The script that you need to execute is called Windows10DebloaterGUI.ps1. There are actually several different PowerShell scripts that are included with the Windows 10 Debloater. Keep in mind that before you can execute the script, you will need to use the Set-ExecutionPolicy cmdlet to allow PowerShell to run scripts. The Windows 10 Debloater is actually a collection of PowerShell scripts, so to use it, you will need to open an elevated PowerShell session.
Once the download completes, extract the ZIP file’s contents and save them to the system’s hard disk.
To use Windows 10 Debloater, go to the GitHub link provided earlier, click the Download Code button, and choose the option to download the code as a ZIP file, as shown in the next figure. The utility also comes with a “use it at your own risk” warning, but I haven’t personally had any bad experiences with it. Before I beginīefore I show you how the Windows 10 Debloater works, I need to mention that this utility should only be used on clean Windows 10 installations (to avoid accidentally removing anything important). You can find this utility, which is appropriately named Windows 10 Debloater, at this link. There is a free utility on GitHub that can do it for you. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about manually cleaning up all of the bloatware.
Even though this edition is specifically geared toward business environments, the operating system is preloaded with an app for the Xbox console and other potentially unwanted software. This is a clean installation of Windows 10 Enterprise Edition. To see what I mean, take a look at the figure below. Today, though, this is no longer the case.
One of my single biggest pet peeves about the Windows 10 operating system has always been how Windows installations are “enhanced” with additional software - a nice way of saying “bloatware.” At one time, you only had to deal with this problem if you purchased a new computer that came preloaded with Windows, and the solution was to perform a clean install.