If you’re Windows user, you know that once in a while, you need to properly uninstall leftovers and all kind of bloatware you accumulate over time. Also, if you don’t use certain many of the Windows pre-installed software applications, which some of them don’t even have uninstallers, you’ll need a “debloatware” tool to help. And this is a today’s post.
In fact, there is a huge number of software, paid or free, that are suitable for the task. However, I have recently tested two new tools which I like and I’d like to share here. Both tools are free to use, but each one of them works different way so I found them complimentary. Other than that, I’ll also show you another (radical) solution to have fresh and lightweight system at the end of the post.
BCUninstaller – a Swiss knife of uninstallers
The first tool’s name is BCUninstaller. And it means Bulk Crap Uninstaller (BCU). As you see from the name, the tool is rather efficient and radical allowing you to uninstall not only regular applications, but also built-in Microsoft’s apps as well as hidden system components.
It can detect most applications and games (even portable or not registered), clean up leftovers, force uninstall, automatically uninstall according to premade lists, and much more.
BCUninstaller can detect and uninstall applications from the following sources:
- Normal registered applications (same as Programs and Features and many other uninstallers)
- Hidden/protected registered applications
- Applications with damaged or missing uninstallers
- Portable applications (looks in common locations and on portable drives, configurable)
- Chocolatey packages
- Oculus games/apps
- Steam games/apps
- Windows Features
- Windows Store apps (Universal Windows Platform apps)
- Windows Updates
- Applications from all of these sources are treated the same – you can filter, export and automatically uninstall them in the same way.
The tool can fully or nearly fully automate the process of uninstalling multiple applications. BCU always attempts to use the application’s original uninstaller to avoid issues found in uninstall managers that blindly remove files to achieve uninstall automation.
- Uninstall any number of applications in a single batch.
- Minimal to no user input is required during uninstallation.
- Uninstall multiple items at once to speed up the process (with collision prevention).
- Console interface can automatically uninstall applications based on conditions with no user input.
- Quietly uninstall many uninstallers that don’t support silent uninstallation.
- Uninstall applications even if they don’t have any uninstallers.
- Uninstall applications by window, shortcut or directory.
- Can handle crashing and hanging uninstallers.
Automation module registers itself temporarily as a windows service to proceed with the batch.
The BCU application has also many useful tools built on top of what’s I reported about. For example, it can remove any leftovers (registry entries) after uninstallation. You can also:
- Clean Program Files directories.
- Uninstall manually an application without using the original uninstaller (force uninstall).
- BCU is translated to Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Slovenian and Spanish at the moment of writing this post, but more languages will be added in the future.
Startup manager tool
Startup manager can help you identified which programs are “slowing” down the windows startup process. You can surely disable some of those to speed things up.
You can find BCUninstaller here – https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
WinScript – a script creator
This tool is an interesting tool as it allows you to create a script with settings you’re disabling. And as you can imagine, you can run this script during different scenarios. If you’re managing Windows domain, you can let this script run before/after user login or integrate it to schedule to run on monthly basis.
When you first execute the software, you’ll notice that it has a nice UI with is several sections. On the example below, we can see the performance section, but other sections can be opened by simple clicking on the left menu.
Note also the import/export allows you to use *.json file for fast deployment/configurations across multiple machines.
- Debloat: Remove Windows bloatware, CoPilot, Edge, OneDrive & pre-installed features.
- Privacy: Disable Windows and 3rd party telemetry & data collection, tracking, app access & more.
- Performance: Set background services to manual to free resources, set your preferred DNS, clean temp files & more.
- Install Apps: Install all your favorite apps simultaneously in one click through chocolatey.
So let’s say, you want completely to disable Microsoft telemetry. Simply go to the Telemetry section and activate all the switches.
Then go to the Run Script section where you can do the following:
- Run directly the script on the machine you’re working with
- Copy the script to the clipboard
- Presets allow you to review the scripts one by one before executing it. Choosing a preset will override your current settings.
You can also activate switch in multiple sections at the same time. All the settings are added to the final script.
WinScript website here. There is a portable version as well as an online version allowing you to set the options and generate the script online. You can also deploy the app by using winget:
winget install winscript
That’s it.
The software is licensed under GPL v3 license.
Final Words
There are many tools which are available to keep your systems running smoothly. The selection above is just a fraction and I hope you’ll find it helpful. For enterprise environments with strict politics you might not find those too useful but for SMB where you have to deal with physical PCs on site, you might like both as there are efficient and do their job.
