Windows 10 Tip: Using a package manager

If you clean install Windows 10 at least a month like me, you probably get annoyed by the time it takes to install and set up all the apps you use in Windows. There is, however, a slightly “quicker” method of installing all the apps you use in Windows 10. And that’s using a package manager.

I did a clean install of Windows 10 just last week, and I found that using a package manager can really make the process a lot faster. I was using Chocolatey, which seems to be the best package manager for Windows and it’s been out there for a few years now so there are a lot of packages/apps.

Getting start with Chocolatey is fairly simple, all you have to do is open up an administrative PowerShell and change the execution policy. To do that, simply type in Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned and hit enter.  After that, you need to run the command that actually installs Chocolatey on your machine — simply copy and paste iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex into PowerShell and hit enter. Chocolatey will then get installed, but it may take a few minutes for it to be ready.

Once the initial installation is done, you can now use the choco install command to install almost any app you want. For example, if you want to install Skype, simply type in choco install skype on CMD or PowerShell and Chocolatey will start installing the classic Skype app on your PC. There are more than 4500 packages on Chocolatey, and you can find all of the packages here.

Needless to say, package managers are mostly for power users who are familiar with these things work. Chocolatey is a pretty neat package manager that works nicely in Windows 10, so go ahead and give it a try!