quality of life: cleanup after use for -sysprep option

[CosmicRaven7]

Hi,
First of I highly appreciate your debloat tool, it's straightforward and efficient.
There are 2 things I noticed that would be quality of life improvement when using the -sysprep option:

1. Since I use the audit mode to create a generalized image, installed app packages for just one user, such as Winget cause the sysprep to fail as it only supports apps provisioned to all users.
   An easy solution would be if an option would be offered to remove installed app packages that were used by the debloat script after it ran/at the end of it.

2. and this might just be rare occurrence and independent of your tool, but after creating a clean image, capturing said image etc. and re-applying it to other devices, I faced an issue where no matter what I did, the windows installation failed across multiple devices and attempts every single time. After a few hours of troubleshooting and research it turns out that even if you cleanly install a blank windows version (in order to customize it), windows creates a Windows.old folder under C. And for some reason that was the sole cause. Since the folder is usually empty for newly installed images and not needed, being able to delete or deleting said folder via the tool automatically would be a good addon for the -sysprep option as it is something one can easily miss.

Thanks for reading, cheers!

[Raphire]

Heya,

Thanks for the kind words!

Since I use the audit mode to create a generalized image, installed app packages for just one user, such as Winget cause the sysprep to fail as it only supports apps provisioned to all users. An easy solution would be if an option would be offered to remove installed app packages that were used by the debloat script after it ran/at the end of it.

I don't quite understand your meaning here, could you elaborate?

and this might just be rare occurrence and independent of your tool, but after creating a clean image, capturing said image etc. and re-applying it to other devices, I faced an issue where no matter what I did, the windows installation failed across multiple devices and attempts every single time. After a few hours of troubleshooting and research it turns out that even if you cleanly install a blank windows version (in order to customize it), windows creates a Windows.old folder under C. And for some reason that was the sole cause. Since the folder is usually empty for newly installed images and not needed, being able to delete or deleting said folder via the tool automatically would be a good addon for the -sysprep option as it is something one can easily miss.

I'm not sure if this is something that falls within the scope of this project. It sounds like a bug within Windows itself. My suggestion would be to create a scrip that first deletes that specific folder (see relevant documentation for reference) and then calls Win11Debloat, or the other way around.

[CosmicRaven7]

Hey, thanks for the swift reply.

Since I use the audit mode to create a generalized image, installed app packages for just one user, such as Winget cause the sysprep to fail as it only supports apps provisioned to all users. An easy solution would be if an option would be offered to remove installed app packages that were used by the debloat script after it ran/at the end of it.

I don't quite understand your meaning here, could you elaborate?

Yes, so when you use the audit mode to generalize and sysprep Windows, it can only do so if all installed applications were provisioned for all users. Since the script evidently only installs winget in the current user context, generalizing and sysprepping the Windows installation, fails until winget is removed (or provisioned for all users). Unfortunately I didn't catch the error message, but it is referenced here:
(Warning external link)

and this might just be rare occurrence and independent of your tool, but after creating a clean image, capturing said image etc. and re-applying it to other devices, I faced an issue where no matter what I did, the windows installation failed across multiple devices and attempts every single time. After a few hours of troubleshooting and research it turns out that even if you cleanly install a blank windows version (in order to customize it), windows creates a Windows.old folder under C. And for some reason that was the sole cause. Since the folder is usually empty for newly installed images and not needed, being able to delete or deleting said folder via the tool automatically would be a good addon for the -sysprep option as it is something one can easily miss.

I'm not sure if this is something that falls within the scope of this project. It sounds like a bug within Windows itself. My suggestion would be to create a scrip that first deletes that specific folder (see relevant documentation for reference) and then calls Win11Debloat, or the other way around.

Fair point, thank you.

[Raphire]

Yes, so when you use the audit mode to generalize and sysprep Windows, it can only do so if all installed applications were provisioned for all users. Since the script evidently only installs winget in the current user context, generalizing and sysprepping the Windows installation, fails until winget is removed (or provisioned for all users). Unfortunately I didn't catch the error message, but it is referenced here:
(Warning external link)

Win11Debloat doesn't actually install WinGet, it relies on WinGet being preinstalled with Windows. It is used specifically to remove Microsoft Edge and OneDrive. If this is the error you see it might be related to something else (possibly Windows itself) doing this.

EDIT: Win11Debloat does check if winget is installed, and runs the winget -v command to check what version is installed. Maybe this is triggering this issue?