Disable Microsoft Consumer Experience on Windows 10 Pro

Question

We would rather not show all of our users a shortcut to Candy Crush Saga, Minecraft etc. on their work start menu. Sources such as this one state that you can remove this stuff with a GPO edit, but the GPO option now indicates that you need Windows 10 Enterprise to remove these shortcuts. We are stuck on Windows 10 Pro.

I have tried manually creating the noted registry key to no avail. I considered removing the shortcuts from the image, but my initial attempt did not carry over to domain users and I am concerned that Microsoft will add fresh garbage in the future.

Does anyone know of a workaround to help our users avoid this "experience"?

Answer 1

There are scripts that will remove this detritus, and you can configure scripts to run using GP. It doesn't "disable" per se, but it does entirely remove the apps and makes them unavailable.

Personally, I run a modified version of W4RH4WK's Debloat Windows 10 script (https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10) on every new Windows 10 computer I image. My modifications pull the required privilege escalation functions and the functional scripts into a single script file to make for easier use and deployment in our environment.

The Debloat scripts remove the apps entirely. They will not show up in any user accounts logged into that computer for the first time after the script is run.

You can use any of several methods then to run this script on first run, first login, domain join, whatever trigger is most appropriate in your environment.

Answer 2

You can push a GPO that disables the CEIP scheduled tasks.

EDIT: I misread your question initially, though I am leaving it because CEIP is also a nuisance in a corporate environment. The following link should provide a solution.

http://mikefrobbins.com/2015/08/20/remove-app-packages-from-windows-10-enterprise-edition/

Ignore the fact that the link references enterprise edition, it functions with powershell entirely and should be version agnostic.