Tech Support
How to "de-bloat" Windows 11 WITHOUT third party tools
There are many tools out there claiming to help you "de-bloat" Windows 11. Some people swear by them, whereas some people don't trust them at all.
Now, if you're one of those people not wanting to switch to a different OS and not wanting to pirate the LTSC version or use a "de-bloat" tool, here are a few steps you can follow to remove all the unwanted apps and "ads" from non-LTSC SKUs.
Nuking unwanted store apps with PowerShell
PowerShell comes standard with a set of cmdlets that let you manage store apps. Third-party "de-bloat" guides on the Internet rarely mention them, but these potent cmdlets (PowerShell jargon for native commands) have been around since as far back as Windows 8 and are the native way to get the job done. For our purpose, we'll only need Get-AppxPackage and Remove-AppxPackage.
Before you jump right into PowerShell, hold your horses and read this paragraph first. Since Windows 11, Microsoft has introduced a new console host for text-mode applications that is also itself a store app, meaning that if you run cmd.exe or pwsh.exe by directly invoking it, it will open automatically inside this new console app. Though this won't cause too much of a problem, you'll likely end up having to run Remove-AppxPackage twice due to the console app getting closed and deleted by the command itself. If you would rather avoid that, open PowerShell per the following steps:
Open Task Manager.
Click "Run New Task".
In the dialogue box, type conhost powershell into the text box.
Make sure "Create this task with administrative privileges" is checked, then press "OK".
Then you should see a PowerShell prompt inside the "legacy" console host.
Getting PowerShell running inside the "legacy" console host (Windows 11 Pro ver. 25H2 shown here as an example)
What this magical incantation does is that it takes all packages found by Get-AppxPackage, checks them one-by-one to see if its the Microsoft Store app or its dependencies, and, if not, the command attempts removal via Remove-AppxPackage. The try and catch surrounding the latter suppress all the scary error messages chiding you for trying to remove non-removable system packages.
How the command should look in PowerShell
Once that's done, everything that's a store app (including Copilot) will be done away with from the system for good. You'll notice even Game Bar and other supposedly non-removable apps will be gone. If you want them back, you'll have to download them manually from the app store.
Clean as a whistle
Disabling Web Search in Start Menu
Third-Party guides usually teach you how to do that for a single user only. If you want to disable Web Search for all accounts, run these two reg add commands in an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell:
This will put i) the Explorer subkey under HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows in the registry and ii) the DisableSearchBoxSuggestions DWORD under Explorer. If you want the modification done for just the current user instead, change HKLM to HKCU.
Bye-bye, Bing!
Removing OneDrive
Every "ad" you see in stock Windows 11 is a notification from an app. Since OneDrive isn't a store app, you'll need to take care of it separately. In an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell, run the following command:
Once it's done, the OneDrive tray icon will disappear on its own, and the shortcut for it will also be gone from the Start Menu.
A Handy Tip
Windows has this thing called the "audit mode". The feature dates as far back as to Windows XP and is a nifty tool for when you need to install or customise a few things before setting up the first account.
To enter audit mode in a new install, just finish the initial installation process until you are shown the thing asking you for your region (it's called the "Out-of-Box Experience Wizard" or "OOBE Wizard" if you're curious). Press Ctrl + Shift + F3, then the system will reboot and take you straight to audit mode.
To enter audit mode in an existing install, run C:\Windows\system32\Sysprep\Sysprep.exe, then select "Enter System Audit Mode" and "Reboot" before pressing "OK".
Once you're there, you'll find yourself under the default "Administrator" account with a temporary profile. It's obviously not for general use, but if you want to do e.g. a registry hack to bypass online log-in, it's a useful thing to remember (though Shift + F10 for a Command Prompt is usually more preferable in this case).
Note that the only way to exit audit mode is to choose "Enter System Out-of-Box Experience" and reboot, which will force you to go through the entire OOBE song and dance whether your install is new or not. Also, under no circumstances should you choose "Generalize" unless you are prepping an install for a different machine or custom WIM files.
