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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

I'm much more prone to working with a busted Windows installation these days rather than just reinstalling because of what a nightmare it is hammering Windows 10/11 into usable shape. With Windows 7, it was just install, ungroup taskbar icons, show hidden files and file extensions, set accent color to black and turn off transparency, then go down the list of installers in my software folder.

With Windows 11, fuck, I don't even remember all the esoteric damn steps I have to do. I'm going to have to write it down the next time I have to do it.

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Haven't set up Windows 11 on a personal machine yet, but for Windows 10 step one is download O&O Shutup 10 and let it set all of their recommended settings. After that all that's left is setting my wallpaper black and fiddling with some taskbar settings. I'd highly recommend checking it out if you're looking for a quick way to get sane defaults set on new Windows installs, including Windows 11.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I had not heard of Shutup 10 before, so thank you for this. Definitely keeping that in my toolbelt. Happy to report it works well on 11 and helped get a few settings that I hadn't found myself.

>I'm going to have to write it down the next time I have to do it.

Honestly, this is what I ended up doing with everything. Fuck remembering all the things. I have a note taking app (used to be a single large TXT), where I scribble down everything, from the model of our electronics, to the steps I need to do to make my ZFS backups. On one hand, it's great to feel safe in that this knowledge won't go away, on the other hand, it's also a boon to free up mental capacity. I'm much happier offloading everything I can.

That's why the upgrades of Windows 10/11 have been "free". Appears that Microsoft is making money off of selling the user and their data.

For any kind of privacy, users have to find and modify/remove all the excessive telemetry, spyware-ish programs, and weirdness settings.

If you go down a list of installers you might want to give Ninite a shot!

I'd never heard of Ninite, it looks potentially quite useful:

https://ninite.com/

You may also like RuckZuck https://www.ruckzuck.tools

If you use ninite, you might want to give chocolatey a shot ;) https://community.chocolatey.org/

If you use chocolatey, you might want to give scoop a shot ;) https://scoop.sh/

Win11 has winget build in. It let you update all installed programs in batch. There is also chocolatey or scoop.

https://winget.run/

https://scoop.sh/

https://chocolatey.org/

For those who don't like command line, there is WingetUI: https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI

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