You paid $199 for that Windows 11 Pro license. It comes with ads in the Start menu and sponsored apps on a fresh install. There's a Copilot button in Notepad, Photos, and the Snipping Tool. Bing is wired into the search box, OneDrive starts syncing before you ask it to, Widgets push MSN content, and Edge reinstalls itself after you remove it. Windows also sends telemetry to Microsoft, and the Pro edition won't let you turn all of it off in Settings.
Then Microsoft shipped Recall. It takes a screenshot of your screen every few seconds and stores the images in a searchable database on your machine. It comes with new Copilot+ PCs, and setup asks you to opt in.
Try removing any of this, and you hit walls. Greyed-out uninstall buttons. Toggles that switch back on after updates. You paid for the machine. Microsoft decides what runs on it.
Samsung ships the same model. A $1,200 Galaxy comes with Bixby, Samsung Internet, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Health pre-installed. You can disable some of them. You can't remove them.
Chris Titus built WinUtil and maintains it. The checkboxes cover:
→ Disable telemetry on Windows 10 and 11
→ Disable Copilot
→ Uninstall OneDrive
→ Remove Cortana
→ Disable Bing in the Start menu
→ Remove Edge, including the component that reinstalls it
→ Disable Recall
→ Install apps in bulk through winget
→ Build a stripped Windows 11 ISO with MicroWin
→ Create a restore point before every change
One caution: removing system components can break apps that depend on them, and major Windows updates sometimes undo these changes. Keep the restore-point option on.
WinUtil is free and open source, with 59k stars on GitHub.