How To Clean Up Windows 10 Bloat (Updated for 2021)

Hello, this is David with the 7 tweaks you should apply to Windows 10 to make it simpler, more functional, and more beautiful. So as you can see in front of me, I have a somewhat cluttered desktop. The shortcut icons are riddled all over the place, the taskbar is looking a little crowded, and the icons are just generally messy. The idea here is we want to take what we have now and make something that's more simple and more functional and more beautiful. That is the goal today. The way we primarily do this is by cutting out a lot of the bloat that's built into Windows 10, using keyboard shortcuts over UI elements on the screen, and adjusting a few settings here and there. I'd like to begin with introducing you to one key on your keyboard. It is this key. It can be called the Windows key, the Start key, but basically if you press it, the Start menu opens. Now of course you can accomplish the same feat by clicking the Start button, as most of you probably do. However, the utility of this key cannot be understated, and I'll show you why right now. So traditionally, when you wanted to open one of your favorite applications, you would just double-click on a desktop shortcut, and it would open to the program that you wanted. But what if I were to tell you there's a faster, more efficient way to open up applications that doesn't require any clicks at all? That's right, hit the Start menu key, then type in the program you want to open, like Notepad, hit Enter, and voilà, it's open. In fact, you don't even have to type out the full name. If I just type in "note p" and hit Enter, it's open. That's how convenient it is. If you have a similarly named app you'd like to open, you can type in "note" and then click the option below it, and there it is. It's open. So even just with that knowledge, you can automatically open the programs you want even faster than you could before. But with this comes new responsibility. That's right, it is up to you to delete all of the shortcuts on your desktop. You do not need them anymore. So simply get rid of them by highlighting them and hitting delete. You'll notice you can't do the same thing with the Recycle Bin. So there's one very specific way to hide the Recycle Bin. And so you'll want to go to Settings first. You'll want to go to Personalization, and then under Themes, there's an option over here called Desktop Icon Settings. And if you simply uncheck Recycle Bin and hit Apply, the Recycle Bin is gone. Look at this nice clean desktop. You can actually see your wallpaper now. It's amazing. So let's say you want to get back to your Recycle Bin sometime. Simply open up File Explorer like you would normally, navigate to Desktop, and one of the options is Recycle Bin. So you can empty out all the silly things that you deleted whenever you need to. So the Recycle Bin is not gone by any means, it's just in a different spot now, and the result is a nice clean desktop. So that's number 1. Number 2 is cleaning up your Start menu. So because you have this wonderful Start key to open this up, and you have an amazing search feature to open up the programs that you need instantly, you don't need tiles anymore. Now the exception to this is if you can't remember what it's called. If you can't remember what the application is called that you open up frequently, I would just pin it to your taskbar here. So for example, let's say I needed Slack very quickly and I did not remember what Slack was called. Simply Select More and hit Pin to Taskbar, and here it is. So I don't need to remember what it's called, I can just click it on the taskbar and it will open. But what this means is I don't need these tiles anymore, so I'm actually going to right-click and select Unpin from Start on both of these. And then after that, I'm going to actually drag this side to the left, and now it's this nice compact Start menu. It's a lot cleaner already. But there are a few more tweaks you can do, which I actually recommend. So if you go to Start— if you go to Settings, Personalization, and then go to Start, you can really clean up some of these settings. So I'm going to turn off Show Recently Added Apps, Show Most Used Apps, and especially turn off Show Suggestions Occasionally in Start because that can be really annoying sometimes. And then the last little bit is customizing the icons along the left. So I don't need a quick link to Documents and Downloads and Music and all those things, so I'm actually gonna uncheck Pictures, Music, and Downloads, Documents, and simply leave File Explorer and Settings as my only two folders. What that does is it just leaves a nice succinct list here. If I want to quickly open File Explorer, I can do it that way, or if I want to go to my Settings, I can do that. But there's not a lot of extra clutter, and this is just my list of applications and programs. So now that you've officially cleaned up your Start menu, I want to show you Focus Assist for the Action Center in Windows 10. As you know, there's this new Notification Center, or what they call the Action Center, that gives you a list of all your notifications on the right and little shortcuts to a few little settings. But what gets annoying is notif— sometimes websites can utilize this, or different applications can use it, and it can get quite annoying when notifications pop up. So what you'll want to do is right-click this Go to Focus Assist and turn on to Alarms Only or Priority Only depending on your settings. I like setting it to Alarms Only and it doesn't really bother me and it stays out of the way. In fact, I don't even use this at all, so I'll be showing you how to get rid of this icon a little bit later in this video. Speaking of cleaning up your taskbar, that's what we'll be covering next. Um, one of the most obvious ways you can save precious taskbar space is by right-clicking anywhere open on the taskbar, selecting Search, and go to either Show Search Icon or Hidden. If I do Show Search Icon, it simply goes down to an icon, and you can click it, and the same search box was there before. But if you remember, hitting the Windows key and typing does the same thing essentially as clicking this. So I don't actually even want it at all. You don't actually need it. So I'm just gonna go to Hidden, and