Windows 10: Uninstalling Specific Apps for All Users

Hey guys,

I am interested in setting up some company-wide commands to remove a lot of the built-in crap from Windows 10. Employees don't need to be using the Xbox app, and we don't need Get Office, Get Skype etc as we already have those installed using the administrator account before the user logs in.

I was looking at Brink's useful tutorial here, and the option that would pertain to this is "To uninstall all Windows apps for only new added accounts afterwards"

I notice that uses Get-AppXProvisionedPackages instead of just Get-AppxPackage.

The thing is, I don't want to remove *all* the apps, some of them are actually useful, such as the photo gallery and calculator. I'd rather specify them manually...

I did some tinkering around with Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage, but cannot get it to work. I get errors similar to this:




Can somebody help me do this? Or is it simply not possible in Windows 10? I know there was a way to do it in 8 and 8.1, as I found some TechNet blog articles about it, with examples.

Related question: can PowerShell commands be deployed over Group Policy? I know you can do cmd ones, and we already have a cmd file that's executed when the user logs on for the first time.
If not, I can just make a note to do it using the admin account before joining the domain.

:)

 

Uninstalling Win 10 apps from ALL users

Hello!

I’ve been using Remove-AppxPackage command in a script to uninstall unnecessary Windows apps from our business computers. It was successful so far, or so I thought. Recently I found almost 3 GB folder with
Asphalt 8 Airborne game on a computer that I ran uninstall for every user that has a profile on it.

Now when I run Get-AppxPackage -user for every user, I don’t see the package listed, but if I run
Get-AppxPackage -allusers, I can see the game plus bunch of other games and other apps that I thought I removed. Checked
WindowsApps folder and there they are.

I tried drastic measures by taking ownership of game folders, but I cannot delete any files or folders there. Besides, I and probably many others want to have scriptable way to uninstall apps and cleanup
WindowsApps folder.

I like Win 10, snappy and reliable so far, runs well even on 10 years old computers. But we need to run a business and I don’t want my users to see anything that will distract them or will lead to unnecessary support calls. I’d prefer to have an ability
to write group policy with approved win apps and nothing else gets installed. If Microsoft wants wider adoption of Win 10 in business, they should do it. Maybe it exists in Win 10 Ent, but SMB cannot afford that.

All done on Win 10 Pro 1703, Windows domain environment.

Regards

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

 

Uninstalling Win 10 apps from ALL users

Hi Igor,

Thank you for sharing this to the community. Have you already tried to perform a disk clean up? Normally, this method can resolve this issue. You can check and review the process from our support site on this
link.

We will wait for your response.

Regards.

 

Hello, *Smile

It looks like you didn't include the PackageFullName for the app in the command using step 4 in OPTION THREE below.

remove-AppxProvisionedPackage PackageFullName

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4...a.html#option3

 

Ah, OK. I was thinking you needed that -online flag...

I also found this via some searching:
Get-appxprovisionedpackage –online | where-object {$_.packagename –like “*officehub*”} | remove-appxprovisionedpackage –online

That seems to work too.

Question about the package names: do they change based on hardware or is it always the same? If the packages get new versions as they get updated, it might be safer to search for it, no?

 

The package name is based on the app itself. Usually, it'll stay the same for the app after updates though.

 

Is there any harm in using the search method though?

Also, is there an equivalent to a .bat file for PowerShell commands? I know you can save it as a certain type of script, but then that has to be imported and it's a bit of a pain.

Edit: never mind. I found out how to deploy a PowerShell script over Group Policy.