Hands-On Windows 183 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, I'm going to start discussing a topic that I think is near and dear to everyone's heart, which is getting rid of the AI in Windows 11 podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Therot. Last week I discussed this book that I had started writing about deinsurdifying Windows 11. We went through this big update to the Win11 debloat utility, which is one of many utilities like that, but it's my favorite utility, and I thought I would kind of expand on that a little bit this week and talk about one of the topics I think is top of mind for people when it comes to getting things out of Windows 11. In this case, Copilot and the other bits of AI that are, you know, sprinkled liberally throughout the system. And, you know, there's more coming.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:58]:
We'll look at win 11 debloat again quickly. There is. It has some capacity for getting rid of AI capabilities in the system, like other utilities. There's something called winslop and some other utilities I've seen out there. None of them are complete. But we're also in a period of time where things are moving rapidly. New features are being added to Windows all the time. I feel like it might be a little while before we have a full handle on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:25]:
So this is maybe sort of an introductory to this topic, an introductory look at this topic, and then we'll probably expand on this again in the future. My Hope is that win 11 debloat or some other utility will arrive with a full suite of capabilities for removing all of the AI that's in Windows 11. Not that all of it is bad, we'll get to some of that. But just to give you a complete list of what you might want to uninstall, let you know, uninstall what you want to install. Right. So last time we talked about win 11 debloat, we can run that again. You run a terminal application as administrator, I still have the address in the clipboard here. And the UI comes up.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:06]:
And as before, I'm going to go through the custom setup, right? Not the, you know, the settings the author wants necessarily. And this two main pages as before, as there would be. And you should turn this on so it only shows the installed apps. You can use this to uninstall copilot. Right. So Copilot is there and I will remove that. There's also depending on the type of PC you have the type of sign in you use. You might see something called Microsoft 365 copilot.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:39]:
I feel like lately it's. You get one or the other. There was a period of time where you could have both. That app is not in this list and you won't see it in this list. But what you're looking for, and I don't have it installed, so you can't actually see it. But look for something called the Office Hub. That's the old Office app, which became the Microsoft 365 app. Which became the Microsoft 365 copilot app.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:01]:
Right? So in this listing, I think they're pulling it out of a manifest file, essentially. So you're not going to see that. So I do have Copilot right there. You can see. So I've checked that I'm going to want to install that, but that's fine. And then when you get to the system Tweaks page, there is this AI section. So he has a Disable Microsoft Copilot option that will do the same thing as getting rid of the app. Like I did in the previous screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:28]:
It removed some background processes and so forth. But that's something you can do. These next two options are only for copilot plus PCs. I know that Windows Recall has kind of a bad rep. If you want to disable, it's fine. It's not actually on by default anyway. But you could disable that. Click to do is one of the features I actually think is really good.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:47]:
So I don't recommend getting rid of that. But you could and I will just go through and let's get rid of some of these at least so we can see how this happens. And then disable AI features in Microsoft Edge. I'm going to leave that one unchecked just so we can go look at what that means later. But I suspect I've already gotten rid of it actually. But we'll see what that looks like. And then these two options here are a little bit controversial, right? So for two reasons. One is that actually I think most of these features are really good.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:15]:
And if you look at something like Paint, I am running this on a Copilot plus PC. Let me minimize that terrible whiteness. Most of the AI features are listed under this menu. Okay. So I've already run this utility. This is. I apologize. There are normally more options here.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:31]:
If you have a Copilot plus PC, the options you see here are options that are available on all PCs. So it looks like I've already done this work. You can also access the remove background functionality over here. The issue with this option in win 11 debloat is that. Sorry, this option is it doesn't actually remove all the features. You can see there were still three left. I've had mixed results with this. It removes some, but not others.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:55]:
I'll also point out that there is no way using this utility or otherwise, to remove the AI features in the the Photos app. Right. And if you have a Copilot plus PC in particular, some of those capabilities are fantastic. I don't know why anyone would want to remove those features, but if you wanted to use a different image viewer, image editor, you could do that and then just uninstall photos. Right. So that would be one way to get rid of that and then disable AI features in Notepad. I'll just. We've probably gone over this, I'm sure, but that's this thing here.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:26]:
So you've got this Copilot icon. I happen to have a Microsoft 365 family account. I don't have anything in here to do anything to, but if I did, I would get options for, you know, summarizing, making a longer, shorter, changing the tone, etc. You can just remove this directly in the app. So, I mean, if you don't like that stuff, just get rid of it. You know, like that's actually just built in. It's kind of nice. So you could do it here.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:53]:
I'm not going to. All right, well, let me just click through this before we take a little break. So again, apply to the current user. I typically do this for the current user as well. Removing the apps. I mean, it's up to you, obviously. Always create a system restore point. And generally speaking, I do recommend restarting Explorer.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:11]:
I'm not going to do that here because we're recording, but apply changes and so this thing will run like it did before. So remember, I removed one app, I removed Copilot, essentially in two different ways, I guess. I think I removed windows recall, etc. It says everything's fine. You can see everything's fine and get rid of it. And now when I search for Copilot is gone. Right. So there you go.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:33]:
