Windows 10: Question about removing all apps in Final/RTM Windows 10

not talkin about addons, talkin about standard ones
Weather sport finance etc

 

There's so many 'default' ones now that you can't uninstall the normal way! *Sad

 

None of those "phone home" or use resources unless you use them.

 

And why would anyone want to. If you don't use them they don't have any affect on the PC.

 

Well... I am kind of an XP enthusiast who got persuaded rather late to switch to W7 (mid 2012) and now with W10 seeing that it will be the base of all future Windows upgrade packages or whatever we want to call it... I am already checking out how to perfectly setup everything as slim as possible. And I am that far that I have a rather big bunch of services deactivated already with no impact for everything I do except for the fact that I am certain now that Windows doesnt phone home, doesnt waste system resources unless i give instructions, and doesnt change software etc. unless i want it to.
Also my memory footprint is pretty low and there is absolutely ZERO background noise (CPU% wise, disk% wise) going on AT ALL TIMES.









Some comments on the services...
Not all of them can be disabled in the services.msc console -> some of them have to be disabled in the regedit by setting their "Start" values to "4" (-> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services )

My network is a fixed IP configuration so I have DHCP disabled with no negative effect.

Also I purposely dont use any Task Schedule stuff because disabling the Task Scheduler comes with the advantage of Windows not fiddling around with ANYTHING in the background anymore. ( You are in control of your system but you are also FULLY responsible for maintenance tasks if you should need them! )

I always disable Windows Update until I am certain that I want to recieve another batch of updates again after having checked the MS site for the newly released updates.

I disable Search because I use freeware tools that index my whole disks like "Everything" or "Ava-Find" and that are not implemented in every single search bar of my computer. If I want to search something, I open the program and look for it. I dont want a search bar in every corner of my desktop giving me one million suggestions and autofills... I know how to search what I want to search - Thank you...

Defender... NOPE, Error Reporting? ... NOPE, Remote Access?... NEVER, Diagnostics xxx?... NOPE!

Yeah, and basically there is even more services that you can safely disable but those are either totally inactive when it comes to disk / cpu activity and they mostly have a pretty small memory footprint.

For example the "Program Compatibility Assistant". You can disable it if you dont need it ever. And you can also disable it and re-enable it just for the times you need to start an exe file in compat. mode ... if you do that rarely.
Of course if you several main programs that you need to run in compatibility mode then it is a different story...

Still there are many other services that can be disabled as well as their use is rather specific.
I for example have 23 services disabled, 49 running and the rest is just on manual and mostly not running anyways.

I am guessing if I take some weeks of research and testing and maybe some knowledge exchange with BlackViper (our all windows service god) then I can reduce the 49 running even further down to maybe 25.
Also even more of the services that are set to manual but are almost never running can be disabled but that is a task when the main stuff is taken care of.

Also a good way is of course to check blackvipers site and go for win7 win8 configurations and work your way through.

Apps are uninstalled if possible through power shell or manually by checking out those folders:

C:\Windows\SystemApps
C:\Windows\InfusedApps
C:\Windows\ImmersiveControlPanel
C:\Windows\DevicesFlow
C:\Windows\PrintDialog
C:\Windows\PrintDialog3D
C:\Windows\MiracastView

you have to work your way through these and just try to delete them and maybe disable certain services or processes as soon as they bring up angry access denied / dependency messages.
also you can just use the search term "appx" to find pretty much all app-related stuff on your drive.
if you are someone who likes testing out stuff and trying out how far you can go with manually removing stuff then this is the way to go to make sure you remove everything and not just turn a "switch" in some settings to "off" or "uninstall" when it actually doesnt really remove the data of the apps...

 

I was playing around with the Technet script - but gave up after a short while since I wasn't having any luck allowing PS scripts to run. I tried two of the prescribed methods and said "Ok, that was fun - I'll try again later"

There are four System apps that you won't be able to uninstall

• Settings - You can't uninstall Control panel either *Wink
  
  
• Search (Cortana) - this is wrapping it's tentacles around the system.
  Search has always been tied closely with the OS since at least Vista
  
  
• Store - manage and update the universal apps, requiring this and Settings make perfect sense to me
  
  
• Edge - not sure if that is really tied that tightly to the OS or if it's because MS locked it for the Preview

 

Charles “Black Viper” Sparks has always done nice work - I just visited his site just now and WOW - he cleaned up his image. Only a week or two ago, he still had a leather jacket ... but now he's a suit! *Wink
Black Viper | www.blackviper.com

I haven't used his tools on Win10 yet, but most likely will when I update to Win10. I have a few that I routinely disable (UPnP, SSDP, Server, Computer Browser, NetBios) because I don't use those services. It's important that a user knows enough about their machine before they play around with services. BlackViper helps a lot there.

It doesn't improve performance because the services load and go idle, it does stop them from initially loading though. Disabling services is more of a deployment strategy than maintenance or for improving performance.