STREAMLINE YOUR WINDOWS 10 INSTALL
How to cut out everything you don’t need, and create a custom Windows install.
Bloat is the curse of operating systems, because they need to appeal to the masses, rather than cater for individuals. You can’t have a Microsoft engineer sit there and craft you your own custom version of Windows (we know, we’ve asked), so you need to scrape off that additional chaff yourself. We’re not just talking about shaving away the contents of a couple of megabytes of storage space, or cleaning up the Start menu. Windows comes with stacks of software that can reduce your machine’s performance or boot time. It comes with stuff that can see what you’re doing. It includes features that are potentially monumentally annoying. So we’ll do away with all of them, and explain what’s safe to chop, and what isn’t.
Doing all this work every time you get a new PC would be very frustrating, so we’re also going to look at creating an already-mostly-trimmed Windows installer, which you can use to start from a much more advanced point than usual, and even integrate apps that make up for some of Windows 10’s shortfalls. A better Windows for your PC of tomorrow.
Windows doesn’t seem to encourage trimming, but a little knowledge goes a long way. Our sacrificial OS for this guide is the latest official ISO of Windows 10 Home, updated for the Creators Update, because (presumably) that’s the version most people are using; if you’re taking a hammer to the Pro version, you might have to tease out a few more services, but the changes won’t be too extreme.
“Windows doesn’t seem to encourage trimming, but a little knowledge goes a long way. Our sacrificial OS for this guide is the latest official ISO of Windows 10 Home, updated for the Creators Update.”
INTERFACE OVERHAUL
Although Windows 10’s interface is already a highly streamlined affair compared to its predecessor, it could stand to be slicker. Let’s begin, with our clean Windows install, by making it snappier, removing unnecessary elements, and making that experience all the better. What better place to start than, well, Start itself? While we personally love the Start menu tiles, you may not be such a big fan.
Windows 10 Pro includes tools such as the Group Policy Editor, which can help you do away with them quickly, but in Windows 10 Home, you’re stuck with the tedious process of rightclicking each tile, and selecting ‘Unpin from start’. Do this enough times, click off the Start menu, and relaunch it, and that right side panel disappears altogether. Clearing out the main bulk of the menu itself, apart from a certain selection of Windows’ default apps, is again a case of wading in with right-clicks, and uninstalling. Those apps that simply won’t uninstall — the monsters — can usually be excised using Powershell. See the ‘Ultimate removal’ boxout (page 74) to find out how to remove and, if you’re desperate, reinstate them.
There is a host of surface personalisation tweaks that you can apply to the Start menu and Taskbar through the ‘Settings > Personalisation’ menu. You can change the colour by first selecting an accent colour in Colours, then checking the box to apply it to the Start menu, Action Centre and Taskbar. While you’re on the same screen, switch off transparency effects for a microscopic performance boost, then head to the Start tab. Because we’re old school, we favour switching off everything here to make the Start menu a straight alphabetised list of apps, but we’re not going to say you’re wrong if you like having recently used or installed apps pushed to the top. Suggested apps, though? That can definitely go. At the bottom of the page, click ‘Choose which folders appear on Start’ to get quick links to a bunch of useful features on there. Quite why File Explorer and its ilk aren’t included by default, though, is baffling.
Basic stuff done, let’s do some more intricate tweaking. Open up ‘Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced system settings’, then click the Advanced tab. Jump into the performance settings, and switch off everything you can’t stand to lose. Since we’re currently here for efficiency, not looks, we recommend disabling animations, fades, shadows — basically, everything bar font smoothing. Save your changes, then open up the Registry editor for a quick deeper hack. Navigate to the ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\ Desktop’ key, open up the ‘MenuShowDelay’ entry and change its value. A flat zero tends to make things a little overcrisp — read: impossible to use — but halving the number can really make Windows feel a lot more responsive.
BACK TO BASICS
Now head back to the control panel, because it’s time to do a little old-school scrubbing. Head to ‘Programs > Programs and Features’ and select ‘Turn Windows features on or off’. The list isn’t over-extensive, and there’s not much you can remove that will leave you with a faster PC, but it can prevent some annoyances. Drop, for example, Internet Explorer 11, because you don’t use it, and there’s no sense keeping it around. You can also kill off Windows Media Player, if that’s not your jam.
