Tip of the week: Debloat your PC
Welcome to Advisorator’s Tip of the Week, helping you learn something new from the tech world every Tuesday.
After getting fed up with the inefficient “Add or remove programs” menu in Windows 10, I decided to investigate ways to uninstall Windows software in bulk. That led me to a useful and delightfully-named program called Bulk Crap Uninstaller, which does a much better job than Microsoft’s own uninstall utility.
BCU itself doesn’t require installation. Just download the portable version, extract the zip file anywhere on your computer, and run included program file. After walking through the setup wizard—in which I suggest leaving nearly every setting as-is—you’ll land on a master list of all your installed programs. In the left sidebar, click “Select using checkboxes,” check off all the programs you wish to remove, then hit “Uninstall Quietly” in the top menu bar.
At this point, BCU will start removing all the programs you selected. While you may have to deal with some uninstall prompts, the app will try not to bother you when possible and will process the removals in an orderly fashion, so you’re never inundated with pop-ups. At the end, you’ll have the option to remove associated registry files as well.
BCU isn’t the only program of this kind, but I appreciate that it’s free, open source, and doesn’t come with any of its own bloatware. While some software removal tools can do more harm than good, this one actually lives up to its name.
(If you’re a Mac user, here’s where you get to point and laugh at how easy bulk software removal is on MacOS by comparison: From Finder, just Cmd-click individual apps in the Applications folder, then drag them all into the trash.)