now that button is completely gone. The functionality is still there if I hit Start and I start typing something, but it's saving space on my taskbar. That's also true for the Show Task View button, which is this button right here. It can vanish. And the People icon here, which I don't use at all. So you can just click Show People on the taskbar if you right-click the taskbar, and it's gone. Now, that Task View button that I hid, there's actually a shortcut you can use to access it, and it's Windows+Tab. If you press Windows+Tab, that will open the exact same interface as it would if you were to click it. So all these things that you're getting rid of, you can actually access in other ways, but it makes it so that your, your interface and your environment is a bit cleaner. The other thing I'd say is unpin any of the shortcuts to applications you don't really need to be there, meaning you don't access them every day, or even every week, simply unpin the ones you don't use that frequently, and you'll find a lot less clutter getting in the way. Now the last section to tackle on the taskbar itself are these, what are called, tray icons. These are little extra icons on the right that can sometimes be useful, but I find they look very cluttered unless a lot of them are hidden. So there are a few things that I do here. First of all, there's this keyboard button you can actually get rid of by right-clicking and unselecting Show Touch Keyboard Button, which saves a little space. If you don't need the touchscreen keyboard that often. And then another option you can do is if you right-click this little arrow right here and go to Taskbar Settings, you'll jump immediately to this menu, and you can scroll down and go to Select which icons appear on the taskbar. So if you'd like, you can actually hide a bunch of the icons. So for my purposes, I'm gonna hide Dropbox Malwarebytes, the Safely Remove Hardware icon, Discord, and I'm going to leave everything else. So these icons aren't actually gone, but they're tucked in this little menu here. So they're all neatly, uh, stored in this little arrow so that it doesn't take up as much space on the taskbar. In general, you can go to Turn System Icons On or Off in the same settings pane. If you wanted to, you could even remove the clock and the volume and those sorts of things if you wanted to really save space. But I'm not willing to go that far, so I'm going to re-enable these 3 icons as I use them very often. Another tip is that some third-party applications, meaning non-Windows applications, have their own icons in here too. And sometimes you want that, and sometimes you don't want that. And some, some applications do give you the option to turn those off. An example is Office Upload Center. It's something that comes pre-installed with Office sometimes. If you click Settings, there's an option to check off Display Icon in Notification Area, and if you turn that off, which I already have, the icon no longer appears in the tray, cleaning it up and making it so that it doesn't bother you. When it comes to the taskbar, the last thing I would suggest is considering making the taskbar smaller. So if you select Use Small Taskbar Buttons, the taskbar overall gets smaller, and allows you more space and more room for your content if you don't need this to be as big. I personally don't use this option, but it is there if you are looking to be even more compact and efficient with your space. The next area we'll tackle is the look and feel of your operating system. So if you go to Settings and go to Personalization and navigate to Colors, you'll notice that there immediately is choose your color option between light and dark. I select dark because I like to save my eyes. If you click Light, you will use this very, very bright color palette, which I personally can't stand for too long, so I'm gonna click Dark and restore it back to what I'm more comfortable with. I also recommend selecting Automatically pick an accent color based on your desktop background. That way, if your desktop background changes to something else, your theme adapts and it, it looks more cohesive overall. I also like to select Start, Taskbar, and Action Center, title bars, and windows and borders also have that color, which makes it kind of fun. I'll show you an example on Notepad. So you can see the top here is all that dark blue color that it picked from up here. So I like how that looks. You can customize it to your liking, but I definitely recommend that. The other piece to saving your eyes is a setting called Night Light, and to access it you go to System and then scroll down a little bit on Display, and under Color it mentions Night Light settings. And Night Light settings, you might be familiar with this if it's on your mobile phone, essentially during the sunset hours it will adjust the lights of the skin, the colors of the screen, so they are not as hard on your eyes. Now these will change how you perceive colors and how the colors actually look, so if you're doing something artistic or you need to do something that's really important for— to have high color accuracy, I would just be careful that— and keep in mind that if this is on, you're going to see things differently. You can easily turn this off. In fact, if you use the Action Center, it's just one click away. If you click this, it goes off, and it can come right back on also by clicking that. The last piece to customize in Look and Feel is to scroll down on the lock screen and make sure Get Fun Facts, Tips, Tricks and More on your lock screen is turned off. That can be kind of cluttery sometimes if you just want a simple background for your login screen. And that also goes to any of these, you know, options for showing— letting an app show more details on the screen. You can clear all these out if you would like, and I have none of them selected currently. The next piece is to audit your installed apps' footprints, and by that I mean Some applications will kind of want to overstay their welcome, meaning they turn on automatically whenever you turn on your computer, or like I said earlier, they'll dominate the tray icon section for no reason. So here are some tools you can use to kind of keep your apps in check and make sure they're not overwhelming you or overstaying their