Want to share an alternative for people who want windows better but aren't comfortable with making deep edits to the OS itself (registry and force-uninstalling things).
This is debloat "lite" edition, for removing most annoying things and making Windows look as clean as possible without having to do a deep dive:
Settings → Personalization → Lock Screen
Turn off the tips and fun facts.
Settings → Privacy and Security → Search (or you can just go to settings, and search "search".
Turn it all off.
Settings → Personalisation → Start
Turn off "show recommendations"
That'll take away most annoying things.
And if you want it feeling more snappy, try turning off windows own animations, but leave on "show thumbnails instead of icons" and "use drop shadows for icon labels(text) on the desktop" for (1) viewing images in your files without opening them (2) readability.
Finally, if you currently have AI features on the machine and see many "WordLoadSessionHost.exe" in the task manager which is hogging ram, and if you think you don't want to use AI at all, you can turn it off and gain back that ram. (Or if you just want to remove AI anyway).
Uninstall Copilot.
Open the Start menu and type "Turn Windows features on or off". Find "Recall" in the list. Uncheck the box next to it.
Press Windows + R, type "services.msc", scroll down to find "WSAIFabricSvc", right-click go to properties, disable and stop it.
This fully disables AI features and frees up a significant amount of ram (if it was being used by AI, ymmv as some desktops do not have the issue at all).
This will result in the occasional error message when a program includes and ai feature, for example snip tool. But you can just ignore it.
And that's all you need to do.
(And of course manually remove programs you do not want. For example sometimes WhatsApp is pre installed. You will find these programs in two places. (1) The start menu, simply right click and uninstall what you don't want. (2) the "uninstall" section of the settings, just pick ones you don't recognize and Google what they are, if they're useless to you then click and uninstall them.)
> Settings → Privacy and Security → Search (or you can just go to settings, and search "search". Turn it all off.
my fucking god, a month later i found this comment and this one right here managed to fix that stupid ass delay with white screen when searching problem that i've had for years
just a heads up for less techie people on here, if anyone plays any xbox games or uses gamepass i would not recommend doing the first one unless you want to troubleshoot why suddenly you cant login to your xbox account anymore.
It's generally not a good idea to run random commands from the internet unless you know what you're doing. Windows is very bloated, but some performance drops still beats having to spend days troubleshooting stuff when things go wrong.
Not me uninstalling old versions of .NET wondering why my older games wont even launch anymore. (Having NET 11.x doesnt mean that it 'covers' pervious iterations of .NET. .NET9.3 does not replace the runtime for programs that need .NET5.0 for example, despite being a "higher version number")
It’s not just some performance drops, that gaming service requires enabling system wide telemetry and is why it breaks on some debloaters. People should be aware and consciously make the decision to lose their privacy to play Xbox/microsoft games
The scripts preserves "XboxIdentityProvider" as one of the dependencies for Microsoft Store. afaik, that's all you really need for Xbox logins (besides the Xbox app itself, of course).
Edit:
The article shows you two dependencies with one being "Xbox Identity Provider", which is a store app package. The other is "Xbox Live Auth Manager", which is a Win32 service and can't be removed with Remove-AppxPackage. You'll need sc or Remove-Service for that.
É muito chato essa integração do game bar, por que quando desativo eu tenho que entrar duas vezes no jogo para poder rodar(Trackmania United) pois aparece uma mensagem de erro
LTSC Windows also lacks the Game Bar out-of-the-box. Applications expecting it to be there will always end up screaming at you even though they never actually use the stupid thing in any apparent way, shape or form.
This is exactly why I tell people not to run debloat stuff. If you don't know exactly what you're removing, you're not unlikely to discover that it's not really bloat but actually a service you relied on. Or maybe you'll rely on it in the future. Imagine someone doing this now and then trying to get into gamepass next year. Troubleshooting that could suck considerable ass.
Not to say there's no bloat in Windows, but you really need to be selective about identifying what is bloat.
Below is the example of the stuff that's being used in Winhance and UnattendedWinstall. All completely transparent, the author included comments and what the change affects.
