How to remove All Default Apps from Windows 8

Have you found modern apps, those comes bundled with Windows 8 aimed at touch screen devices no longer useful for your desktop PC?, You can remove all of these permanently by running few commands in PowerShell. Windows 8 comes with preinstalled metro apps like Camera, Photos, Reader, SkyDrive and others -these will be available for immediate use after Windows 8 install. If you don’t want all these so called “modern apps” you can remove them and gain significant disk space.

Update : Easier method is using this free app: Windows 8 App Remover Easily Removes All Installed Modern UI Apps

Removing all default modern apps in Windows 8 for all user accounts using PowerShell

1. First of all open PowerShell with admin privileges,

for that, start typing PowerShell, once it being showed in search results, select it and right click on it and choose “run as administrator” at the bottom.

2. To see all default apps you’ve already installed in Windows 8 run the following command in PowerShell window

Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers

Here you should know that when you remove all Windows 8 apps for one account, new account creation installs all these apps again. So removing apps for system account in Windows 8 is necessary for that run the following command in PowerShell window.

Get-AppXProvisionedPackage -online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -online

To remove modern apps from current account associated with you, type and run following command in PS

Get-AppXPackage | Remove-AppxPackage

• How to Clear history of Windows 8 Store Apps
• How to Know Which Apps Are Preinstalled on Your Windows 8 PC

You can also remove all pre-installed apps in Windows 8 of other users without switching to them by adding theirs username in place of <username> as shown below and run

Get-AppXPackage -User <username> | Remove-AppxPackage

To remove metro apps for all users, use the following command

Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage

You can install these removed apps one by one again if you want via Windows Store. Try this at  your own risk.  [Via Winaero blog]

Have you found metro apps offered by Microsoft in Windows 8 for non-touch PCs useful? If you found useful name them? Share me reasons for not liking default or other apps offered on new operating system ? Do you like to remove them? What you’ve decided?.