welcome. So if you open the Task Manager, if you go over to the Startup tab, you'll notice there's a list of applications that are optional to start with your system. Now I've organized these by enabled versus disabled so I can see which ones are enabled, and I'm happy with Dropbox, the Logitech Options application, and this shortcuts.exe app that I have running by AutoHotkey. I am very happy with those running when I turn on my computer because I want those to happen instantly. But some of these other programs, for example, I don't necessarily want Skype for Business to open as soon as I turn on my computer. Or even Steam or anything like that. So I've disabled all these myself, and you'll find your startup time will be a lot faster the more of these you disable. Keep in mind the example of removing the tray icons like I showed you earlier, and that will kind of vary from program— from app to program. And so just make sure you navigate the options and see if there's a way to turn off those icons. Another example of applications using up space you might not want them to use is the right-click context menu. So if you were to right-click a file or something, you might see some of these extra options like Play with Zune, the 7-Zip option, and Scan with Malwarebytes are the ones that are on my screen. Now these are inserted by programs and apps, but sometimes if you have too many apps that do this, your right-click context menu can get kind of messy and cluttered. There are options in some applications to customize this, So I'll show you an example with 7-Zip. If you go to Tools and Options in 7-Zip, and then go to 7-Zip tab over here, you can actually uncheck Integrate 7-Zip to Shell context menu, and remove icons on the context menu, and even customize some of these. And so this is just an example of how you can customize that to your liking. Another example of this is applications will sometimes install add-ons onto your browser or onto Office programs, So here's an example of TeamViewer. If I click Extras and Options, I go down to Advanced Settings, Show Advanced Options, and then scroll down a bit, I can see right here Deactivate Outlook Add-in. So by default, when you install this application TeamViewer, it forces an Outlook add-in onto the app. So with this option, you can click Deactivate and it will be removed and not in the way. The last set of options I want to do is more advanced, and it uses an application called WinAero Tweaker. Now this is an application you can download from winaero.com, and I would say only use this tool at your own risk because this is a— this is messing with settings that the user isn't necessarily supposed to be able to tweak, but it just provides a lot of great shortcuts to do things that you would want to do on your computer potentially. And one of those things, like I mentioned before, is actually getting rid of this Action Center button. So I don't use it at all. So for me, it's just wasting space on the taskbar. So what we're going to do is we're going to search for Disable Action Center, which is right here, and we're going to enable this option. By the way, the link to download this application will be in the description below. So now I've selected Disable Action Center. Uh, this icon will no longer appear here and it will be impossible to open even with the Win key A combination. Now this is something that's a preference for me, but if you use the Action Center, obviously you don't necessarily have to worry about doing this. But another example of using this application is disabling a lot of the ads and unwanted apps in Windows 10. As you know, sometimes ads come up in Windows 10, which is not a great experience. So this is a really quick way to get rid of those things. Another thing that I like to do personally is deciding the, the starting folder for File Explorer. So in other words, if you open up File Explorer new, usually it opens up to Quick Access, which is this view, but I prefer it to open up in the This PC view. So you can actually change it from Quick Access to This PC, or even Downloads if you'd like, if you access Downloads the most when you open up the File Explorer. And And then on top of this being an option, I like to go to Customize This PC Folders. And once I do that, I can pick whatever folders I would like to appear whenever I open File Explorer. So that's an option that I do. It's something that I really enjoy doing. I also have disabled Cortana. I have also disabled the People Bar and the taskbar context menu item for People. I've disabled Windows Ink because This computer is not a touchscreen device, so it doesn't make any sense to have this. I've also enabled Classic Paint and got rid of Paint 3D, which was the replacement for Microsoft Paint. I've also restored the Windows Photo Viewer, which is the old viewer. All you have to do is click this button and it becomes an option you can select and make it your default photo viewer, for example. So anyway, these are just some examples of the many amazing little tweaks you can make with WinAero Tweaker. Huge shout out to the guys at winaero.com for these tweaks. Finally, as an honorable mention, I would like to show you Windows 10 Debloater, which is made by user SickNex on GitHub. And essentially what you can do with this is it's a little something you run with PowerShell, and I like using the GUI, the GUI version of this. Just right-click and hit Run with PowerShell. And this will open and you can actually customize and remove all of the bloatware in Windows 10, as well as shortcuts to disabling Cortana or uninstalling OneDrive and these sorts of things. Again, do this at your own risk, but from my experience, it does work quite well. I like to start off with customizing the blacklist on this side. You can go through and anything that you check will be removed. So here's Print3D, here's People, here's Here's Office Lens and all the stuff that I never use. So if you're comfortable with this list, simply click Remove Bloatware with Customized Blacklist, and it will remove just the items you want to get rid of. So all in all, I hope this was a helpful guide for you. It's been a while since I made a video like this, so, uh, make sure and comment and leave a like if you enjoyed it, and I'll catch you guys again next time.