Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU If you've ever dreamed of a Windows free from Bing, Edge, and other built-in apps, Microsoft has decided to grant your wish – provided you're a resident of the European Union. A Thursday update from the Windows Insider Program Team appeared to flag that Microsoft is giving up its fight to get exemptions from the EU's Digital …
Here's the thing though, when features from Windows are removed it's usually just removing access to them. So you'll remove a little 500 kb program, but the back end machinery remains. You can accomplish the same by removing shortcuts, making sure processes/services don't start etc.
I hated that stupid fucking Cortana thing back when I was trying to use Windows 10 for gaming, so I hacked it out. Windows wouldn't let me remove the "app" because it would respawn after being killed so I had to quickly rename the directory out of the way before it could respawn. Task manager poised... file manager poised. Kill process, rename and hit enter. Then I replaced the directory with a file with no extension so there would be something there to fail a write. It could also be done from off system, if you can boot with something that can write to the fs (e.g. BartPE based boot disk)
My life is Windows free now though, since the translation technologies (wine and directx translation) in Linux have gotten to the point where games that don't work are the exception.
Try a few tools;
DISM++
Chris Titus Win10/11 Toolbox
Disable Bing via registry
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001
Disable Win11 background apps
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\AppPrivacy]
"LetAppsRunInBackground"=dword:00000002
Enable GPEdit on Home Editions (ran as batch file in admin cmd)
@echo off
pushd "%~dp0"
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~3*.mum >List.txt
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~3*.mum >>List.txt
for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . List.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"
pause
Good idea. I can always use my old address in Lisburn - Oh, I forgot. I don't need to. My only bit of kit which dual boots int0 Windows* won't go beyond 10 anyway.
* I keep it mostly to remind myself of what I'm missing and reassure myself I made the right decision years ago. Tomorrow I'll maybe run this month's patches and marvel at how long it takes and how many times it reboots.
I missed a region setting choice, their are three regions covering the British Isles, UK, Ireland and Isle of Man.
Not that that matters because the region setting has nothing to do with the regional format making what I wrote above irrelevant. :)
Number date and currency regional format in Windows will default to use the regional format for the display language. The default of using the display language can be overridden by choosing to use a specific regional format, Whether the regional format defaults to the display language or is set to a specific regional format neither using the region setting.
So no need to worry about default currency, just set region to Ireland and display language to English (United Kingdom) and the currency will be £.
Have a word with that nice Mr. Farage. He promised us the UK would be a land of milk and honey when it left the EU and told its pesky bureaucrats to fuck off. I'm sure he'll be delighted to help everyone break free of M$'s shackles. And bring back the days when Britannia^Wthe Amstrad e-mailer ruled the world.
Since he has tried, and failed, to get elected as an MP seven times, it might be difficult for him to become PM.
Not as difficult as it should be, mind, given that we seem to now be appointing people who haven't been elected to the HoL in order to shove them directly into high offices of state, and that is apparently fine.
Don’t forget to also (at initial install time) use the language locale English(World) or English (Europe) and so avoid a whole lot more cruft.
Looks like the first thing to be done with a new system will be a factory reset reinstall of Windows ( haven’t tested whether a repair reinstall has the same cleansing effect).
When people all over the world discover that they can dump all the Bing and Edge crap simply by saying they live in Sweden on the setup screen, I can imagine Microsoft getting a bit perplexed by future usage stats showing that 58% of Windows users live in Sweden.
I don't see one as we need to be in the EU to remove the bloatware and being outside the EU means we can get some crap AI foisted upon us.
*Miust admit, I am surprised MS have not been sued to using CoPilot. I hear that name and think of a routing application I used to use"
If you read the article carefully, the "Brexit Bonus", clearly meant ironically, is that the EEA is not getting access to Copilot yet while the UK, not in the EEA, is. Nothing whatsoever to do with the other part of the story about removing certain apps from the system.
Perhaps codejunky is Farage. They have the same delusions and spout the same bollocks.
She/he can't be reading Mad Nad's entry for the Nobel Literature Prize. That only takes a minute or two, even for those who have to point their finger under each word as they spell it out letter by letter.
So the ability to remove MS bloatware is only going to be available for new installs where the location is set to a country inside Europe or will this function get enabled if you already have Windows set to a location in the EEA through a Windows update?
Im sure it will just be some patch and registry setting that people more clever than me will work out what it is and publish online for the rest of us outside Europe in no time once it goes live either way.
That's always the trouble with these things. Around these parts people like to choose their apps, but the average user just wants things to work, hence why Linux on the desktop doesn't work for the average user unless someone makes the decision of default apps for them.
Before long we're going to see the same suits hit Android, iOS and MacOS too.
If only the same could be applied to Android. Both my phones are loaded with bloatware from Google that I will *never* use; most of it can only be disabled, with some dire warning about the system not working properly, which for speech recognition apps and so on is ridiculous. Also Google Play Music is insane, it requires an internet connection even to play music stored on the phone itself; so after installing VLC, you guessed it I *can't* uninstall Google Play Music; it sits there wasting storage space that could be used for things I *want* on my phone :(
Put on your wizard hat, go into the version info on your phone and tap it the magical number of times until your phone is in "developer mode", download and install adb on your PC (may also apply on a Mac, almost certainly will on Linux), plug your phone in via a USB cable, open an adb console, and uninstall it using the following incantation:
pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.music
The same technique can be used to remove all manner of "non-uninstallable" bloatware off your phone, including shiteware that mobile operators preinstall on new phones if you're silly enough to buy one through them.
Get ADB, or search for android debloat apps (xedevelopers are a good source of info abd apps). I have everything google related stripped out of mine.
They run on your PC and allow you to uninstall absolutely anything on your phone. Most have a default set of stuff you can safely.uninstall, but you can use them to uninstall anything - so be careful!
LOL, 70+ comments and not one person mentioned MSMG Toolkit that lets you easily remove all the crappy MS bloatware. I've been using it for years now and I must say the experience is similar to when you start using adblockers , just can't imagine going back browsing internet without uBlock or installing vanilla Windows on my PC.
Anyone tried automated processes to get rid of that fucking Copilot icon which has appeared on the taskbar in W11 23H2? I'm currently testing but there doesn't seem to be anything in the Intune settings catalogue so resorted to a proactive remediation using Powershell scripts to check for, and if necessary create, the required registry keys which turn it off.
Typical Microsoft - foist this shit on us and make it difficult to remove it. It's due to come to W10 too in due course so hopefully the registry keys are in the same place.
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