You know all that bloatware that appears in the start menu on even a clean install of
Windows 11? Well, what if I told you, you could install Windows without all
that bloatware with just two clicks? I made a tweet about this and it went kind of viral,
got over a million views. So I figured I'd make a video with a bit more details about it and
how you can de-bloat it even more for other stuff that people might consider bloatware.
And the trick is extremely simple. When you go to do a clean install of Windows and you
see this screen come up for the installer, all you have to do is change the region
and currency option to "English (World)". Then you go through the install process exactly the
same as you would otherwise. And when you do the first restart to start the out of box experience,
the only thing different you'll notice is you will get an error that says "OOBEREGION".
You can just skip that. That's just because it doesn't know
what region you're in because you put world. Then after that, again,
you continue exactly the same and eventually you'll get into Windows and it'll pop up the
start menu and you'll have a nice clean start menu. Now there is one thing you'll want to do,
because if you open up the Microsoft Store, for example, you'll see that there's an error.
It doesn't know what region you're in, so it doesn't know what currency to use. So you're
going to have to go into the settings and just change the region to what you actually are,
and then it'll work again. And I can confirm that even if you restart,
the bloatware does not come back. So once it's gone, it's gone.
And the reason this works is the bloatware is region specific. Depending on the country,
you're going to have different apps installed. So if you put world,
it doesn't know where you are. So it just doesn't put any. Now, a few things I want
to clarify though. First of all, yes, all the default Microsoft apps are still installed.
It's just the third party apps that don't show up in the start menu anymore. I got a lot of people
complaining on Twitter saying, "oh, it doesn't remove all the Microsoft bloatware." Listen,
if a stranger walks up to you and gives you a dollar, do you complain,
"Why isn't it $5?" Just take a win when you can.
Another thing to clarify is technically these third party bloatware apps are not
actually installed. They are essentially shortcuts. And if you click on them,
they do automatically install from the Microsoft store. But still, whether they're installed or
not, you still have to right click on every single one and uninstall each individually.
And it's just a pain. It's a waste of time. So it still saves you time. And if you look
at the normal experience, you'll actually see that in addition to extra third party apps,
there's also additional Microsoft apps in the start menu that aren't in this clean
one. So if you don't want all that stuff in the start menu, that saves you a bit of time too.
As for the Microsoft apps that are built in, I looked at the "All Apps" menu in the start menu,
and it looks exactly the same. So besides the third party app shortcuts in the start menu,
everything else is the same. Now, even though the Microsoft apps are still pre-installed,
you can actually go through and uninstall them manually
in the start menu by right clicking most of them and doing uninstall.
So if you consider all that bloatware, you can still de-bloat it that way. Now for any
advanced users who even want to uninstall some of the apps that you can't right click and uninstall,
there is actually a way to do it using PowerShell. This is a bit advanced,
but I figured I'd go over it just for the people who want it, to make this a comprehensive guide.
Basically, I created a PowerShell script. I uploaded it to GitHub if you want to download it,
and it essentially allows you to see all the packages that are installed and uninstall them,
even if you can't through the start menu. I'll put the link in the description,
but I recommend right clicking where it says "Raw" and downloading it that way by saving.
If you just copy and paste it, there's a digital signature. And if you don't copy
everything exactly, Windows might yell at you, but I just put that there to be easier
on certain security policies. Anyway, to use it, what you'll do is search for
PowerShell and open it. You might have to run as administrator, but I did not here.
Then just drag the script in or type in the path, and you'll probably get an error about
how scripts are not allowed to be run on the computer. And that's just because we
need to change the execution policy. I put the command for that right in the script,
so you can open that with notepad and look for this here, set execution policy.
And what this one does is only changes it temporarily for the current session. So copy
that in and put it into PowerShell and you'll see it says "scope process". That means it's
only going to apply this for the current process window. So just run that and you can confirm it
worked by typing in Get-ExecutionPolicy, and it should say "RemoteSigned" instead of Restricted.
And you can confirm this if you open up a newer PowerShell window and type
Get-ExecutionPolicy into that, you'll see it says Restricted there. So again,
it's only that other window temporarily. After you have that set, you can either drag the
script in again or press the up arrow keys to go through previous commands and run it again.
It might ask you if you want to trust the signer, which is me,
so you can hit yes for that. Now you'll see that the script shows you a big list
of all the AppX packages they're called, that are installed in Windows. But keep in mind,
some of these are important and it's not all the stuff that appears in the start menu.
There are some that are behind the scenes that are critical to Windows. So don't be just going
and uninstalling all of these. Only uninstall ones where you know what they do and you want to get
rid of them. Then it's going to have you create a List.txt file, put it in the same place as the
script, and you'll want to copy only the names of the packages you want to uninstall into that.
So let's look and we can see, for example, Windows Phone. If we right click that,
it doesn't give us the option to uninstall it. So we can look for that in the list of
package names. And here it is. I'm going to copy the full package name, but you can copy
either. If you haven't created the List.txt file yet, do that now and just paste it in.
If you have multiple, again, do multiple lines,
but I only have the one. Then hit any key to continue and it'll look for the text file.
And here I actually realized PowerShell was in the user folder, not the desktop folder. So it
couldn't find it. So I just do "cd desktop" and now it's in there. Run the script again.
And this time it works. It should uninstall them all. So in our case, if we go back and
look at the start menu and look at the bottom, the Windows Phone one is not there anymore. It
will tell you if one of the names you enter in the list file is not found. So if we run again, when
the phone thing is already uninstalled, you'll see that it says that it couldn't find that one.
And if you have multiple, it'll tell you all the ones that weren't found. And behind the scenes,
the script is very simple. You can see it's not very long. It just uses the command to
print out the list of packages. Then it looks in the list file,
it gets that list and goes through the list of packages, checks if each one is found by the name.
And if it is, it uninstalls it. And there's also some error checking in
there in case something goes wrong, it'll let you know. So now for those of you who want to
debloat Windows 11 to the maximum without any third party tools, besides the script,
of course, now you can use that. But at least it's pretty simple and open source,
you can see exactly what it does. I should point out that there's
obviously plenty of other tools available on the internet to de-bloat Windows 11,
some more complicated than others. There is one example, Tiny11, which is a custom made
ISO that someone made that effectively has a way reduced version of Windows in there.
But again, that's third party, but apparently it can run on very old or weak computers with
a lot less resource overhead. As for me, I try to always stay first party if possible.
That's why I wrote the script. Also, I want to point out, I did not discover this trick with
the English world thing. I read about it on either one or multiple blogs a long time ago.
I believe this is the one that I heard about it first on,
and was able to just try it the other day. And that's why I tweeted about it.
But apparently very few people knew about it because after the tweet went viral,
then there was a whole bunch of news articles now that were written about it. So now everyone knows.
And I don't believe that Microsoft will patch this because it's not really a bug. They kind
of have to have those options in there for licensing reasons of the different
third party apps they use. Another thing I believe this should also work on Windows 10.
I don't see why not. And apparently you can also select "English (Europe)" if you want,
but English World is a lot closer to the default.
Anyway, enough rambling. Hopefully now you guys know multiple methods for how
to de-bloat to varying degrees. If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful,
be sure to give it a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm. If you want to subscribe,
I try to make videos about twice a week, usually Wednesday and Saturday.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is one where I made
a new app for generating memes with a hundred percent AI. I think you'll
find it pretty entertaining. You can actually use it yourself. I'll put
that link right there. So thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.