That's that. So you can use a utility like Windows 11 to bloat. Most of the AI features in Windows 11 can be removed in other ways. This is not consistent. It's a little irritating, frankly. I think you should do what you can do with win 11 to bloat because it makes it easier. But for example, if you wanted to remove Windows recall, which I just did, actually, you would have to bring up the Windows features control panel and let's see if it's in there now because I did get rid of it, but I think it's under. It's already.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:12]:
It's gone anyway, I got rid of it, so I killed it. But you could, you can get rid of that from here, I guess. Click to do. If you wanted to get rid of that for some reason I don't recommend it. Also in a very strange place, right, you go into privacy and security and actually I've already gotten rid of it. So there you go, it's in here. There's a click to do option somewhere in this list down here normally. But I already got rid of it, right? So that's in a non standard place.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:37]:
Typically when you want to remove apps from Windows, you do so from the Settings app and then apps and you can see installed apps, right. If it is a system component, you can go. Actually it might be at the bottom of that list. Excuse me, all the way down to the bottom here. And you can get the system components and AI components, right. And so there's nothing AI related in this one. But if I go back, I already screwed it up. So let me go back and go to installed apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:07]:
Let that thing fill in, go down to the bottom. AI components. I've already turned off experimental agenic features. This is the interface for getting rid of agent, you know, agents which are coming, right. And so if I were to turn this thing on, which I don't want, but I'll do this for you. There's nothing here yet, right? So this is still kind of in process, but there might be some additional features here in the future. The other big one that you will find in Settings for AI type features is under Actions. Right? So I've already, I've turned these off.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:43]:
So actually I'm going to turn a couple of. Let me just turn the image ones on because that will make that a little easier. We've looked at this before, but just as a quick recap, I have some screenshots here. You have this AI Actions menu and it will show me what's available for that type of file right now if I turn all of these off. This is a little goofy, but the AI Actions menu is still there, but it's empty now. Microsoft has said in a future version of Windows 11 they're going to just get rid of that menu if none of those are on. But for now, that's kind of what we're stuck with. I already showed you how to turn off AI features in Notepad.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:20]:
There is no way in the UI to turn off AI features in Paint, but Win11 DeBloat can do that. And there is no way to turn off AI features in the Photos app that I'm aware of, although you can just remove that app and use something else if that's your. That's what you want. Okay, but what about Microsoft Edge? This one is going to depend very heavily on how you have this thing set up. The first place to go is AI Innovations. Right now I've turned this off, but I can. If this is on, you can see all of the different things that are available here, including some. You can have this theme where it kind of, you know, themes the window, like the Copilot app or.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:01]:
Right. There are new and then coming features like Journeys, where. Let's see. I don't know if I. Yeah, I already have my custom homepage. You're not seeing the Copilot homepage, but you could do that. So there's that. But you also want to look at appearance.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:18]:
And if you scroll down here, there should be a Copilot and Sidebar option. So I've already turned this off, but I could just going to turn those off. I hate the sidebar. But you could turn on Copilot as a sidebar. Right. So we turn it on and now when you click this, you get the sidebar. Right. So this is probably pretty familiar.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:44]:
You can show it on the. I don't even know what that means, actually. The bottom center of the Edge window. That's funny. And then also allow Copilot Vision, which. You know what, I'm just going to leave those off. I don't like this. But you can get into the settings for Copilot as well, which honestly, there's not much there, but basically you've got.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:03]:
Let me see if I get this right. Basically two main places in Edge settings. So there's AI Innovations, which I showed you. So now I'm actually going to reverse that because actually I really don't want this stuff on. You can go to Appearance, scroll down to Copilot and Sidebar, turn off all this stuff. Right. And I think that's. I think that's basically it.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:25]:
Now you could also just not use this damn thing. Right. So Microsoft Edge certainly has its problems. But if you do want to use Edge, but you don't want any of that, which to me makes sense because most people that actually do use AI, even if they're Using Microsoft Edge, you're probably going to want to use Chat GPT or Anthropic Cloud or Google Gemini. And those are all things that you can access just from the web inside the browser. You don't really need, you know, to. To have this integration. There are extensions that are out now and some that are coming in the future that will add those capabilities from other browser or, sorry, AI makers.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:03]:
I think Anthropic, for example, has a Chrome extension that should work normally in Edge as well, if that's what you want. But I like to turn all this stuff off, you know, that's me. But obviously that's up to you. So there you go. This is just a preliminary look. There's more coming and I mean that in multiple ways. There's more AI coming from Microsoft. That's just inevitable.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:24]:
There's that agentic functionality that is coming this year, which I'm borderline freaking out over, but you may or may not want that. There are the features you can remove from utilities like Win11 DeBloat. There are other features you cannot. And so I feel like sometime the next few months we're going to have an opportunity to revisit this topic because I think this is just going to. As AI gets worse in Windows 11, if you will, I think the utilities that remove that stuff will only get better. So hopefully we'll have more soon and hopefully you found this useful as it is. So thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club TWIT members.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:02]:
We love you.