Windows 10 Bloat Remover and Tweaker Changelog
What's new in Windows 10 Bloat Remover and Tweaker 5.0
Aug 17, 2023- Dropped support for Windows 10 versions 20H2 and 21H1: the tool now only supports 21H2 or higher
- Completely reworked the way system apps (Edge legacy, Xbox Game Bar UI) are removed to be less invasive and more effective:
- Make system apps removable operation has been removed, since the tool now makes a system app removable only when it's about to uninstall it
- Removed system apps will not be reinstalled anymore after cumulative updates
- The tool will now refuse to uninstall a system app only for the current user (previously it was possible, but didn't always work)
- Disable suggestions, cloud content and feedback requests has been split in two separate operations: Disable suggestions and feedback requests and Disable consumer features
- The former only disables apps suggestions, Windows tips and feedback requests
- The latter disables Spotlight, News and Interests, programmable taskbar and also some extra features:
- Search highlights
- Meet Now icon
- automatic installation of suggested apps on Windows 10 Home and Pro
- Bing search in Windows search bar (previously was done in Tweak settings for privacy, now also works on Home and Pro editions)
- Fixed Microsoft Edge removal, which didn't work at all with recent versions of the browser
- The tool now also properly checks if Edge Chromium uninstallation is successful and reports an error if it isn't
- Disable Windows Defender antivirus now fails straight away if the user forgets to disable tamper protection in Windows Security app (previously the disabling procedure would have silently failed without reporting any errors)
- Aggressive disabling of smartscreen.exe introduced in version 4.3 has been removed because it breaks sideloading of UWP apps.
- If you used Win10BloatRemover 4.3 to disable Defender, you may want to undo smartscreen.exe disabling by running the following command in an administrator command prompt: reg delete "HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionImage File Execution Optionssmartscreen.exe" /f
- Fixed automatic updates disabling for Store apps on Windows 10 Home
- Fixed Microsoft Store removal when some specific apps are installed
- Refined checks to determine whether the tool should recommend a system reboot, especially after removing UWP apps
- Remove UWP apps and Remove Windows features have been rewritten to leverage native Windows APIs instead of PowerShell commands: this makes them noticeably faster
- Many other under-the-hood improvements, including:
- much faster start-up when the app is launched for the first time 🚀
- greatly reduced executable size 🍃 (now 12MB instead of 36MB!)
New in Windows 10 Bloat Remover and Tweaker 4.3 (Jan 30, 2022)
- Make system apps removable now works on Windows 11 too
- The tool continues NOT to support Windows 11, and there are no plans to do it in the future. This change has been made solely for users who want to do some experiments on Windows 11 at their own risk.
- Windows Defender disabling process received a few relevant improvements:
- Windows Security app won't be uninstalled anymore
- It's actually useful for changing exploit mitigation settings, which would otherwise be impossible to do
- The app will still be prevented from running automatically at system start-up
- For those who want to uninstall it anyway, they can do so by launching the PowerShell command Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.Windows.SecHealthUI | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers after making system apps removable
- Made SmartScreen disabling more aggressive, preventing smartscreen.exe from automatically starting in background
- Fixed disabling of SmartScreen for Microsoft Edge Chromium
- Tweak settings for privacy will now also forcefully disable data reporting for personalization purposes in Microsoft Edge
- Disable suggestions, cloud-based content and feedback requests will disable Spotlight in Microsoft Edge too
- Edge uninstallation process will remove more leftover files created by Chromium-based Edge
- Fixed UWP apps removal not working in recent builds of Windows 11 (and potentially in future builds of Windows 10, in case Microsoft backports the breaking change)
- Fixed an error that could occur while removing certain OneDrive leftover files
- Minor performance and reliability improvements
New in Windows 10 Bloat Remover and Tweaker 4.2 (Jul 3, 2021)
- Dropped support for Windows version 2004 (May 2020 Update) and added support for version 21H1 and higher
- Concretely, this means that the program will not display any incompatibility warning on future Windows 10 feature updates (e.g. 21H2)
- We now also have a single executable for all supported Windows versions (20H2 and higher) instead of separate binaries
- Disable tips and feedback requests feature has been overhauled with new capabilities and fixes (and was therefore renamed to Disable suggestions, cloud content and feedback requests):
- System-wide disabling of News and Interests
- Disabling of online tips for Settings app
- Disabling of programmable (cloud-powered) taskbar
- Fixed Spotlight disabling on Home and Pro editions (this time for real! ??)
- Tweak settings for privacy will now also disable passwords and app data syncing with your Microsoft account
- Very minor improvements to Disable telemetry and Make system apps removable
- The program will now raise an error when the configuration file is empty instead of being silent and crashing afterwards