Hands-On with Win11Debloat

I’ve spent much of this past year seeking solutions to the creeping enshittification in Windows 11. And I’ve made some progress, though a full victory for common sense and users remains elusive. Depending on what bothers you most–Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist–there are fixes in some cases and workarounds in others. This situation isn’t in any way ideal: One worry is that Microsoft will simply reverse many of the changes we make when you install an annual Feature Update or even the random monthly cumulative update. But at least there are actions we can take.

This is a bit simplistic, but you might divide the Windows 11 enshittification solutions into two basic categories: Those you employ before installing the OS and those you employ after. Those you employ ahead of time include such things as Tiny11 Builder and Rufus, tools that create a version of Windows 11 Setup that’s stripped of features and/or specific requirements, like needing to be online or sign in to a Microsoft account. Those that you employ later, like OFGB (Oh Frick Go Back), WinToys, and O&O ShutUp10++, modify the Windows 11 configuration after you’ve already signed in and started using the system.

On the one hand, these utilities are conveniences, as they allow one to make a lot of configuration changes in a single place all at once, rather than manually doing so by navigating around the Windows 11 Settings app (and elsewhere), finding the annoyances (and hopefully not missing anyway), and changing them one by one. But some of the configuration changes these utilities make either aren’t found in user-facing UIs, or are at least very difficult to find. And that makes some of these utilities doubly useful.

Under the covers, so to speak, these changes all occur in the Windows Registry, a configuration hive that dates back to the earliest days of Windows 3.x, and is renowned for its terribleness. Microsoft creates policies on top of the registry that are particularly useful for IT pros managing PC deployments in organizations. But at the core, these settings, these configurations, are just Registry keys, and that’s true whether the changes they make are ever surfaced by Microsoft as user-accessible UIs or not. For users, that means they work in every Windows 11 product edition.

Anyway. We have choices, some of which are good. Most of which will likely need to be run repeatedly over time, as Microsoft issues new Feature Updates and other Windows 11 changes. And now we have another choice when it comes to de-enshittifying Windows 11 in situ, if you will, or after you’re already up and running. This one is not a typical app, however. It’s a command-line script, written with PowerShell, that works with both Windows 10 and 11. And while I understand some are nervous about command lines, and even more nervous about scripts that need to be run with admin privileges so they can change your PC’s configuration–both completely understandable–you should at least examine this thing. It’s incredibly useful.

It’s called Win11Debloat.

Win11Debloat is hosted on GitHub, so the source code is publicly accessible and can be viewed and modified by anyone who uses it. How you use Win11Debloat is interesting because its author, Jeffrey Raphire, provides three methods for doing so. Despite the name, I recommend using the third of those three methods, Advanced, by which you download the script package in ZIP format, extract it, and then run it using the provided instructions. Basically, you run Terminal with admin privileges–it defaults to the PowerShell environment–disable the default Windows 11 blocks for executing downloaded scripts, and then run the utility.

Those last two bits require the following command lines (as noted in the Win11Debloat readme):

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope Process
.\Win11Debloat.ps1

Note that the first of those commands disables the script execution block only for the current Terminal session: When you close the window, that permission dies with it. Note, too, that the second of those commands assumes you’re in the same directory as the script.

When you run the script, it will deliver the following security warning.

Tap R and then Enter to run the script.

Each of these options is useful and interesting, and while I wouldn’t usually go with the first one, Default Mode, it’s worth looking at.

As this screen explains, running Win11Debloat in Default Mode will make many changes, and while its author believes these to be what most people would want, I have several issues with this mode. There are several apps I use that are removed by default, for example, and a few features disabled that I would leave intact. So I don’t ever use this mode: I type Ctrl + C to exit, re-run the script, and go with the second choice, Custom Mode. In this mode, the script prompts you several times to make choices about various types of configuration changes.

The first is for apps.

You’ll find a file named AppsList.txt in the root of the extracted Win11Debloat folder that determines which bundled apps it will remove. This means you can edit the file–perhaps after making a backup copy just in case–to ensure that it only removes the apps you don’t want and will never use.

