Bloatware is still a curse in the Windows world. One command is enough to remove everything

You buy a Windows PC, turn it on for the first time, and realize there are things in there you didn’t ask for. A demo of Candy Crush or an antivirus that promises to protect you from possible threats. It’s the doom of bloatwareand it is still a real problem for many users.

Fortunately most of that bloatware (or crapware) can be uninstalled, but doing so can be a bit of a hassle. This is precisely what a small utility that you can run from an instance of Powershell solves: with one command, get rid of all the bloatware.

An easy way to get rid of bloatware

The presence of unsolicited software on our PCs, laptops or mobile phones —a very widespread practice too— is something terrible: even paying for those computers and devices, we still have to put up with that alternative to traditional advertising that doesn’t show ads, but pre-installs trial versions of games or apps so we can pay for them later if we decide we like them.

For manufacturers, the practice is logical: profit margins are low in this very competitive segment, so reaching agreements with that video game developer or that antivirus company pays off: I pre-install your software demo, but you pay me to do it. The user will take care of uninstalling that component if he wants.

It is true that indeed Windows PC and laptop users can often get rid of bloatware and crapware easily from the Settings panel, but the process is heavy since it forces us to select the components to uninstall one by one.

However, it may happen that some components are more hidden and don’t make things so easy at the time of being completely eliminated from the system. Native Windows applications, for example, can make it difficult, but in both cases there are ways to eradicate all this bloatware from our system.

One of them is use the script called Windows10Debloatercreated by Sycnex and that works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11. The script code is available on GitHub, which makes it possible to audit it and confirm that it is a safe script and not some type of malware.

If we download the script we can eliminate, for example, unnecessary applications from Windows 10, stop telemetry functionsprevent Cortana from being used in search indexing or also disable scheduled tasks that we do not take advantage of.

The list of applications that the script detects as bloatware is remarkable and includes those that manufacturers they usually come pre-installed with evaluation versions. There’s Candy Crush, but also Asphalt8, Microsoft News, MSN Weather, Pandora, Skype for Desktop or Flipboard, among many others.

To use it you don’t even need to download anything. Just go to the start menu, search for “Windows Powershell”, right-click on the result and choose the option “Open as administrator”. After accepting the execution of PowerShell with those privileges, we will find that Windows console in which it will only be enough to write and execute the following command:

By doing so, a small program will be executed in which we will see options to deactivate Cortana, the reading of Edge PDFs, or that will also give us the possibility of customize blacklist (blocklist) of applications that if the system detects will be deleted from Windows to leave it without bloatware.

Image | Piero Negro

Via | Life Hacker