This is just what I could find in a few minutes. Some are more privacy-focused, some are more de-bloat focused. Some add new features or enable new tweaks. Some are flexible, some are one-and-done. They're everywhere since Win 10 released.
https://www.ntlite.com/
https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/
https://github.com/builtbybel/debotnet
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
https://www.w10privacy.de/english-home/
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://www.revi.cc/revios/download/?method=playbook
In Scripts to build a trimmed-down Windows 11 imageW4RH4WK
Debloat-Windows-10
PowerShell2015–2024
W4RH4WK / Debloat-Windows-10 · Archived
Debloat-Windows-10
A Collection of Scripts Which Disable / Remove Windows 10 Features and Apps
23Distinct people
30Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
6.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A Collection of Scripts Which Disable / Remove Windows 10 Features and Apps
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
i recommend https://boxstarter.org/ and something like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 for dealing with installing win10 source: configured windows10 manually…
twalla used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- dfkt/win10-unfuck · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- disassembler0/win10-initial-setup-script · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- sycnex/windows10debloater · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year30 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-08-08 14:51:12 UTC to 2024-04-26 03:19:21 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Debloat Windows 10
🕯️ End of Life:
Windows 10 is officially end of life in October.
This repository is therefore deprecated.
Attention:
Apparently there is an issue where running the scripts results in a broken user account / system.
So far, there is only little information what actually causes this.
See the corresponding issue.
Note about Windows 11:
This project does not directly support Windows 11.
Things might work, or might not work - find out if you are brave.
Do not expect this project to transition to Windows 11 as the maintainer lacks the time to do so.
This project collects PowerShell scripts which help to debloat Windows 10,
tweak common settings and install basic software components.
I test these scripts on a Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit (English) virtual
machine. Please let me know if you encounter any issues. Home Edition and
different languages are not supported. These scripts are intended for
tech-savvy administrators, who know what they are doing and just want to
automate this phase of their setup. If this profile does not fit you, I
recommend using a different (more interactive) tool -- and there are a lot of
them out there.
Also, note that gaming-related apps and services will be removed/disabled. If
you intend to use your system for gaming, adjust the scripts accordingly.
There is no undo, I recommend only using these scripts on a fresh
installation (including Windows Updates). Test everything after running them
before doing anything else. Also, there is no guarantee that everything will
work after future updates since I cannot predict what Microsoft will do next.
Translations
Fork with German version
Interactivity
The scripts are designed to run without any user interaction. Modify them
beforehand. If you want a more interactive approach check out
DisableWinTracking from
10se1ucgo.
Download Latest Version
Code located in the master branch is always considered under development, but
you'll probably want the most recent version anyway.
Download [zip]
Execution
Enable execution of PowerShell scripts:
PS> Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope CurrentUser
Unblock PowerShell scripts and modules within this directory:
PS> ls -Recurse *.ps*1 | Unblock-File
Usage
Scripts can be run individually, pick what you need.
Install all available updates for your system.
Edit the scripts to fit your need.
Run the scripts you want to apply from a PowerShell with administrator privileges (Explorer
Files > Open Windows PowerShell > Open Windows PowerShell as administrator)
PS > Restart-Computer
Run disable-windows-defender.ps1 one more time if you ran it in step 3
PS > Restart-Computer
Start menu
In the past I included small fixes to make the start menu more usable, like
removing default tiles, disabling web search and so on. This is no longer the
case since I am fed up with it. This fucking menu breaks for apparently
no reason, is slow, is a pain to configure / script and even shows ads out of
the box!
Please replace it with something better, either use Open Shell or Start
is Back, but stop using that shit.
Known Issues
Start menu Search
After running the scripts, the start menu search-box may no longer work on newly
created accounts. It seems like there is an issue with account initialization
that is triggered when disabling the GeoLocation service. Following workaround
has been discovered by BK from Atlanta:
Delete registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lfsvc\TriggerInfo\3
Re-enable GeoLocation service (set startup type to Automatic)
Reboot
Login with the account having the stated issue
Start Cortana and set your preferences accordingly (web search and whatnot)
You may now disable the GeoLocation service again, the search box should remain
functional.
Sysprep will hang
If you are deploying images with MDT and running these scripts, the sysprep
step will hang unless dmwappushservice is active.
