Windows 10 to dump Paint and Outlook Express in the recycle bin

[sincity]

We’ve talked a lot about the smart new features coming with the Fall Creators Update, but it has just emerged that Microsoft is cutting some of Windows 10’s capabilities with the upgrade, too, and that includes the likes of Microsoft Paint and Outlook Express.

As Microsoft explains in a support post, some of these features are being completely removed, while others have been marked as ‘deprecated’, meaning they aren’t being developed at all anymore and will be removed in a future version of Windows 10 (i.e. they’re effectively dead, just not buried, as it were).

As mentioned, Microsoft Paint, the simple graphics app which has been a part of Windows since the very beginning, will be dumped. Of course, that’s mainly because it’s been superseded by Paint 3D, but still, some folks might shed a nostalgic tear over the lightweight program.

Living on the Edge

Outlook Express also gets the push with Microsoft explaining that it is non-functioning legacy code, and the Reader app is gone – mainly because in the latter case it’s been integrated into the Edge web browser.

Screensaver functionality has been removed from Themes, and it’s deprecated elsewhere (such as in the Control Panel). Also, the 3D Builder app is no longer installed by default in Windows (although you can still grab it from the Windows Store should you wish).

There are a multitude of other capabilities being dropped: for example, the use of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) will be blocked (Microsoft suggests that Windows Defender Exploit Guard’s exploit protection feature should be used instead). For the full list of cuts, check here.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that while it hasn’t been dropped, we recently heard that Microsoft’s smart Timeline feature, which was originally planned to be part of the Fall Creators Update, won’t be ready in time. It will be in a future update though (the first one of next year, almost certainly).

Lest we focus all our attention on what won’t be in the next major update, you can check out all the new goodies Microsoft is bringing to Windows 10 this fall right here.

• Want a Windows 10 notebook? Check out our best laptops of 2017