Windows 10 How to prevent automatic app installs?

zirkoni

Extraordinary Member
Hi!

I just did a clean install of Windows 10 Anniversary Update. After the OS had finished installing a few updates it began downloading and installing some useless games (Candy something something and others).

I have a slow internet connection so I had to wait for ~30 mins for all the games to download and install before I could continue downloading & re-installing my programs. These automatic downloads were using all my bandwidth and I couldn't even stop them (I tried clicking uninstall in the start menu but that just hid the icon & progress bars and the apps appeared back in the menu after they were installed).

Is there any way to prevent these automatic application installs? I really, really hate them. I'm using the Win10 Home edition.
 
You can remove most of them from a powershell prompt Remove-AppxPackage "*partialappname*"
 
Yes, I know I can remove them but I'd like to prevent them from installing in the first place.
 
If you're talking about for all new accounts going forward you can remove them with DISM
  • From an elevated command prompt get a list of all the installed AppxPackages with DISM /Online /Get-ProvisionedAppxPackages
  • Then remove it with Dism /online /Remove-ProvisionedAppxPackage /PackageName:Microsoft.MicrosoftSolitaireCollection_3.10.6302.0_neutral_~_8wekyb3d8bbwe
  • This will completely remove it for any new users, if a given AppX package is staged for an existing user it will not remove that.
  • You can see what applications are installed and staged by opening an elevated powershell prompt and typing Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers
 
So, I guess the answer is they can't be stopped. And the same issue with system updates. I wonder how people with a dial-up connection are doing. Wait for a few days/weeks for the updates to download?
 
If you use the commands in reply #4 that will remove them completely. The only way to do it from the get-go would require more work and technical skill than your average user has. In a nutshell the steps would be
  • Extract the content from a Windows 10 ISO
  • Mount the install.wim or install.esd file to a directory
  • Run the commands from reply #4 replacing /Online with the offline mount point
  • Unmount and finalize the WIM file and either build an iso to burn to disc or copy the content to a bootable usb media
  • Install
In an enterprise setting you have tools that make it a lot easier than that such as WDS and the easiest tool to use would be SCCM but that is cost prohibitive for SOHO.
 
Solved it, this requires a registry edit:
Create a key "CloudContent" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows.
Inside that key create a new DWORD called "DisableWindowsConsumerFeatures" and set the value to 1.
 
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