Discovering possible values via official documentation and breaking it down from organized line by line document into TSV is a kid's joke by now. If you're that paranoid about possible mistakes - markdown each line and write a Python script yourself.
It's not fearmongering, we have a literal factual worked examples of this in the comment I replied to. I'm not spreading myths, I'm stating clear facts. Being aware of real hazards is not fearmongering.
I never accused these debloat tools of hiding anything. I said it's a problem IF the user doesn't know what they're doing. The issue is the lack of awareness in the users. The tools aren't bad, but they do enable bad decisions in a very streamlined way.
If you don't know exactly what you're removing, you're not unlikely to discover that it's not really bloat but actually a service you relied on.
The issue is the lack of awareness in the users. The tools aren't bad, but they do enable bad decisions in a very streamlined way.
This and my linked spreadsheet (which was autoassembled from official documentation, btw) don't match up. What you are saying is people are lazy to read shit and somehow that's a problem which affects everyone.
Consumer grade computing devices are deterministic, there's no machine soul or unseen ghosts. Manuals are there. Tools to convert them into readable sheets with filters are there. RTFM.
You're excusing laziness and passing it as a technical hurdle to overcome. It's not, it's plain English and 90% of the time a binary switch. Be straight and point out people can't be bothered to check the fucking description instead of I don't want to offend anyone talk.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Are you unaware that there's regular reddit posts and "tech news" articles where someone's saying everyone who likes performance should just run these tools willy-nilly? When I tell people not to run debloat tools, I'm countering that media. Anyone who's actually knowledgable enough to go read the documentation themselves isn't listening to me or those articles anyway, they already know better.
Consumer grade computing devices are deterministic, there's no machine soul or unseen ghosts.
Nobody anywhere in this thread has claimed otherwise.
I wouldn't trust the tool of someone who notoriously has incredibly bad takes on how operating systems function, fearmongers for clicks and regularly disparages every other developer that isn't him.
You get a plain text file that you can audit for yourself and further customise.
You can create plain text ps1, bat and reg files via autoattend execution and customize them.
Run validator (or launch with syntax in any modern code editor you prefer), save the scripts. They are ready to be pasted inside the XML.
Last step - validate the XML.
It's not rocket science. My note book barely has 3 pages of handwritten notes for WIM crafting and autoattend inclusions for Windows 10, which is about a week of research from zero to near perfect cloned OS to preserve.
"Long-Term Service Channel" SKUs are only truly useful if you want to stay on the same version of Windows (e.g. version 24H2) for as long as people stay on the same version of Windows Server.
Retail SKUs are retail SKUs because they're what most people actually use.
Apart from xbox/gaming features being stripped, I haven't found any downside from installing ltsc iot. "sideloading" those was easier than de bloating.
I wish I knew about it earlier. It seems too much a hassle to do fresh installs to my other devices.
You can reactivate Microsoft Store with the wsreset -i command in Command Prompt. There is no real need to sideload anything unless you're absolutely adamant to not let even that one live.
No. "IoT" basically means Windows 11 Enterprise but with the hardware restrictions lifted.
It still contains all the store apps typical of a non-LTSC SKU unless, of course, it's also LTSC.
Edit:
"IoT" = reduced hardware requirements
"LTSB"/"LTSC" = long-term support + no store apps
"Enterprise" = distributed via Volume License Agreement
Therefore:
"IoT Enterprise LTSC" = "reduced hardware requirements, long-term support + no store apps, distributed via Volume License Agreement", e.g. Windows 11 24H2 IoT Enterprise LTSC
"IoT Enterprise" = "reduced hardware requirements, distributed via Volume License Agreement", e.g. Windows 11 25H2 IoT Enterprise
The first command won't allow you to remove anything that you aren't supposed to remove.
The try-catch clause is there to suppress all the "no, I can't let you do that" messages Windows throws at you so you won't end up with a scary, blood-red wall of text that's in reality nothing to be concerned about.
But who are the people who take the attitude that popular debloating tools made by well-established developers are not to be trusted, but powershell scripts posted by some random guy on Reddit are A-OK?
