New Windows, same old crap to configure (and new ones every version…)
Install with a local account
At the step where it asks you to enter a Microsoft account or create one, you can no longer skip… Fuck you Microsoft… even Apple still lets you its OS without forcing you to create a fucking iCloud account…
Anyway. Just use no@thankyou.com and enter some random password: it will say something along the line of “Whoops, too many attempts with incorrect password” and will let you create an offline account…
Reduce the number of running services
Regedit, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control. In there, locate or create the DWORD value SvcHostSplitThresholdInKB and set the value to 4000000.
Stop pushing Bing crap on me when I’m searching for an app
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer (created the last key if needed)
New DWORD value: DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = 1
Stop writting System Volume Information on removable drives
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search (create the last key if needed)
New DWORD value: DisableRemovableDriveIndexing = 1
Disable Storage Service in services.
Customization Tools
List of tools that allow you to tweak Windows to remove some of its bloat, restore it to a functional desktop, etc.
- Explorer Patcher : Quite good, but has a few bugs and things that don’t work well for me. Might be possible to fix (it’s on Github) but don’t have the time or motivation for this.
- O&O ShutUp10++ : Might be worth a try. Not open source, but seems serious.
- https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil