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Removing “Contact Support” app

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It seems a lot of blogs start off as either e-mail or IM conversations – this one is included in that category (thanks to Justin Chalfant).  The question is fairly simple:  How do you remove the “Contact Support” app from Windows 10 1607?  If you remember back to the original Windows 10 releases, this wasn’t possible – the app was considered a system app and couldn’t be removed.  That changed with Windows 10 1607, although not quite in the way you would expect: you can now remove the app, but there is a different process needed to do it.

It’s first useful to see how to do it manually through the UI.  Open up the “Settings” app and search for the “Manage optional features” page.  On it, you’ll likely see “Contact Support” at the top of the list, and if you select it, you’ll see an “Uninstall” button:

image

OK, so what if you wanted to automate that?  Well, then you need to understand that these “optional features” are part of the “Features on Demand v2” setup introduced in Windows 10 and maintained using the “capabilities” commands provided by DISM.  So to remove “Contact Support” you just need to run:

DISM /Online /Remove-Capability /CapabilityName:App.Support.ContactSupport~~~~0.0.1.0

So where did that capability name come from?  From a list of all currently-installed capabilities:

DISM /Online /Get-Capabilities

The same thing can be done via PowerShell if you prefer:

Get-WindowsCapability -online

Remove-WindowsCapability -online -name App.Support.ContactSupport~~~~0.0.1.0

And since PowerShell supports piping the results of one command to another you could do this in a single command even if you don’t care to type the whole name:

Get-WindowsCapability -online | ? {$_.Name -like '*ContactSupport*'} | Remove-WindowsCapability –online

You can do this as part of an image (removing the feature before sysprep and capture, or even offline) or after the OS is deployed.  And if it’s been removed, it shouldn’t come back when a new feature update is installed.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2017
    Thanks for this info. We have been wanting to do this for some time now.
  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2017
    Any reason it's not an app like most others?
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2017
    See Nickolaj's script for a working example of removing Capabilities along with Apps. https://twitter.com/NickolajA/status/845020217482919942 Worked a treat in my build and capture.
  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2017
    It looks like "Get-WindowsCapability" cmdlet requires an internet connection; Direct Internet--Didn't like our proxy-pac.Dism command works just fine though as long as you add "/LimitAccess"
  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2017
    Thanks for the heads up! Works great!