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If you spend any time on message boards for Windows enthusiasts, sooner or later you will run across recommendations for Windows "debloater" utilities. These magical tools promise to get rid of unwanted software and make your PC run faster while using fewer system resources. Like every offer that sounds too good to be true, there's a catch.
People have been complaining about "bloat" in Microsoft's flagship OS for as long as I can remember. So-called "debloating utilities" used to be called performance optimizers, and they were mostly snake oil. These days, utilities that promise to streamline your Windows 11 experience tend to be scripts (usually free) or customized installation images that remove apps, disable services, clean out the Windows registry, and change default settings, all in the name of greater performance.
A decade or two ago, before solid state drives were standard and when system memory was expensive, this sort of fine-tuning could result in measurable improvements. On modern PCs with sufficient system resources, you will see marginal benefit at best from this sort of indiscriminate brush-clearing, and you run a significant risk of causing additional problems that will cost you far more troubleshooting time than you'll save in an entire year. I went through the issues reported by users on one popular GitHub-hosted script and found a staggering range of complaints, ranging from "breaks sleep mode on my laptop" and "all my desktop icons turned black" to "most things on my pc are now broken."
Then, of course, there's the risk that one of these scripts will add malicious software, as one popular script was discovered to be doing earlier this year.
Using a "debloated" installer created by some random guy with a YouTube channel is just not a good idea. As an alternative, you can use a utility like NTLite, which allows you to create custom installation images and (if you pay for a license) modify a currently installed Windows installation to remove features, apps, and services. It's an extremely powerful tool, capable of rendering an otherwise functional PC completely useless if you disable the wrong feature. It's appropriate for full-time administrators and hobbyists who aren't afraid to break things. If you're just trying to make your PC easier to use, it's overkill.
If you have older hardware that can't be upgraded, you might benefit from reducing the impact of apps and services that run in the background. But you don't need one of these all-purpose scripts to accomplish that.
Here's a quick checklist of ways to safely tune your system.
With those tweaks out of the way, the best strategy for avoiding "bloat" is to be extremely careful about installing any third-party software. Legacy programs that add their own services and auto-starting add-ons are the worst offenders in this regard. But treating every third-party program as a potential source of performance problems is probably a wise strategy in the long run.