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.
