Well, this is a welcome development. That Refresh Windows tool I discussed yesterday will be available from within Windows 10 going forward and will let users remove all of the crapware that comes with a new PC. Now that's progress.

In this second article in my series about performing a crapware-free clean install of Windows 10 on a new PC, I look at a critical step: Disaster recovery.

It's time to take a look at how you can have the best and most error-free Windows 10 experience possible, even when you buy a new PC with crapware.

Much of my email traffic is from people looking for help, but regardless of that it’s full of mostly positive exchanges. Sometimes, however, I get truly ignorant feedback. This is one of those times. I don’t intend to normally share this kind of email, and I see the “Ask Paul” series as a way to…

In a startling yet overdue announcement, Lenovo said today that it would no longer bundle crapware—for the most part—on any of its PCs. This is exactly what I asked Lenovo to do in the wake of the Superfish fiasco, and I am now calling on the other major PC makers to do the same. Yes,…

If you’ve been following along with my Clean PC article series, you know that you can replace your PC maker’s crapware-laden version of Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 with a clean version. But if you find that process a bit too arcane, you have other options. Among them is the system image capabilities…

You may recall that my original Windows 7 Ultrabook cleanup walkthrough was a bit of a slog. Determined to make this a bit more efficient, and armed with my previous experiences, I tackled a second, older Windows 7-based Ultrabook. And while cleaning up a Windows 7 PC will always be time-consuming, this one did go…

If you followed my travails in cleaning up a Windows 7-era Ultrabook, then you know that the process was time-consuming and difficult. But if you have a more modern Windows 8.1-based device, your experience could be much, much better based on my initial experiment with such a PC. The phrase “night and day” comes to…

It’s one of the biggest downers in personal technology: you buy a new PC, take it home and set it up, and then spend hours investigating and removing the crapware that PC makers put on there. But there’s a better way thanks to a small selection of utilities designed specifically to help remove this space-…

In August 2012, I bought the first PC ever sold at the Microsoft Store in Boston. But while that PC was a Signature edition PC and thus cleaner than other PCs of its day, the software preload—Zune, an out of date version of Windows Live Essentials, and more—is outdated today. So I’ve put my Clean…

I want every Windows user to have a clean PC. And I especially want those who have purchased a new PC to be rid of the crapware that PC makers foolishly push on their unwilling customers. To this end, I’m starting a new series, Clean PC, which will examine the steps you can take to…

Microsoft's PC Manager app is out of beta and available in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11. And it's as weird as ever.

Windows 11 includes a free and surprisingly full-featured video editor called Clipchamp that should meet the needs of just about anyone. Get to know Clipchamp When you first launch Clipchamp, the app displays a Getting started view that lets you create a new video project from scratch or using AI, browse the available project templates,…

We interrupt our regular programming for something completely unexpected: this weekend, I became a Clipchamp user. To be fair, I had described it as a capable video editor when I went hands-on with the app over a year ago. So maybe the real question is, what took so long? It's hard to say. Maybe inertia.…

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I foolishly enrolled a Windows on Arm-based PC in the Windows Insider Program some time ago. This wasn’t an issue for a long time, but when Microsoft changed the Insider Program last year so that the Dev and Beta channels no longer mapped to specific Windows versions,…

Reset this PC is a system restore tool that helps you quickly reinstall Windows 11 and return it to a pristine, error-free state. You can do so in two ways: a refresh, in which Windows 11 is reinstalled but you keep your existing Microsoft account, its personal files, and any installed Microsoft Store apps, or…