win-mute: an open-source switch for Windows AI, telemetry, and bloatware (Windows 10/11)

I'm tired of Windows shipping things I never asked for: AI features turned on by default, telemetry I can't fully see, bloatware I uninstall every time I set up a new machine. So I built a PowerShell toolkit that shuts all of it off in one place, on both Windows 10 and 11. What it does win-mute ships 72 tweaks across 6 categories: Category Covers AI Copilot, Recall, Click To Do, Cortana, Bing web search, generative fill, Search Highlights, clipboard Suggested Actions Telemetry Diagnostic data level, DiagTrack, advertising ID, activity history, CEIP, error reporting Services Retail Demo, Maps broker, Fax, Windows Search indexing, Remote Registry, Xbox services ScheduledTasks CEIP, Application Experience, feedback prompts, autochk telemetry, WER queue Bloatware 25 inbox Appx apps (Xbox apps, Bing Weather/News, Solitaire, Skype, Teams consumer, etc.) Privacy Start/lock screen ads, "Recommended" section, classic right-click menu, taskbar Chat icon, Widgets, OneDrive nags, sponsored app auto-install, and more Each tweak is a plain PowerShell object with Apply, Revert, and Test script blocks, touching the same levers those closed-source tools use: Group Policy registry keys, service startup types, scheduled tasks, Appx package removal. Nothing hidden, modules/*.ps1 reads like a list of ingredients. Two rounds of "what do people actually complain about" Instead of guessing which toggles matter, I searched Reddit and tech-press roundups for real Windows 10/11 complaints (2025-2026) and matched each one to a confirmed registry fix before it went into the code: Windows 11 backlash: the gutted right-click menu, Start menu ad badges, forced "Recommended" feed, taskbar Chat icon, silently auto-installed sponsored apps. Windows 10 pain post end-of-support (Oct 2025): the recurring "Upgrade to Windows 11" nag on machines staying on 10 for ESU, Bing hijacking the taskbar search box, the People icon nobody asked for, Edge re-planting its desktop shortcut after every update. Windows 10 vs 11, auto-detected No version picker. Get-WindowsMajor checks the build number, and tweaks that only exist on one OS (Copilot, Recall, the classic context menu fix, Widgets) disappear automatically on the other. 64 of the 72 tweaks apply on Windows 10, 70 on Windows 11. CLI and GUI # Interactive picker .\Invoke-WinMute.ps1 # No prompts, one or more categories .\Invoke-WinMute.ps1 -Categories AI,Telemetry -All # Only the tweaks with zero functional downside .\Invoke-WinMute.ps1 -All -SafeOnly # Full rollback .\Invoke-WinMute.ps1 -Undo For anyone who doesn't want to touch PowerShell, START-GUI.bat opens a WPF window that self-elevates, shows one big "Apply now" button for the recommended safe tweaks, and tucks the full checklist behind "Customize". It switches between English and Portuguese with one click, no restart needed. The "will I lose anything" question I went back through all 72 tweaks specifically checking for that. None of them touch personal files, they only flip registry values, service startup type, or scheduled task state, or uninstall a Store app (which removes that app's own local cache, never your Documents or photos). Found one real gap in the audit: forcing "let apps run in background" off globally can stop mail/chat apps from showing live notifications, so I reclassified that one from Safe to Moderate instead of leaving it in the one-click bucket. A System Restore point gets created by default before any change, as a second safety net. One thing left alone on purpose: forced Windows Update and auto-restart behavior. Turning that off trades a UX annoyance for unpatched security holes, and that trade isn't worth it even under -All. Try it git clone https://github.com/obrenoalvim/win-mute MIT licensed, PowerShell only, no external dependency. Repo: https://github.com/obrenoalvim/win-mute What's the Windows "feature" you'd disable first if you could? Ps: I'm building BloodLink, a free platform connecting blood donors to donation campaigns.