Microsoft points to a golden future where you can make Windows 10 your own (2019)

Microsoft has announced that its customers will finally be able to remove more of the cruft that arrives with a Windows 10 installation. In 2019.

While Slow and Release Preview ring Windows Insiders got to experience Redmond’s latest efforts to stabilise the troubled OS, Fast ring and Skippy testers got their hands on a fresh build of the 2019 version of Windows 10 (aka 19H1).

Build 18262 has finally introduced the ability to uninstall some more of the preinstalled Windows 10 apps (also confusingly known as "inbox"), such as little-used 3D Viewer, aka Mixed Reality Viewer. The following apps can also now be uninstalled:

Users would previously need to exercise their PowerShell muscles to get the things off their system. While we at The Reg are big fans of PowerShell (and all things CLI), it seemed a little harsh to force customers to resort to the command line or Registry editor to remove unwanted apps.

It is already possible to remove the likes of Solitaire, Skype and Weather. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that Microsoft’s largesse extends to making the Edge browser uninstallable.

The update also includes better visibility into which apps are likely to throw a wobbly in a high DPI environment and introduces a "Troubleshoot" function, which makes use of diagnostic data slurped from the PC to suggest fixes for problems. It sounds suspiciously like those helpful websites that claim to spot issues on your rig and offer a fix, before spraying your OS with layer upon layer of malware. Just without the malware bit.

Significantly, the Windows Insider team cautioned that as this is early on in development, “builds may contain bugs that might be painful for some”. It seems a shame that they didn’t slap a similar warning on the release code too. ®

Do I REALLY need the over-200 “services” that start up?

Is there a list somewhere of only what is required so that it doesn’t take my machine 4 minutes to boot?

And WHY when I go to “startup” to see what’s supposed to load there are only a few things, but there are still over 200 services? What’s that all about?

yeah i dual boot- i run linux mint as my main operating system for almost all my online stuff- email, browsing net etc- when i boot into windows 7, i do so to use photoshop, or play an online racing game I like- or other offline windows only games (windows still does dominate in that area- although i guess with linux and a steam account, one can play windows based games on linux now- but i haven’t looked into that yet)

I don’t do any email or browsing on my windows os- and 90% of my time on the computer is done with linux- it does everything i need it to do online- email;, research, browsing, etc- it’s amazing how far linux has come from it’s early days- very easy to use now- and ‘nearly virus immune’ compared to windows virus magnet-

as an added bonus, IF anything should happen to the linux installation, I can simply reinstall, update the os- put a couple of apps back on the way i like them, and I’m back up and running in about 1 hour as compared to days for windows (tweaking windows, updating which takes forever, getting protection for the os configured etc- windows just had so many annoyances that i had to ‘fix’ to get it to behave the way I wanted it to- that it took forever and extensive notes to remember all of them- linux just works the way i like almost right out of the box

The dual boot was a little bit of a hassle to set up, but once set up, I now have the best of both worlds-

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