O&O's software is what software should be. I've deployed ShutUp10 on every PC in my household and keep it updated. I tried AppBuster and it actually worked! I was able to remove a host of Microsoft trash apps and "non-removable" crap like XBox apps and services.
I did notice that certain apps couldn't be removed due to being in use. I rebooted and was able to remove those apps. Also, AppBuster doesn't seem to run in Safe Mode as it hung while scanning for apps.
Not too related but that's one of the reasons I switched to macOS and struggle to move back. Even back in Windows 7 there was already a lot of preinstalled crap that just made me feel gross about my installation. Now with Windows 11 the situation seems astronomically worse. I don't want to feel disgusted by my OS installation out of the box. In that sense (of course there are other downsides) macOS feels almost totally pure out of the box, although the Apple Music stuff is an early red flag to me.
I don't feel all that different on Mac. When I get a new one the dock is covered in crap I don't care about. I use zero of the apple apps except maybe Music to play mp3 so I have to spend a bunch of time removing them from the dock and argubly I should uninstall them
Then in notifications there's more crap like news, sports, stocks I have zero interest in as have to uninstall.
Then it nags me about Apple TV (the subscription service) as well as Game Center.
I use my Mac 10x more than my PC but it's very similar in how much stuff I have to remove.
Just in the last 2 weeks I set up a new M1 Mac and upgraded to Windows 11 on my gamer PC. Sure Windows is worse but both are full of bloat.
Yeah, they're kinda OK among utility developers. I used to use O&O Recovery tool which scans deleted files by signatures (headers), even wrote some custom rules. But a few versions later they started walking the Nero way, adding more "looks", changing interface, and filannly - breaking things. (
In the WindowsSrv2003 Day's their Defrag tool was a must, and BlueCon is still pretty good to have. It's pure no BS proprietary software (and that's perfectly ok).
Incase one of the developers is in here - I just tried the app and it prompted me to create a restore point before starting. It encountered an error while making the restore point and then proceeded to uninstall the apps anyway. This is probably not intended behavior and should be fixed
The "create a restore point" part is handled by Microsoft VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) and it probably failed because of issues with the OS, not the software itself.
Can it remove Contact Support and Windows Feedback?
Fun fact: "Zune" was never scrubbed from some of the names of these apps, the Films & TV crapware was (is?) still called "zunemusic" when you removed it with Powershell.
Though to be fair, we've all seen that kind of thing in the code and just left it well alone rather than pull on thr string and own the broken pieces you'll be handed for you trouble.
It's somehow horrifying that the unnaturally animated corpse of something that was so cool at the time like MSN Messenger lives on in an abomination like Teams.
Nothing much remains of the original protocol besides the name (MSNP), however; it started out being an IRC-like text-based protocol that MS even submitted to the IETF --- but never reached RFC status[1] --- but in its later years became gradually "XML-ized" and required more and more complexity in the client. The latest major revision of the protocol, which is also what the "new" Skype uses, is basically an HTTP API and thus most suited to being used in a browser, but definitely hinders those wanting to write a native client for it.
Yeah, I tried Win11, very MacOS, but if I wanted a Mac, I will buy a Mac, not a PC. So I uninstalled it and went back to Win10. Maybe by Win12 it should be good again.
Meh, I don't know. I don't use Windows all that much, mostly just for gaming and the odd day at work, besides that, I use Linux. As for the macOS comparison, I don't agree. Windows is much, much more annoying than macOS. Be it 10 or 11.
However, I don't get the hate on Windows 11. It has all the same annoyances Windows 10 did (random apps installed, random CPU spikes for no reason, etc). Yet I find it works much better. It feels much snappier and boots much quicker, even though the PC I usually use it on isn't supposed to be supported (old ivy bridge CPU, no TPM). And no, it's not because it's a fresh install. It actually is an upgrade from the previous Win 10 install.