Xbox Wireless Adapter
Apparently running the stock remove-default-apps script will cause Xbox
Wireless Adapters to stop functioning. I suspect one should not remove the Xbox
App when wanting to use one. But I haven't confirmed this yet, and there is a
workaround to re-enable it afterwards. See
#78.
Issues with Skype
Some of the domains blocked by adding them to the hosts-file are required for
Skype. I highly discourage using Skype, however some people may not have
the option to use an alternative. See the
#79.
Fingerprint Reader / Facial Detection not Working
Ensure Windows Biometric Service is running. See
#189.
Liability
All scripts are provided as-is and you use them at your own risk.
Contribute
I would be happy to extend the collection of scripts. Just open an issue or
send me a pull request.
Thanks To
10se1ucgo
Plumebit
aramboi
maci0
narutards
tumpio
License
"THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this
stuff. If we meet someday, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can
buy us a beer in return.
This project is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
30 sourcesHmm looking here: https://docs.atlasos.net/troubleshooting/removed-features/
It just seems to remove a lot of security modules, out of all the bloat out there why would I want to just remove the sec modules? Also it now adds an option to include those, so all in all, it then removes:
- Some APPX and UWP applications
- Logging of Network Configuration
- Microsoft Edge and WebView
- Restore Points and System Reset
- Telemetry
- Windows Error Reporting
- Windows Updates
- Hyper-V and VBS
- Background Apps
- Disk Defragmentation
- User Account Control (UAC)
I can use https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 and https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 and https://www.oo-software.com/en/ooappbuster to do most of the debloating and telemetry tasks.
I don't see the point of removing
- Disk Defragmentation (how much does this even affect gene
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ral usage?)
- UAC (?)
- Hyper-V (since this is an optional feature anyway)
- Edge (it's not that bad once the telemetry is removed from it, sleeping tabs are very good)
- System Restore Points (haven't they ever bricked a system?)
All are pretty useful, and we end up using them one way or the other
I also took a look at their scripts: https://docs.atlasos.net/troubleshooting/scripts/ ; nothing that interesting and seems to be there just to troubleshoot/fix issues caused by Atlas.
You can use stuff like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
In Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11Microsoft is atrocious. The worst telemetry kleptomaniacs ever seen.
If you use VSCode don't forget telemetry is enabled by default.
Here is how to disable it:
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry
I refuse to touch any Windows 10 machine that did not go through this:
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
https://gist.github.com/gvlx/b4d4c5681900ca965276fc5c16fe852...
(Warning: Use at your own risk)
Here is a great experiment you can do. Use an app like for example Netbalancer that can show you bandwidth use per app.
Launch your locally installed PowerPoint. Note I am not talking about Office 365 but a locally installed Office component. Start some internal presentation to your fellow workers, just presenting, no editing or creating a new presentation. Amaze yourself at it sends data to Microsoft at the rate of 4
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to 5 MB/s. Yeah...just try it.
Its better then ever.
1. Use Chocolatey (winget is still new). You can setup everything via it, and I mean everything - node, postgre, docker, vscode, all browsers, selenium and drivers etc.
2. Learn Powershell, but learn it really good. Adopt PowerShell build system Invoke-Build
3. Install better terminal - ConEmu or Windows terminal
4. Enrich Windows using FOSS and cross platform tools: choco install copyq, flameshot, less, fzf, paint.net, git, tortoisegit, winscp, kitty, screentogif, sysinternals, wiztree, gsudo, lockhunter, signal, viber, slack
5. Disable Windows Defender and use some debloater (controversial, but I do it, and system is at least x2-x5 faster). I use https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 along with ShutUp10 tool.
6. Install the best search engine in the world: cinst everything
Enjoy, its awesome.
In Ask HN: Windows Dev Setup?> What does this exploit let you do that you couldn't already do with a local administrator account
There are some things that users in Administrators group still can't do. Hence the need for TrustedInstaller perms.
For example, try running this script:
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/blob/master/sc...
You will get access denied since few months back:
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/issues/273
In HiveNightmare a.k.a. SeriousSAM – anybody can read the registry in Windows 10Yeah, because I am not babysitter. You should do your homework :) I am glad when people hint me good info.
