WPD

Whether you're looking to protect your privacy by disabling some Windows services, take control over the firewall or uninstall unwanted applications, you can turn to WPD (Windows Privacy Dashboard).

Wrapped in a clean and attractive interface, this program provides you with intuitive and practical options for tweaking your computer, whether you're running Windows 7 or 10. It doesn't require installation so you can copy the downloaded package to a USB flash drive to directly launch it on any PC without setup. Administrative rights are required, though.

The main app menu is brought up to the screen at startup, allowing you to access the privacy-related features, firewall settings, apps to uninstall, or other tweaks to make.

When it comes to privacy matters, you can deactivate the steps recorder, advertising ID, search companion, telemetry, Windows Error Reporting, handwriting auto learning, OneDrive (for file storage), and others. Some of the options displayed here might seem confusing. However, you don't have to look up definitions on the web since WPD shows descriptions in tooltips next to each option. Otherwise, you can disable everything listed here with the click of a button.

As far as firewall settings are concerned, Windows Privacy Dashboard can be instructed to block Windows telemetry, third-party apps and Windows Updates from establishing Internet connections. If you change your mind and wish to reset these options to default, you can simply delete the newly created rules.

Only Modern UI apps can be uninstalled with the aid of this utility, whether they came bundled with the operating system or got installed from other sources. Lastly, the tweaker gives you the possibility to hide sync provider notifications, allow the swap file to be cleared during restart, and prevent apps from using your camera, microphone and other devices.

Taking everything into consideration, WPD turns out to be a straightforward and useful system tweaker. It enabled and disabled system settings without any issues on Windows 10 in our tests.