How to remove calc.exe in Windows 10?

Question

There's new default Calculator app in Windows 10. Is there a way to get rid of calc.exe file from system32 folder? Reason: I don't want any built-in apps, but I have a habit of running calc command via Win+R. I removed Calculator with

Get-AppxPackage -allusers *windowscalc* | Remove-AppxPackage

but every time I run calc it reinstalls back. When I try to delete/rename the file, it says that it's write-protected, although it's not running (at least it's not listed in the task manager).

Alternatively, I also tried to create a file calc.bat in my folder and add it to PATH variable higher than other locations, so that my command would be found first, but for some reason this doesn't work, and Win+R > calc still installs&runs modern win10 calculator.

I'd appreciate any way to make calc command not run that app, but removal of calc.exe would be the best.

Answer 1

Right-click Start, click Command Prompt (Admin)

Type:

copy rundll32.exe calc.com

That should prevent Calc from starting when you run calc from Run dialog. But you can still launch Calculator by typing calc.exe.

Answer 2

Most online instructions are incomplete, so the full set of steps required to actually delete the file are:

1. Get-AppxPackage -allusers *windowscalc* | Remove-AppxPackage
2. reboot

Which is mostly useless, but it's a start. To actually delete calc.exe from the system32 folder, you'll have to take ownership of it first, then delete it:

3. Open the properties for the calc.exe file in the system32 folder, and go to the "security" tab, then click "Advanced".
4. The only user account with full control will be the TrustedInstaller account, so select your own user account entry, click "edit", tick the "full control" box, and hit OK,
5. Hit "apply" and verify your account is listed as having full control.
6. Close the property dialogs and delete calc.exe

And then at this point you probably want to copy in Windows 7's calc.exe instead (a real one, not one you found online from a site you never downloaded anything from before).

Answer 3

Cygwin (run as administrator) has no problems deleting calc.exe:

$ rm --verbose /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/calc.exe
removed '/cygdrive/c/Windows/System32/calc.exe'

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I did back it up with XCOPY first, just in case:

XCOPY C:\Windows\System32\calc.exe C:\Windows\System32\WindowsCalculator.calc.exe /K /X

$ ls -al /cygdrive/c/Windows/System32 | grep "calc\.exe"
-rwxr-x---+ 1 NT SERVICE+TrustedInstaller NT SERVICE+TrustedInstaller     27648 Mar 19  2019 WindowsCalculator.calc.exe

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Note that calc.exe will be restored if you run SFC /SCANNOW:

[SR] Repairing corrupted file \??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\\calc.exe from store