Uninstall Windows 10’s built-in apps

Martyn Casserly shows how to clear away the clutter on your PC by getting rid of unwanted apps

Windows 10 has some pretty useful features out of the box, a number of which are delivered through dedicated apps that are preinstalled when you buy a new machine. If you don’t use them though then all they’re doing is taking up space on your hard drive, not to mention cluttering your desktop. We show you how to clear them out in this quick tutorial.

Remove built-in apps

The approach above won’t remove any of the apps that are actually part of Windows 10, and you won’t see an option to uninstall the app when you right-click on it. For such apps it’s going to take a little more work. It’s not difficult, but it will involve using the command line, which while intimidating at first is actually quite straightforward.

Open the Start Menu again and type Powershell into the search box. It should appear as Windows PowerShell at the top of the list of results. Rightclick on it and select the Run as Administrator option. Obviously, you’ll either need to logged in as an Administrator account for this to work. (The default user account you created when you first got your computer should be an admin account.)

With the PowerShell window open you can now type in commands to remove the apps in question. The command you need to use follows this format:

Get-AppxPackage *name of app* | Remove-AppxPackage

So, for example, if you wish to remove the Office Hub app you’d type the following command and press Enter:

Get-AppxPackage *officehub* | Remove-AppxPackage

Here’s a list the built-in apps and the names you need to use to delete them:

3D Builder: 3dbuilder Alarms & Clock: alarms Calculator: calculator Calendar & Mail: communicationsapps Camera: camera Films & TV: zunevideo Get Office: officehub Get Skype: skypeapp Get Started: getstarted Groove Music: zunemusic Maps: maps Messaging: messaging Microsoft Solitaire Collection: solitaire Money: bingfinance News: bingnews Onenote: onenote Photos: photos Sports: bingsports Voice recorder: soundrecorder Weather: bingweather Xbox: xbox

There are a few apps that can’t be deleted, though. These are Cortana, Microsoft Edge, Contact Support, Windows Feedback and, while you can remove the Windows Store, it’s not a great idea since you might want it in the future.

So there you go, a simple way to clean up your system and declutter your app tray. Now you can either keep it sparse or replace the removed items with ones you might prefer.