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.