A new Windows 11 PC arrives with software nobody asked for. An antivirus trial that starts nagging in week four, Store apps you'll never open, and a Start menu seeded with pins for services that aren't even installed yet. None of it is dangerous, but it costs disk space, startup time, and attention. All of it can go, and almost all of it can go safely, as long as you remove things one at a time and know which handful of items only look like bloat.
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1. Uninstall from Settings first
Open Settings → Apps → Installed apps. Use the Sort by control to order the list by Size or Date installed. Both orderings surface bloat fast, since preinstalled extras cluster around the day the PC was set up.
For anything you don't want, click the … menu on the right and choose Uninstall. Desktop programs will hand off to their own uninstaller. Click through it, and decline any "are you sure, here's a discount" detours. Store apps just disappear.
If the Uninstall option is grayed out, the app is either part of Windows or protected by policy. Note it and move on. Section 3 handles some of these, and section 5 explains why others should stay.
2. Clear out the preinstalled Store apps
Windows 11 itself preloads a set of Store apps and Start menu pins. Two things worth knowing before you start removing:
- Some pins are just stubs. Tiles for third-party services often aren't installed at all until you first click them. Right-click and choose Unpin from Start and they never arrive.
- Removal is low-stakes. Anything you uninstall here can be reinstalled from the Microsoft Store in a minute, so you don't need to agonize over Clipchamp or the Xbox app.
The fastest route is to open Start, right-click an app, and choose Uninstall directly. Common candidates are the preloaded Office hub, To Do, News, and whatever games or streaming apps your PC's maker added. Keep the ones you actually use. The point is choosing, not scorched earth.
3. winget for the stubborn ones
Some entries resist the Settings route or don't appear there at all. Windows 11 ships with the winget package manager built in. Open Terminal from the Start menu and run:
winget list
That prints everything installed, including items Settings hides, each with an exact Id. Copy the Id from that output and uninstall by it, so there's no ambiguity about which package you mean:
winget uninstall --id <Id from winget list>
If you'd rather use the display name and it contains spaces, quote it, as in winget uninstall "McAfee LiveSafe". Add --silent to skip the app's own uninstall wizard where the installer supports it. When winget reports the package as unknown, recheck the Id against the winget list output. Matching is stricter than it looks.
4. OEM trials and manufacturer extras
The heaviest bloat on a store-bought PC is usually the paid placements, antivirus trials (McAfee and Norton are the usual suspects), VPN trials, and cloud backup offers. These earn their bad reputation by nagging, so remove them through Settings first. Antivirus suites in particular are known for leaving pieces behind. If anything survives, the vendors publish dedicated removal tools (McAfee's is called MCPR) that finish the job. Windows' built-in Microsoft Defender takes over automatically once third-party antivirus is gone, so you are not left unprotected.
Manufacturer utilities deserve a moment of thought instead of a reflex. Tools like Lenovo Vantage, MyASUS, or Dell's update apps are how BIOS and driver updates reach many machines, so keep one updater per manufacturer and remove the rest of the suite. This decision matters most on a hand-me-down or family PC that's been accumulating trials for years. If you're the one who ends up maintaining those, the eclean for families page covers keeping shared PCs sane.
5. What not to remove
A few items look like clutter and aren't. Leave these installed:
- Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime. Many apps, including parts of Windows itself, render their interfaces through it.
- Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable entries, all of them, every year and version. Games and apps depend on specific ones, and they're small.
- Microsoft Store. Even if you never browse it, it delivers updates for the apps in section 2 and for system components.
- Graphics and audio software from Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, or Realtek. These are driver control panels, not bloat.
- Phone Link, Snipping Tool, Terminal, and other built-ins you might use later. They cost almost nothing.
The working rule is simple. If you don't recognize the publisher, search the name before removing, not after.
6. Why "debloater" scripts cause breakage
Search for bloatware removal and you'll find scripts and one-click tools that strip dozens of packages at once, including provisioned system components. The pitch is tempting and the failure mode is well documented. Broken Start menu search, a Store that won't open, updates that fail with opaque errors, sometimes a feature update that refuses to install a year later. Because these tools remove things wholesale, you often can't say which removal caused the damage, and there's no supported route back short of resetting Windows.
The difference between debloating and breakage is reviewability. Remove things one at a time, know what each one is, and keep a way back. That's slower by hand, which is exactly why the nuke-everything tools exist, and exactly what they get wrong.
Keep it this way without the ritual
Bloat returns. Feature updates re-add apps, new software brings companions, and the family PC regrows trials on its own schedule. eclean's Uninstaller keeps the whole software footprint in one reviewable inventory, confirms before every removal, and checks for the leftovers a standard uninstall misses. And removing apps is only half of a cleanup. The caches and leftovers they've already written are the other half, covered in how to delete temporary files in Windows 11. Download eclean free. The core stays free for good.
