Win11Debloat 2026.08.24

A fresh Windows install arrives carrying apps you did not ask for, a taskbar full of things you will never press, and telemetry running quietly underneath all of it.

Removing that by hand means working through Settings, the Start menu and the registry, one item at a time.

Win11Debloat does the whole job in a couple of minutes, and shows you what it plans to do first.

See Every Change Before It Happens

This is the feature worth knowing about. A preview mode lists exactly what the script would remove and change, without touching anything, so you can read the whole plan and then decide.

On top of that it sets a system restore point before it starts, which means even a change you regret is reversible.

What It Removes

The default selection targets the things most people never open, and everything is opt-in from there.

• Pre-installed apps such as Xbox, Clipchamp, OneDrive and Copilot, whose removal was fixed in the current release.
• Telemetry and data collection, including the scheduled tasks that quietly restart it.
• Taskbar clutter - Widgets, the Chat button, suggested content and web search results in the Start menu.
• Game Bar integration, which can now be switched off without leaving the default selection.

If Copilot in particular is what brought you here, the piece on Copilot taking 3.3 GB without asking covers how it arrived in the first place.

How to Run It

The download is a small launcher called Get.ps1 rather than the script itself, which is why the file is only a couple of kilobytes. It fetches the current version when you run it, so you are never working from a stale copy.

Right-click the file and choose Run with PowerShell, then approve the administrator prompt. A graphical interface opens with everything laid out as checkboxes.

Take the recommended selection if you want it done, or work through the list yourself if you would rather decide item by item. There are command-line parameters too, for anyone scripting this across several machines.

The Codec Catch Nobody Mentions

Debloating scripts can remove the Microsoft Store, and on a codecs site that deserves a warning of its own.

Several of the codecs Windows relies on are delivered through the Store rather than built in. The HEVC Video Extension and the AV1 Codec are both Store packages.

Take the Store away and you cannot install or update either of them, so a machine that played 4K video perfectly before the cleanup can stop doing it afterwards, for a reason that looks nothing like the cause.

If that has already happened, Media Foundation Codecs restores the underlying media layer, and the Codec Finder will tell you what a specific file is actually missing.

What Is New in the Current Release

• Preview mode. See every change the script would make before committing to any of it.
• Domain policy warnings. An alert when group policy is going to override what you change.
• Fewer antivirus false alarms. The dynamic DLL imports that triggered detections have been replaced with native methods.
• Timestamped Start menu backups, so more than one backup can exist at a time.
• Interface tidied to sit closer to the Windows design guidelines, with errors now surfaced rather than swallowed.
• Dead apps dropped from the removal list - Fitbit, Shazam, Twitter, Viber, Wunderlist, XING and Plex.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

The tell is whether you can name what you want gone. If you cannot, a debloater is the wrong instrument - you are looking for a disk cleaner, and removing system apps will not free meaningful space anyway.

Microsoft PC Manager is the official one-click option, and it will not remove anything Microsoft would rather keep.

CCleaner and BleachBit clear junk files and browser traces instead, which is a different job with a different payoff.

For deeper routine maintenance, HDCleaner and Wise Disk Cleaner both go further on temporary files than a debloater ever will.

And if your concern is browsing traces rather than pre-installed apps, Privacy Eraser Free is the closer fit.

Other Debloating Tools

CrapFixer is the closest peer here, going after the same junk apps, ads and telemetry rather than temporary files.

FlyOOBE works at setup time instead, and adds the ability to get past the Windows 11 hardware requirements, which is a different problem entirely.

Kudu bundles cleanup and optimisation tools together if you would rather have one application than several.

Quick questions

The rest of the field sits in the drive cleaners category, where the cleanup tools and the debloaters live side by side.

Download Win11Debloat and see what it finds on your machine, or tell us how you got on if you have used it before.