Things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge | Hacker News Reader

Things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge

arstechnica.com

32 pointsmastazi18 comments

This is a sign of an abusive relationship.

If you have the stomach for this, you have the stomach for Ubuntu and a Looking Glass VM for whatever software won't run under wine (which is a lot).

Link to Looking Glass for anyone interested https://looking-glass.io/

My use for Windows has been shrinking rapidly over the years. The last holdout seems to be HDR gaming, which, unfortunately, Looking Glass doesn't seem to support yet.

I don't understand how cloud Windows accounts work. Will you be able to log into your computer if Microsoft bans you or you end up in the US sanction list?

Also those who are willing to go to great lengths tuning Windows should consider using Linux - not only it has more opportunities for "tuning", but as a bonus you'll be able to fix the errors in the source code.

Fresh install? Hit it with Blackbird and enjoy.

https://www.getblackbird.net/screenshots/

The documentation page of that website is pretty interesting. Can disabling all those things break Windows in some way, like making updates not work or something like that?

Of course, that's the entire point of having 'admin' power over the OS..

     blackbird -d = Enable/Disable Windows Defender.
     blackbird -u = Enable/Disable auto-installation of Windows updates / Sets to manual download and install only.
     blackbird -m = Enable/Disable auto-installation of Malicious Removal Tool updates.

Well what I mean is, if you disable Cortana or the gaming services or whatever, can it cause functionality like windows update to stop working properly?

what an awesome handle; also caught this as it reads: 1970-01-01 10 hours ago

No, there are thousands of pieces of random cruft in Windows that can removed without breaking updates or core functionality. There's only 12 or so processes that are actually critical to keeping Windows running.

Windows Server exists and must not include any of Cortana/OneDrive/online accounts/...

So as long as the base for Server is the same it should at least be theoretically possible to remove unwanted components without breaking things too badly. (of course non-Server editions could hardcode something that breaks when some component is not present but I assume this is not how Windows editions work?)

Not sure how Windows Update behaves if some expected component is removed; not having it working would be pretty bad.

That looks daring! But any update can undo privacy measures.

I think the safest option is to not allow windows any network access. But that can be a pain in a dev vm, something like visual studio needs to talk with a trillion domains for installing. An MS does not provide static ip-lists for anything azure.

The whole Windows ecosystem experience is such a backwardness, each time I can shut down a win vm I feel relief.

last updated 2022 though; i'd assume it is outdated for win11 though im unsure if it syncs its actions against something more recently maintained

What kind of bubble the "product managers" of Windows are living in? Does anyone of them actually tries a new install of Windows or are they entirely focused on just incrementing some stats counter on some telemetry based dashboard?

They all run Windows 11 Enterprise configured by Microsoft's IT department, so no.

Install StartAllBack and choose the Windows 7 theme. Even if you dont care about the other UI improvements like the older Start Menu, it's worth it just for the improvements to the clock and calendar - the analog clock especially.

There is a whole subreddit devoted to "fixing" windows. https://old.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

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