Any way to get useless games out of Windows 10 Enterprise?

drfsupercenter said:

Home likely has them too, but I haven't checked... I only use Pro at home, and it does the same thing.

They aren't "preinstalled" per se - if you don't have an Internet connection you'll never see them. They just get downloaded once you've logged on.

I'll install Home in a virtual machine and see what happens, just because I can.

By all means try mate. The question (from 6 months ago so the OP has probably found a solution or got a new job) was why do you have these apps installed on Enterprise.

You still have them (except on LTSB) and if you can't figure out how to remove what you don't want before making an image to deploy then you possibly have the wrong job.

What is interesting (I think) is you can copy the initial tile layout from LTSB to C:\Users\Default on any other version and then you drop all the rubbish when you create a new user. The exact definition of the TileLayerDatabase is unclear though, at least to me.

lx07 said:

By all means try mate. The question (from 6 months ago so the OP has probably found a solution or got a new job) was why do you have these apps installed on Enterprise.

I'm the OP :P

I was just bumping this thread with the answer, because I hadn't actually figured it out until then. I was just going around uninstalling the games from people's computers manually...

OK, so using a VM of 10 Home...



With no network connection, you see those little downloading icons that say "A great app is on its way!" (great being subjective of course...)



No Candy Crush because as I mentioned, it's not actually in the install, it gets downloaded. No network means it can't do that.

So now I connect the network.

At first it looks promising, Twitter is not actually installed, just has a pinned shortcut that will install if clicked (and someone else on this forum told me "just unpin it, it only installs if you click it")



So I unpin them all. Wait about 5 minutes. So far so good. Reboot a couple times, and... what's this?



Same auto-downloading crap as the others. No Candy Crush yet, but you get the idea. It downloads them one at a time, and over a few different reboots too, trying to keep your apps "fresh" or some crap.

That GPO I mentioned will stop it from doing that! Going to wipe that VM and try it again, setting the registry key and see if it works in Home (since Group Policy doesn't normally work on home versions)... I can confirm it works on Pro and Enterprise.

I installed yesterday (for some other boring reason) Pro, Enterprise and LTSB.

There is no difference really between Pro and Enterprise but LTSB doesn't have Edge (and all the other rubbish).

I've also tried playing with the start menu layout but that never worked so well for me. This is a home user site so perhaps you'll not get a good answer but if I was you I'd start with LTSB and then add what you want. Removing things is a PITA (except for trivial apps).

It depends what your job is I guess.

What is your problem then?

Of course there will be useless people who do nothing all day but they would do nothing all day if they had XP or 7 or 8 or 10.

If your problem is you have lazy people then just sack them.

If your problem is you have wonderful people who (despite that) might be distracted by CandyCrush then you are mad and you should just resign from the company, buy a small island in the Caribbean and stop worrying about it.

IMO (obviously)

Nah, the problem is that Microsoft is installing games on an Enterprise OS, which is just stupid. I trust people to not play them, but they shouldn't be there in the first place.

So now with that GPO set, one less thing to worry about :P

drfsupercenter said:

they shouldn't be there in the first place.

Who?

The games.

drfsupercenter said:

The games.

At the risk of repetition you have a choice.

You can install Pro (with all the games)
You can install Enterprise (with all the games)
You can install LTSB (without)

or

You can make your choice:

Your install the latest version of Windows for your company (Enterprise I guess)
Install Office and whatever other programs you want
Set your start menu as you desire (this is trivial)

and install that on everyone's PC

If you don't know how you should employ someone else.

lx07 said:

At the risk of repetition you have a choice.

You can install Pro (with all the games)
You can install Enterprise (with all the games)
You can install LTSB (without)

or

You can make your choice:

Your own version of Windows for your company (Enterprise I guess)
Install Office and whatever other programs you want
Set your start menu as you desire (this is trivial)

and install that on everyone's PC

If you don't know how you should employ someone else.

I feel like you're missing the point of this entire thread.

My complaint was that Microsoft included the "download games from the cloud!" features into the "Enterprise" version, which is designed to be used in workplaces. There's no logical reason for this besides shameless ad revenue.

The only solution I was able to come up with was to remove the games after they were installed (as they don't come back unless you manually reinstall them)

No, this has nothing to do with the start menu. I've explained this already. If you click on Candy Crush in the start menu, yes it will download and install. But even if you unpin it, the game will be downloaded at some point in the near future (I haven't tested this extensively, it could be 2-3 reboots, or it could just be 10-15 minutes after first logging in, whatever)

Because these aren't actually preinstalled, the PowerShell method of removing them doesn't work as they aren't technically there to begin with! They get downloaded in the background.

So... the real answer, which I've already mentioned in my bumped reply a page back, is to set a Group Policy object called "Turn off Microsoft consumer experiences" and apply it to all domain computers. You can also do this on your own local machine using gpedit if you're using Windows 10 Pro.

I don't know what it is about this forum... I posted another thread asking how to stop OneDrive from continually readding itself to libraries and got into a massive 4-page-long argument with some member who couldn't read my question and kept thinking I wanted to "disable OneDrive" when I clearly stated in the first post that I did not want to do that.

I'm not going to argue about this anymore.

The fact is that all versions of Windows 10 (minus LTSB) automatically download and install unwanted apps in the background whether or not they are on your start menu. Unpinning them does not stop this. The ONLY ways to get rid of them are to either wait for them to all be installed and remove them one by one, or just set the policy I mentioned...