Hands-On Windows 182: Win11Debloat Gets a GUI

0:00Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at a major update to my favorite Windows 11 utility. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Toit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows on Palthrot and this week we're going to take a look at an update to win 11 DiBloat which is one of those great utilities I've mentioned in the past for kind of de-insertifying Windows. In fact, what came out of this is I ended writing a book about de-insertifying Windows called De-insertify Windows 11 which I'm not trying to sell you on exactly but we've discussed a lot of the topics in this book on this show. We've gone through a bunch of the utilities that I mentioned in this book like Tiny 11 Builder which you can use to create a really clean install of Windows 11 if you want to start fresh or win 11 DiBloat which is a great way to clean and existing Windows 11 install. But since the last time we talked

1:05about this the author of Win 11 DiBloat has issued a major update that I think will be quite appealing to people especially if you're not super happy using command line utilities and so forth. When we first talked about it it was completely text-based and it's still a power shell script behind the scenes but it's easy to run and there's a GUI now and so I'm on the Win 11 DiBloat site this is on GitHub it has a picture of the UI there but if you scroll down he has this really handy way to get this script running remotely and so what you have to do is start a terminal window but run it with admin privileges like so and I don't really have to make this any bigger because it's going to download and unpack the zip file that includes the CXC and then the XC is going to run and there it is. So unfortunately this thing does not, let me see if I can get it as big as it

2:07can be but it won't really fill the screen it's kind of an awkward app in some ways but again much friendlier than it used to be. So there are two modes now there's the default mode which I do not recommend and then a custom setup which we'll look at in a minute so if you go to default mode what you're going to get here is the scripts or the apps recommend or desired configuration right so he's removing a lot of applications to sabling telemetry to sabling widgets etc you can see the list here it's a lot of stuff it's only being applied to the current user that's good except for the apps which are being applied to all users I'm not sure about that one and he has auto selected this option down here for the restore point which actually does make sense however let me back out of that I do not recommend that so I'm going to run that one more time because I think the real power here isn't just stripping everything out of windows because at that point you might find that you need some of it back but rather to just strip the stuff out

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8:21something so something does happen you'll notice that you can remove Microsoft Edge which I'm not going to do here because I'm actually using it this time it despite what it says here you can do this anywhere you can remove this or works fine it does work fine you can also remove one drive although one drive is one of those apps that you can remove from the native UI so normally I would select a lot more apps here but you get the idea of the select the one and this is where the real magic happens so in the system tweak screen there's a lot going on of course strongly recommend going through all of this but I would pretty much just say yes to all of this stuff under privacy and suggested content right the big thing here and this is something you could do with a registry or a group policy hack is actually disabling telemetry right not making it do less which is built into the UI but actually disabling it so that's huge we're going to look at some AI stuff here in a future episode but again I strongly recommend going through this I would also look at everything

9:25here in Windows update right you don't want necessarily want you might want but I don't want the computer to automatically restart every single time does an update right I want to be told about that I want to be given the opportunity to do it myself I don't want to lose any data obviously although Windows is pretty good about that stuff and then you could just go through this right obviously I've had recommended section to start menu you know you might want to disable Bing search I'm not even sure if I have that installed I've already removed that actually so it's not going to do anything but you can disable whatever you want to disable here so this is you know it's just pretty straightforward this is actually really nice and then you get to the screen and now it's going to tell you what it's going to do which is great it's going to tell you where it's going to apply these changes typically would want it to be the current user if you have a computer with multiple users you may not want to remove the apps for everybody you might want to just do that for the current user account your user account that's up to you of course

10:26but when you get down to the bottom here strongly recommend creating a system restore point and also restarting Windows Explorer the process if you're making any changes to explore based on that previous screen you might not see some of them unless you reboot or restart Explorer will do that for you I'm not going to do it right now but I do normally have that option chosen so from there you apply and bam that's done now the only wrinkle here is if you choose to uninstall Windows Explorer sorry Microsoft Edge close-pull and you don't live in the EEA European Economic Area it will give you a dialogue this is the normal uninstall didn't work you want us to force uninstall it says it's not recommended but I have done that on multiple systems I've never had a problem it works it does the job we can close explore now as far as me showing you

11:26changes from what I just did that's going to be difficult because I've already cleaned this system before but you get the idea and this is a way to you you have the system it might be a little messy you might have things installed and things going on that you didn't want or didn't anticipate or whatever and this is a really nice way to just make those you know the cleanup changes after the fact which I think is what most people are looking for obviously you don't mind starting over from scratch you might use a tool like tiny 11 builder and get that super clean version of Windows from the get go but when you do that you have to you might have to install a handful of apps right that one will get rid of edge it will get rid of one drive etc so you might find you have to go into the store and maybe install a couple of apps but I recommend using Windows when 11 to bloat and if you again if you are not a big fan of terminal or command line applications I get it but this is just a simple copy paste you have to run it as admin boom you're done it's fantastic I mean this thing just works great um so I hope you found this useful we're

12:29going to look at some AI removal techniques in the next episode kind of building off that de-insertification theme that we started here today but when 11 to bloat is one of many utilities I do this kind of thing of course it's my favorite it's the one that works the best of my opinion I hope you like it I think you should give it a try and we will have a new episode of hands on Windows every Thursday um thank you for watching thank you especially to our club twit members you can find out more about this show at twit.tv slash HOW and you can find out more about club twit at twit.tv slash club twit thanks see you next week hey there it's Leo Laporte host of so many shows on the twit network thinking about advertising in 2026 we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech each featuring authentic post-read ads delivered by Michael Sargent my co-host and of course me our listeners don't just hear our ads they really believe in them because we've established a relationship with them they

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