I mean from the UI point of view. The new taskbar, or at least the one on the version I tried, is much more MacOS than Windows10. And the hate is because after so much work, half of the OS works in a new way, and the other half in the old way. That the new taskbar breaks all the flow from Windows 95 to today (I cannot have multiple icons for the same program), does not help.
That said, I don't get the hate on Windows. In my case, I have used many variants of Linux: Debian, Mandrake, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Mint, LFS, Suse, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, and I currently have the latest Redhat on my ThinkPad T460s. And while incredibly what the community has done, in the end I always felt that either I was missing something (Adobe, Autocad, WinRAR, hibernate, etc), or that everything was more complicated than using Windows which just works on all on my machines.
Again, I can use Linux if needed, and I am not afraid of other OSes (used DOS, BSD, OS/2, AIX, BeOS), but for my use case, Windows is much more stable, has the apps I need to use, and just works out of the box.
Maybe one day I will migrate to Linux if Microsoft continues f*cking up with it.
Since my earlier days of using Windows, I have a strong impression that OS-tweaking tools are very much a double-edged sword. The advertised functions always look attractive, but maintaining a system with such tools has always been not as trivial as the authors were depicting it to be. Sometimes to the point that something would break immediately after tweaking a setting or using some sort of system 'cleaning' slash registry 'optimisation'. In my experience, the latter had always been breaking something. And the former wasn't ever a permanent solution. In other words, given the possible complications and maintenance implications, these tools felt borderline malicious.
But it's been years if not a decade since I last used something like that. How are the things with tools like the ones O&O offer these days? My impression is, 'Shutup' seems like it could very well break a thing or two. And that Buster thing seems... superfluous? I'd rather remove unwanted apps with tools at hand. And if that would involve some black magic, then maybe they shouldn't be removed at all? What's the use in fighting windmills just to remove some default media player?
Anyway, not looking to bash on the O&O software, but merely curious what experience people have with 'tweakers' these days.
PS: I was quite surprized to see a freaking CC-cleaner installed on some modern systems. What's up with that, too?
They can still wreck havok on your system, although doing general package uninstalls on windows is a relatively stable activity. It's an extremely modular OS and it's designed to handle many combinations.
That said, Windows 11 has turned much attention to these tools due to all of the useless crap they're including on default installs. And by useless, I specifically mean the litany of "pre-installed" app shortcuts.
I used to do TONs of tweaks on unattended custom installs i use to make for Windows XP. Nowdays, esp Win10, not many are really need anymore, just a few open source things from ninite and Classic Start was the best, you didn't really need to see the Win10 "Apps." I haven't used Win11 too much at work, just at home on my gaming system and its mostly the same but you have to use a decent $5 pay app for the start customization and tweaking of Explorer to how you like it.
You can't feel too much of the bloat anymore in a clean MS windows install and i never use the modern apps anyways (though a lot of drivers are starting to convert to that system) so uninstalling them all should not really be an issue. I've also been using StopUpdates10 to control my updates for the last few years.
after a few years of not using windows I used O&O recently and it does do some things by default you wouldn't neccessarily expect.
Didn't break anything but the first thing I noticed is that Edge had no browser history, which of course you can turn back on but it was a somewhat hard to find option, and I wouldn't consider that a 'default tweak' necessarily.
at least I don't think it broke anything, but I think many people will still run into things that suddenly don't work with these tools.
I used to set the group policies by hand. The tweak tools take me 5 mins and cover 95% of what I want. It's easy to footgun if you don't know what each option (sort of) does.
These days I leave programs like OneDrive, app store, edge, the xbox ones unless it's like a VM.
Just a reminder: a lot of people have literally 0 alternative to MS Office. this is the single largest thing keeping me from going back to daily drive linux.
I did notice that certain apps couldn't be removed due to being in use. I rebooted and was able to remove those apps. Also, AppBuster doesn't seem to run in Safe Mode as it hung while scanning for apps.