That’s straightforward: I removed Clipchamp, Network speed test, Skype, Windows Alarms, Zune Video (Movies & TV), Windows Sound Recorder, and the old consumer Teams client, for example. I left the other lists in there–third-party bundled apps and apps that will not be uninstalled by default as-is. You may have different thoughts. And with that out of the way, I then chose option 1 in the default apps step.

It then prompted about removing pinned apps in Start (which I skipped by typing n). And then it prompted about disabling “telemetry, diagnostic data, activity history, app-launch tracking and targeted ads?”

No-brainer: I typed y there and then Enter.

Then, another no-brainer: “Disable tips, tricks, suggestions and ads in start, settings, notifications, explorer and lock screen?” Another y, plus Enter.

Then, “Disable tips, tricks, suggestions and ads in start, settings, notifications, explorer and lock screen?”

You bet: y plus Enter.

In the next step, it asks about disabling Windows Copilot. To this, I typed n and Enter, but I get it if you feel otherwise. And then about disabling Recall, which doesn’t even exist yet. Again, n and then Enter.

Then, it asked about restoring the old Windows 10-style context menus in Windows 11. To this, I also responded with n and then Enter.

Next up: “Do you want to make any changes to the taskbar and related services?” This one is unclear, so I looked at the readme. And it’s related to superfluous Taskbar entries like Widgets, Search, and Task view, plus configurations like Taskbar centering. The things I need to change there are obvious enough and were made long ago, so I just typed n and Enter, but you may want to take a look.

Next, it asked about making any changes to File Explorer. Here, again, it’s worth reviewing what it does via the online readme, but there’s only one change in there I’d make personally, so I choose n and then Enter, but we’ll revisit this bit in a moment.

And with that, you’re done. There’s a final prompt, to which you type Enter to continue. And doing so, I then watched as it did my bidding.

It’s a beautiful thing. When it’s done, you can just tap any key to exit.

Depending on how deep you went, the changes can be profound and easily noticed. In my case, the biggest immediate change is that Search went from this:

To this:

And if you know what you’re doing, you can navigate around in Start, Settings, File Explorer, or wherever else and see changes throughout.

But here’s the thing. I mentioned that in some cases–File Explorer is a good example–that I didn’t necessarily want to make all the changes the script’s author prefers. And maybe there are times when I just want to make a single change. Fortunately, the Win11Debloat download includes the individual Registry files needed to make those one-off changes. So you can just run those if you’d like.

Sticking with the File Explorer example, Win11Debloat supports the following changes:

• Show hidden files, folders, and drives
• Show file extensions for known file types
• Hide the gallery section from the File Explorer navigation pane (Windows 11 only)
• Hide the 3D Objects, Music, and/or OneDrive from the File Explorer navigation pane (Windows 10 only)
• Hide duplicate removable drive entries from the File Explorer navigation pane

Only that last one is interesting to me. Normally, when you connect a USB flash drive or SSD, it adds the icon for each partition to the bottom area of the File Explorer navigation pane, with This PC and Network.

I don’t like this: They take up space and in many cases, there’s not enough room so you get that ugly overflow effect. You can use Win11Debloat to change this: Instead of appearing in the root of the navigation pane, removable drives and partitions will only appear when you view This PC. Or, you can just find the Reg file that makes this one change and run then instead. These files are in the Regfiles folder in that extracted Win11Debloat download.

Now we’re talking. The one I’m looking for is called (the very long-winded) Hide_duplicate_removable_drives_from_navigation_pane_of_File_Explorer.reg, and because it’s just a Reg file, you can open it with Notepad to see what it does.

And when I ran it, those two partitions disappeared from the root of File Explorer, as desired. They are still available in This PC, of course.

This is a powerful combination of capabilities in a nice little package. It will likely be updated over time, so you may want to always grab the latest version from GitHub when you use it again. And you will almost certainly need to use it again when the next Windows 11 Feature Update–or perhaps some other monthly update, Microsoft is so unpredictable–appears.

Anyway, this is a good utility to know about. I’ll be keeping this one around.