Fresh installs of Windows 10 include a number of preinstalled apps, many of which you’ll probably never use and would not opt to install. But until now you couldn’t easily uninstall them. That changes with Preview Build 18262.
If you purchase a pre-built PC or laptop running Windows 10, then it will have a number of third-party apps installed by default. These are affectionately referred to as crapware, because they exist to try and extract more money from you and are best removed as quickly as possible. But there’s also a number of preinstalled apps that Microsoft includes with Windows 10, many of which can’t be uninstalled easily. That’s changing, though.
In the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview Build (18262), Microsoft will allow you to uninstall a number of these so-called Windows 10 inbox apps. The inbox apps you can already uninstall include:
In the new Preview build, the list expands to include:
These new uninstall options are very welcome if they make it into a final build. You can use third-party utilities to get rid of most of them already, but that involves installing more software. Now we should be able to get rid of a load of Windows menu clutter by default.
Of the apps listed above, the only one I’ve ever used is Calculator and even that hardly ever gets opened now. The rest may be useful to some Windows users, but this uninstall option from Microsoft suggests there aren’t many of them. Could we even see them disappear completely in future?
The other change worth mentioning in Preview Build 18262 is «DPI Awareness in Task Manager.» As display technology has improved over the years, so has the dots-per-inch (DPI) and resolution of the screens we use today. We may even run multiple monitors each of which has a different DPI and resolution.
Some applications are setup to handle this and will redraw based on the DPI of the screen, but others (usually legacy apps) won’t. Microsoft is adding a DPI Awareness column to Windows Task Manager so you can easily view which of your running applications is DPI aware.