I do have ample personal experience - when government web server was randomly dropping from 2k req/s to 2 req/s we disabled defender and from there we had continuous 2k req/s. I have seen this literary hundreds of times. Not sure why people install AV on servers but its common in banks and similar. On home computers its even worst. I witnessed new laptop computer with 2 AVs - defender + something vendor installed like mcafe. It was so slow that while typing letters appeared 1/s.
AVs inject themselves on number of places and do all kind of "funky" stuff. All power users should disable that junk. You have other means to protect yourself. If you are grandma, sure, go for it, but grandma will not run "Reclaim Windows10" from github gist,
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no ?
Context is everything. It certainly doesn't justify above comment claiming "DO NOT DO THIS!!!" on HN. Its utter nonsense. We are here to talk about hacking things by definition. Power users customize their OS, not the other way around. Its pity that MS doesn't provide minimal OS (like Linux OS's usually do) but the first thing I do is not run single script like Reclaim, but dozen of such scripts and my healthy nervous system thanks me all the time because benefits are huge and minuses are minor and fixable.
If anything, we need more projects like that, more polished, more documented, more maintained. My personal fav so far is [1]
[1]: https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
On my home machine, I've update to the Windows 10 October 2020 update
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/10/20/whats-new-in-the-windows-10…
Mainly doing so as to have access to a real Bash shell via WSL.
On another Windows machine, I had run a debloat script. Pretty sure I'd used this:
https://itigic.com/debloat-windows-10-powershell-scripts/
https://theydreamer.com/windows-10-debloating-and-optimization/
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
And I'm wanting to run it now on my newly updated (and therefore spyware loaded machine).
Any pointers to other debloat scripts that you've had good experience with would be much appreciated.
1 points · Open discussion> Why is Windows a nightmare? I use Windows 10 on a PC I built and it's fine.
Buy any consumer machine with Windows 10 and it comes with so much pre-loaded doodoo, that it takes a couple hours to purge it down to the basics. In fact, so much so, that there are a myriad of scripts to help do this [0].
0 https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
In macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOSThe ecosystem of stuff is the first thing that comes to mind. Windows has never been an environment that was well suited for modern automation practices (infrastructure as code).
For instance, it's not straightforward to take a database or XLS document of users and transform that into an Active Directory implementation.
Here is a tool that would help with that: https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc
Normally you would need to run this on a Windows machine ... but now I am excited at the thought of using it from my mac.
I'm in the middle of doing a rollout of new network infrastructure, VPN, Firewall appliance, Hyper-V hosts, Active Directory, O365 sync, File storage, etc... for small/medium sized business. I am primarily a software/ops consultant, so I like to build infrastructure 'as data' and then use that data to assert the
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real thing. IE, terraform apply.
tl;dr – with cross platform we're closer to bringing modern ops tools into Windows land which is exciting. WSL is useful when you are on a Win box, but if you are trying to build infra from Linux/macOS you are struggling.
Here is a big list of powershell crap I have starred recently on Github:
- https://github.com/dsccommunity/ActiveDirectoryDsc (linked above)
- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME
- https://github.com/DrEmpiricism/Optimize-Offline (not relevant to cross platform)
- https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 (not relevant to cross platform)
iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 | iex
cinst -y totalcommander copyq neovim vscode firefox everything sysinternals nirlauncher smplayer vlc git tortoisegit conemu 7zip paint.net dngrep dbeaver
Update-SessionEnvironment
git clone https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10
ls Debloat-Windows-10/scripts/*.ps1 | % { . $_ } # YMVV
git clone https://github.com/majkinetor/powershell_profile.d
gc powershell_profile.d/setup -raw | iex
code --install-extension ms-vscode.PowerShell ...
Install-Module PSWindowsUpdate
# repeat this as long as needs restart
Install-WindowsUpdate -AcceptAll
Restart-Computer
Then I go ad-hoc from there...
That is for my daily machine. For specialized machines such as media center etc, the list is different...
In Ask HN: What are the first things you do on a new Windows 10 PC? Any checklists?i recommend https://boxstarter.org/ and something like https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10 for dealing with installing win10
source: configured windows10 manually once, decided i'd like to never experience that particular circle of hell again
In Microsoft Is Putting Ads on the Mail App in Windows 10Showing the 15 most recent of 30 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.