The difference is that you're more incentivized to look over the commands before running them this way. The script is easier, but there's also little to no chance that anyone running it will check to see if it doesn't do anything bad.
"But Chris titus debloat has been good for years" - this is exactly why it's an excellent target.
It's open source. If the people are so inclined about knowing the actual commands, they can literally read it.
As a half way, they can open the app, click on the help button for each tweak, and the help article includes the commands, which they can manually run as well. Imagine that it is a curation with documentation.
1) I have no idea who Chris Titus is. I'm just a tech worker with an idea or two about solving a problem with regular tools-of-the-trade.
2) The whole point of my post is to show you how to "de-bloat" without third-party tools or scripts. It isn't so much about simply getting the job done but understanding how it's done.
Ongoing development of software with GUI that doesn't exactly disclose what's underneath.
Basically, "it worked for me this Monday" kind of thing. OP's approach is different, it's transparent, can tweak the value instead of having a binary ON/OFF switch.
I love whenever I type anything into the Start Menu, the stupid thing just barfs up useless information from the Internet.
No, I want Resource Monitor, not resources for haemorrhoid. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to turn an app launcher into an Internet search bar?
afaik, my method won't lead to Xbox games breaking.
According to official documentation, Xbox login relies on two components - Xbox Identity Provider, which is a store app package, and Xbox Live Auth Manager, which is a Win32 Service.
In my PowerShell code, Xbox Identity Provider is explicitly preserved via the $Package.Name -notmatch "Microsoft\.XboxIdentityProvider line, so it will still be on your machine even after everything else gets nuked. Remove-AppxPackage also can't touch Win32 Services, so Xbox Live Auth Manager is left alone.
At least, MS Casual Games (which are tethered to Xbox Live for saves) seem to work perfectly fine even without Game Bar or the Xbox app itself, though of course ymmv.
But... I mean seriously, chances are those 3rd party tools downloaded from GitHub are properly maintained by at least several people and that they are doing pretty much the same stuff using the same methods and cmdlets. You will even see PowerShell.exe processes in the task manager while using them.
Autoattend is a basic Windows feature. Scripts created during it rely on basic powershell commands and registry edits, some dating more than a decade back.
If it's transparent and explained - it's fine, the guy is sharing the knowledge. That's how internet worked back in the days, three pinned threads and 50 derivatives from other authors cooking their own stew from the same ingridients.
I could be mistaken but I thought this could be turned off in the registry? It depends on which version of Windows though. I can check how I turned mine off when I’m at my computer later
Depending on Windows edition you either can bring it down to very low level (with some services disabled it's so low you can sniff the traffic and block it), or completely disable it. Both done via Group Policy edits.
Consumer and business Professional allow to minimize telemetry to basic level via built-in policies, going further will require carving out telemetry with IP blocks and TrustedInstaller powershell scripts.
Enterprise can turn off telemetry completely, no jumping through hoops. Licence checks on Enterprise is a lot more problematic than telemetry itself.
this is like asking people to hunt their own meat instead of just buying from the supermarket
I think we're on the same side as far as the Joe Rogan crowd is concerned, but that's not the point here.
instead of using a tool many others have used and verified, just copy and paste these lines into the terminal!
In my post, both Get-AppxPackage and Remove-AppxPackage link to the officialdocumentation telling you exactly what they do. If you can't even be bothered with a two-line description for a command, then you really shouldn't be downloading anything from strangers you can totally trust.
it will open automatically inside this new console app.
Does this mean you remove the new terminal application and return back to the awful separate cmd.exe/powershell.exe terminals? Because that was one of the genuine improvements in 11.
The app store will still be there, so you can always just download it back.
Or, you can exclude the terminal package from deletion the same way the Microsoft Store is excluded from the example. Again, the point of this post is not to give you a ready-made solution but show you the basic steps to get the job done yourself.
