REMOVE ‘ORPHANED’ PROGRAMS
So they’ll never crash your PC
Remove ‘orphaned’ programs
Bcuninstaller ( www.snipca.com/18041) is designed to replace Windows’ Uninstall tool in the Control Panel. One of its best hidden tools lets you find ‘orphaned’ programs, which have been left on your PC without an uninstaller.
To see orphans, tick the ‘Show orphaned applications’ filter (on the left – see screenshot above right) – they will then be highlighted in pink. To group them together so you can more easily check them, make sure ‘Show items in groups’ is ticked (on the left), then click the Uninstaller Kind column. Scroll down to the Simple Delete group to see the orphaned programs.
Delete any you don’t want in the usual way: click one to highlight it, then click Uninstall. Click Create when prompted (to create a system restore point). Once that’s done, a Command Prompt window will open which will prompt you to type y (for yes) and press Enter to confirm the deletion of each file (you should delete every file Bcuninstaller suggests). Once you’ve finished, click Close, then Yes when prompted to ‘look for leftovers’. If Bcuninstaller finds any traces (registry keys and other hard-to-shift files associated with uninstalled programs), click the ‘Delete selected’ button to remove them.
List only Windows 10 apps
You can filter Bcuninstaller’s list of programs so that it only shows Windows 10 apps. These include Microsoft’s built-in Windows 10 apps (such as Groove Music and 3D Builder), as well as any you’ve installed from the Windows Store. To see these, make sure the ‘Show Windows Store apps’ box is ticked (on the left), click View, then View Windows Store apps (see screenshot above). The apps will all be highlighted in light blue. You can now uninstall these in exactly the same way as any other program.
If you’re unsure which ones to get rid of, we recommend removing 3D Builder, Gamebar, Get Office, Get Started, Groove Music, Microsoft Wallet, Skype Preview, Xbox, Xbox Identity, Candy Crush and Royal Revolt – assuming you don’t use any of them.
Disable startup programs
To see a list of programs that load automatically whenever you boot your PC, click Tools, then Open Startup Manager. The default view lists every boot process (including Windows’ system processes). To limit the list to programs only, click the dropdown menu at the bottom of the Startup Manager window, then select ‘Show startup entries’.
This will show just the programs that have requested to be loaded when Windows boots. Look at the Enabled column to see which of these have permission to do so. On our PC, for example, a program called Shadowplay (an Nvidia program used to record footage of video games) was enabled. We stopped it by right-clicking its entry in the list, then unticking Enabled.