The truth is that even if you completely reinstall Windows 10 from scratch, it still comes with pre-installed apps and settings that make it run less efficiently than it could. This is what we call “bloating”.
Fortunately, there is a powerful utility called Windows 10 Debloater on GitHub. It provides a powerful set of scripts that you can run using an easy-to-use user interface. In this article, we will look at the most important scripts that you should run right away using the Windows 10 Debloater application.
How to Install Windows 10 Debloater
Windows 10 Debloater uninstalls apps and resets settings that might affect your system in ways you didn’t expect. That’s why it’s a good idea to take the time to get a Windows 10 restore point before moving forward .
Then visit the GitHub Windows 10 Debloater page and select the green Code button at the top of the file list . Select Download ZIP .
Save the ZIP file anywhere on your computer that is easily accessible. Open all files.
Windows 10 Debloater Settings
Right-click the Windows10DebloaterGUI.ps1 file inside the Windows 10 Debloater folder and click “ Run with PowerShell “.
The Windows 10 Debloater app will launch and you will see the user interface with all the options.
If this is a fresh install of Windows 10, you can safely choose Remove All Bloatware and let the utility clean everything up.
However, if you’re running this on a Windows 10 system that you’ve been using for a while, you may want to customize which bloatware apps and settings are actually changed. You can choose Customize Blocklist to do this. Here you will see a list of default apps that come with Windows 10.
This list contains utilities and applications that you cannot remove from the system. You will also see unchecked boxes next to things that Windows 10 Debloater does not normally remove. You can select them to prolong the cleaning process if you wish.
If you don’t know what one of these items is, you shouldn’t delete it.
If you scroll down the list, you’ll see items with white marks inside the checkbox. These are the items that Windows 10 Debloater will normally clean your system by default . If you see something here that you really don’t want to delete, deselect any of these items.
If you want to use the same customized list in the future, just click the “ Save custom Allowlist and Blocklist to custom-list.ps1” button. This will update a file of that name in the same directory as the Windows 10 Bloatware utility.
You can see the full list of “ Bloatware that is removed ” on the GitHub page .
Using Windows 10 Debloater
If you have not made any changes to the Block List, you can select “ Remove All Bloatware ” and let the utility do its job. While it’s running, you’ll see individual commands running in PowerShell.
If you see some error messages while the script is running, you may not have started PowerShell correctly as administrator.
In such a case, you need to close the GUI and then repeat the above process to restart the application as administrator.
It’s important to make sure these commands work properly because the default Windows 10 scheduled tasks are often unnecessary and consume much more system resources than they should.
Running Other Changes
After Windows10Debloater has removed all the bloatware, there are a few other options you can use to further clean up your Windows 10 installation.
You can enable or disable Cortana, Edge PDF inheritance (where Edge inherits as your default PDF app) and enable or disable the Windows Dark Theme.
The most interesting are the Other Changes and Fixes in the subsection. Here you can perform all of the following cleaning tasks.
- Uninstalling OneDrive: Users reported that they had difficulty completely removing OneDrive from Windows 10. This script will clear all traces of OneDrive.
- Detach tiles from Start Menu: Are you annoyed by tiles in the Start menu? This script will remove it.
- Disable telemetry/tasks: Removes the services Microsoft uses to collect errors and other issues to improve the overall quality of the Windows operating system.
- Remove bloatware regkeys : Cleans registry keys left after bloatware cleanup script.
- Install .Net V3.5: Programmers are often annoyed that the .NET framework is not available on Windows 10. This script will reinstall it.
You may not need to run most of these scripts. But if your goal is to make your Windows OS as efficient as possible, you should at least run Disable Telemetry/Tasks and Remove Bloatware Regkeys.
Running UNPIN TILES FROM START MENU will also make your Start Menu start faster and more efficiently.
After running the Debloater software, be sure to restart your computer. This will start all Windows processes fresh and ensure all registry changes take effect.
There are three things you will notice right after running the Windows 10 Debloater scripts. First, Windows should start much faster than usual. Second, the Start menu will be much more responsive.
Third, with the tiles gone, the Start menu will look much cleaner and be much more responsive.
There are a few things you can do to improve your Windows 10 experience other than talking about the system. You will be very glad you did. And remember, if something goes wrong, you can always recover from one of your captured restore points.