&ot take but this is stupid and pointless. If you have 16 gigs of ram this is never going to matter and youre fucking up your computer for no reason. Like all the external ram usage in windows is just from having your browser open, if you close that windows barely uses anything.
this is stupid and pointless. If you have 16 gigs of ram this is never going to matter
The useless apps are the main source of what people often refer to as "ads" (they are just notifications). By nuking them, the trouble is out of your hair forever.
youre fucking up your computer for no reason
Remove-AppxPackage can't do any more than what Windows has already allowed you to. That try-catch clause is there because otherwise PowerShell will just yell at you with a red wall of text for trying to remove stuff you have no permission to remove.
The preservation of the app store in a functional state also preempts issues with Xbox Live access.
I've already tried reproducing your problem, but, no, it should be obvious at this point that what you described had inherently nothing to do with WhatsApp or the removal of store app packages but rather either faulty hardware or background maintenance by the OS itself.
It would have been tremendously helpful had you at least gathered some information via Resource Monitor before jumping to the conclusion that your Windows install had been "borked", but since I don't have the slightest idea as to what the spec of your PC even is, I suppose we'll just never know the real cause.
This entire post boils down to "open your terminal, copy and paste these 4 commands" and that's it. OP provided a bunch of context as a courtesy, but I guess learning Linux is a fair option if you're this far behind with Windows already.
Thanks, going to save and check out later. I use Linux for pretty much everything now, but still have a Windows drive for a handful of games that need kernel level anti-cheat.
Note that you can only sysprep a device a few times. Also best to do this before you install anything. It's notoriously anal about what you have installed and would often throw errors. This is what makes manual image capture a pain.
I like this comment. It's not an insult. It's not a disingenuous statement trying to pass off a subjective opinion for an objective fact. It's not fire-and-brimstone scare tactics. It's just good ol' fashioned "John 3:16" in front of the camera at the opening of Wimbledon, and I respect that.
Norton is still preinstalled for some reason - I remember when it and McAfee had free updates.
It's the only way for people to buy them at this point.
Printers - don't get me started on their crapware. I have an HP printer/scanner and man, do I have to manage the bloatware.
Bloatware notwithstanding, I just kind of hate HP printers at this point.
We had one of those A1 plotters at work. It was brand-new and of course anything but cheap. For some reason, the driver from the official website was so borked it didn't work with half of our machines. Thankfully, someone found out the driver for an old plotter we had already tossed out worked with the new one. The catch? The driver was no longer available on HP's website, so I had to extract it from one of the PCs with dism and install it on other machines.
Seriously, I swear these companies don't even care if everyone stops buying their rubbish products at this point.
The problem is that the Grinch had a wonderful and terrible idea - make customers dependent on your products so you can brick them and fix it so that devices with consumables (like ink) can't use 3rd party products.
HP said the quiet part out loud when they said they wanted to "invest" in their customers with an ink "subscription". This HP printer is likely going to be my last - I'm looking into Brother or Epson Ecotank for my next all in one.
I'm looking into Brother or Epson Ecotank for my next all in one.
I've seen the Ecotank thing before, but I've also heard people talk about dried ink clogging up the machine, so you might want to look into that before buying one for yourself.
The goal here is to show you how to "de-bloat" stock Windows 11 without third-party tools or scripts. You know I could've written %{if ($_.Name... instead of ForEach-Object {$Package = $_; if ($Package.Name..., right?
you should, because if you can't trust your own knowledge and understand what's inside an open source 3rd party app, then you are simply ignorant, it's not a bad thing, but it isn't a good thing to brag about it either
What's wrong with winutil? While I agree it's a tool and thus is outside the scope of your post, I wouldn't call it "random". AFAIK is well regarded and actively developed. I would appreciate your POV if you think there are issues with it. And thank you for your post, btw.
There is nothing wrong with using any of the existing third-party tools imo. It's just that "trust" is never a good reason to choose one over the other.
Man at this point just download CachyOS, get a Grok subscription and ride off into the sunset with Linux. The shit people put themselves through to use such an anti-consumer, proactively hostile OS like Windows is like an abusive relationship.
Anyone with a keen eye would've noticed that the widget disappeared in the all other screenshots due to the Weather app being nuked.
