Third-Party Apps Installed on a Fresh Windows 10 Installation

There’s a fantastic feature of Windows 10 that makes reinstalling Windows a breeze. On one of my laptops, I had a hard drive fail. Not a problem, it was a horrendously slow HDD and I was interested in letting it scream with an SSD. At the time, I didn’t know that Windows 10 saved information about the motherboard so I could reinstall Windows 10 without having a license on hand. So, for a year I was running various flavors of Ubuntu before I realized that today, on May 6th, 2017, I could just throw Windows 10 on a USB Drive and be back in Redmond and activated. It worked, now here’s the fun part: I get to see how much crap Microsoft throws your way on this Windows 10 Pro fresh installation. In this list, I’ll only be including apps that aren’t made by Microsoft for the benefit of the user, or that just have no reason to be preinstalled. Also note, I did sign in to my Microsoft account upon setup, and I have not personally entered the Windows Store to download anything; these are all apps that decided to show up on their own.

1. Candy Crush Soda Saga — This has been presented countless amounts of times as the big standout app being shoved in our faces.
2. Facebook — Of course this is here, but not everyone wants access to this.
3. Houzz — I don’t have a clue what this app is, and I’m not going to open it.
4. March of Empires — Again, never heard of it, no interest in it.
5. Twitter — This goes in the same boat with Facebook; it does not need to be installed by default.

Now, here’s a list of questionable additions. You get to decide if they’re useful.

1. Microsoft Solitaire Collection — I included this on the list because it does lead the user to Xbox to sign in and whatnot, but Solitaire has been here since Windows 3.0, so I suppose it gets a pass.
2. Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition — Microsoft may be positioning Minecraft as the next 3D Pinball, as a game you can just get into at any point for no reason, but it’s still an Xbox-connecting game.
3. Skype — This one’s a tough one. Skype is just like Microsoft bundling Windows Live Messenger on Windows, I really don’t see any issues with it, but someone might not be on the Skype bandwagon.

The rest of the Microsoft built-in apps I would say are useful, like Sticky Notes and Paint 3D. However, some may say that the five big ones that Windows preinstalls are five too many. I personally don’t mind, because, hey, a billion-dollar company has to many money somehow!