As great and as popular as Windows 11 is, it's a well-known fact that it comes with a lot of things users don't want, and debloating is one of the first steps we usually recommend after setting up your PC. However, a lot of debloating software gives you a ton of options you may not be fully familiar with, and you may end up removing something you regret.

Thankfully, there's a new solution in town that's all about safety. Sparkle is more than a debloating tool, but that is one of its core features, and it claims to only make changes that are fully reversible, so if anything goes south, you can always put things back the way they were. So is it any good? Well, it's complicated.

How good is Sparkle's debloating?

It removes all the stuff you'd expect

The most important part of a debloating tool is, of course, how well it can do its job of removing unnecessary junk from your computer, so when Sparkle claims to "only" make reversible changes, I worried that some options I'm used to may be missing here. However, there's quite a bit you can still do here, and it's great to see.

You'll find most "debloating" options under the Tweaks tab, and the first option here is what Sparkle calls delboating proper. This tool lets you uninstall a wide range of preinstalled Windows 11 apps, whether they're included by Windows itself as a standard, or included by certain OEMs, so things like Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify, and so on can all be removed in one go. In fact, that's just the options offered by Sparkle's own debloating tool, but it also integrates with the popular Win11Debloat script which automatically removes a selection of apps without you having to do any of that yourself.

This page has a wide range of other tweaks, some of which may fall under what you'd call "debloating", while others are just performance or general usability tweaks. A notable one is the option to disable "Consumer Features", which prevents apps from being automatically installed through the Microsoft Store, meaning you shouldn't get any surprises later down the line when Microsoft tried to push certain apps as part of an update.

You can do other things like disabling telemetry, the Xbox Game Bar, Recall (on Copilot+ PCs), lock screen tips, and more. With the exception of the option to uninstall apps, all of these things are simple toggles, so you can easily reverse the changes by just clicking the toggle. What's great is that you can also jump to a documentation webpage that shows you exactly what's being done behind the scenes when you enable or disable one of these toggles, and you can just run the corresponding PowerShell commands and scripts yourself if you'd rather go about it that way.

Restore points are broken for now

It's still in beta

As cool as this concept is, Sparkle seems to be broken in its current iteration. It's officially still in beta, and I'm testing version 2.15, but unfortunately, some things just don't work. I chose the option to create a restore point when I first launched the app, but when I went to check the Restore Points tab, nothing was listed. The page does say that listing restore points is a beta feature but creating them should work.

However, after multiple attempts at creating a restore point, I was never able to see it, and I had no way to restore things after uninstalling apps. I imagine this worked fine in previous versions, as there are official instructions on how to use this feature, but it looks like I may have found this app at a bad time.

Of course, you can still use Restore Points in Windows itself if you want, and most of the tweaks are reversible directly within the app, so there are only a few scenarios where you would truly need a restore point, but it's problematic considering this is one of the primary selling points of the app. Hopefully, an update will come sooner rather than later and make this better.

What else can Sparkle do?

Windows maintenance made easier

While debloating Windows and enhancing its performance and privacy is a big part of Sparkle, there's actually a wide range of features available here that make this app worth keeping, even beyond the debloat stage. Essentially, it brings together a handful of tools already in Windows that make things a bit easier in the long run, since you can find it all in the same place.

The Tweaks tab I already mentioned above has a few more options that can be helpful to have quick access to, such as enabling hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, aligning the taskbar to the left, or enabling seconds in the taskbar clock.

But you can check out the Utilities tab to access a lot of other helpful tools, including disk cleanup (and Storage Sense), enabling or disabling Fast Startup, changing your power plan, or even restarting the graphics driver, which can help solve glitches in some cases. Other features include clearing the DNS cache or releasing your IP address, disconnecting you from the internet temporarily, to solve internet issues. Interestingly, there's also a Cleaner tab that offers functionality similar to Disk Cleanup, if you'd rather do everything in one app.

There's even a DNS Manager tab that lets you quickly change your DNS provider to a handful of popular options, like Google or Cloudflare, if you happen to have a preference. You can also set a custom DNS here. The last notable tab here is the Apps tab, which acts as a sort of repository for various popular apps so you can install them and get going more quickly. You can install your favorite browser and apps like Discord and much more in one fell swoop using WinGet or Chocolatey as the backend, which makes things much breezier. You an even export a list of selected apps so you can save it and select those same apps later on another computer.

Sparkle could be a great all-in-one tool

Barring the major problem with creating restore points in the version I got to test, Sparkle is a pretty compelling app. Not only does it offer a lot of options for debloating with easily reversible selections, but you can also perform all kinds of maintenance on your Windows PC, make changes to specific settings, and even install apps easily. It's very convenient and easy to use, so with some polish, I'd say this belongs on everyone's PCs.