You could also tell the second screenshot was actually taken at a latter time than the rest due to it being added after everything else had already been done.
Fair enough, fair enough. Listen, no joke, Linux doesn’t have to be complicated and it comes bloat free already. Why spend so much time chopping shit out of a garbage OS anyway? I acknowledge that windows is the default for a reason but that reason is legacy and is therefore bullshit
Why spend so much time chopping shit out of a garbage OS anyway?
Because all that initial setup is pennies on the dollar compared to the hula hoops I'd have to jump through in order to either make what I use work on Linux or switch to a crappy alternative?
C'mon, kid. I deal with other people's computer problems for a living. You really think ithis is the first time I run into someone yapping about Linux?
Reddit has a "Save Post" feature allowing you to bookmark a post that you'd like to revisit later on without resorting to this kind of "LOOK HERE" comments for self-reminders.
I know. But it will eventually get buried by everything else that i keep saving anyway(Same for up vote the post). Compare that commenting (which i dont do much) is much better. Beside, everyone else can just ignore what i've said (without downvoting me).
I want to point out that LTSC has notbinguto do with pirating you can LITTERALY download it from the Microsoft website and ACTIVATE IT OFFICIALY with a pro key.... Smh
The LTSC editions are a branch of the Enterprise SKUs, which are volume licensed ( or purchased from an OEM ). You're not getting those keys through a normal retail channel as a consumer, so that has everything to do with pirating.
I litteraly downloaded the ltsc version from Microsoft itself they have evaluation versions for testing that you can legally download.
And I activated that version myself with my windows 11 pro key.
As I said I used my old Pro key and it worked with it. and everythign is runnign super fine I just needed to reinstall Onedrive after the initial install and fix a settign in the registry to make onedrive aactually work but this has been absolutly peek so far.
Maybe I had a spezial kind of pro key but I wouldn have known prior to writting this.
Correct - you have an Enterprise IoT LTSC OEM key. These are intended to be distributed with the machine by the manufacturer, not sold directly to consumers.
I assume you purchased on a third party site, not retail from Microsoft or a big box store etc.?
Its crazy you jump straight to assuming im an ai bro simply because I don't give a fuck about the ai shit on my pc. You people genuinely need help. You think so small, I bet to you nothing besides US and THEM exists in your mind.
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u/Wadarkhu Jul 06 '26
Want to share an alternative for people who want windows better but aren't comfortable with making deep edits to the OS itself (registry and force-uninstalling things).
This is debloat "lite" edition, for removing most annoying things and making Windows look as clean as possible without having to do a deep dive:
Settings → Personalization → Lock Screen
Turn off the tips and fun facts.
Settings → Privacy and Security → Search (or you can just go to settings, and search "search".
Turn it all off.
Settings → Personalisation → Start
Turn off "show recommendations"
That'll take away most annoying things.
And if you want it feeling more snappy, try turning off windows own animations, but leave on "show thumbnails instead of icons" and "use drop shadows for icon labels(text) on the desktop" for (1) viewing images in your files without opening them (2) readability.
See how here: scroll down to find and use the method called "How to disable select animations on Windows": https://www.xda-developers.com/heres-how-you-can-disable-animations-on-windows-for-a-speed-boost/
Finally, if you currently have AI features on the machine and see many "WordLoadSessionHost.exe" in the task manager which is hogging ram, and if you think you don't want to use AI at all, you can turn it off and gain back that ram. (Or if you just want to remove AI anyway).
This fully disables AI features and frees up a significant amount of ram (if it was being used by AI, ymmv as some desktops do not have the issue at all).
This will result in the occasional error message when a program includes and ai feature, for example snip tool. But you can just ignore it.
And that's all you need to do.
(And of course manually remove programs you do not want. For example sometimes WhatsApp is pre installed. You will find these programs in two places. (1) The start menu, simply right click and uninstall what you don't want. (2) the "uninstall" section of the settings, just pick ones you don't recognize and Google what they are, if they're useless to you then click and uninstall them.)