Next, let’s improve your boot speed by preventing a few things from running at startup. Launch the Task Manager with ‘Ctrl-Shift-Esc’ and head to the Startup tab. Each program that’s launched automatically is listed with a broad rating of its start time impact. If there are components you use very little, it’s a good idea to stop them; to squash OneDrive’s system-grinding initial launch time, for example, right-click it, and set its status to Disabled. For more intricate control, Microsoft’s Sysinternals team has long published Autoruns ( bit.ly/2CKVQo5), a free — and portable — add-on that offers access to the same management tools as Task Manager, plus a lot more.
More classic cleaning can be done within Windows 10’s Settings screen. Microsoft’s love for its Universal apps
means it presumes you’ll want to use them, and are going to want them ready at a moment’s notice, running in the background at all times. Which may be true, but disabling those background apps is preferable if you want a smoother-running PC. In ‘Privacy > Background Apps’, you can switch off anything you’re happy to just fire off manually, which will likely include, well, just about everything.
One more quick optimisation, whether you’re running a small drive or not, would be to clean up temporary files, and wash away old versions of Windows. This will gain a fraction more speed in certain apps if they’re forced to grind through cache directories before running, but you’re not doing this just for speed; you’re doing it for cleanliness. Find the drive you want to optimise in File Explorer, right-click it and select Properties, then seek out Disk Cleanup in the General tab. Select the categories that you want to kill off, and then use ‘Clean up system files’ to expunge the lot.
SLASHING SERVICES
We are, of course, working on a clean Windows install, but you probably aren’t. Disabling the core Windows services — those programs that run quietly in the background, supplying your PC with essential (and inessential) functions that don’t require an interface — isn’t necessarily recommended; Microsoft’s own suite has been honed over the years to be as efficient as possible, its contents sitting in the pagefile, barely ever touching system RAM. You could chop out most Windows services and never feel a difference on a modern machine, apart from the whole operating system crumbling around your ears. Thirdparty services, though, are a different story, and cutting them out means you’re likely to see a real change, which (usually) will only impact that app’s time to initial launch.
First up, find out what’s running. The Task Manager is a good place to start. Switch to the Advanced view, and scroll down to see the entries prefixed with the words ‘service host’. These are all fired off via svchost.exe, so they’re categorised together. Some might contain more than one service, which you can discover by clicking the expand arrow on the left; and most, while not essential, are there to improve your Windows experience. A quick glance through the list in our clean install reveals Superfetch as the main culprit for RAM hogging — as it should be, given that it’s the service that puts commonly accessed data into RAM, rather than spending ages reading it from the hard drive. Our biggest CPU sapper is the usefully named Local System, which deals with Windows updates. That’s the perfect target for now: We know there are no updates pending, so we can stop it.
Clumsily ending the task in Task Manager won’t do. Instead, type
services into the search bar to open the services section of Windows’ Management Console. You won’t find Local System in the list, but you should find the two components we’re looking for: Windows Update and the Update Orchestrator service. Right-click them, select Stop, and they’ll go away until your next boot. Those sanctions not
harsh enough? Right-click, select Properties, and poke around the General tab. Change the ‘Startup type’ to Disabled, and they won’t come back until you dig through the list and switch them back on again. Be warned, though: Unless Windows is happy to do without, this a stupid thing to do. Even more stupid — but similarly possible — would be to remove a Windows service altogether, although cutting out a third-party service, maybe even a piece of malware, is unlikely to sting too much. Run the Registry editor by typing regedit into the search bar, then dig down to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ CurrentControlSet/Services’. Finding the particular service you want to kill can be tricky, but click around until you find it, then rename (or, eek, delete) its key to get rid.
BACK IN TIME
If you’re installing on a new machine, there’s no reason you have to use Microsoft’s stock ISO. Installation customisation tool NTLite actually makes generating a stripped-down Windows easier, and it means you can arguably do a lot more in a lot less time. It’s also a chance to save a bunch of time post-install, as you can integrate all the drivers, updates and software you need into your custom installer, so it’s there straight away. What’s more, it’s a fantastic way of cutting down an existing Windows installation, as long as you pay for a licence — although you’ll only be able to create your own install image if you’re chipping away at an ISO, rather than a running system.
Let’s concentrate on trimming a new ISO — the live process is no different, just a little more narrow. Download the software from www.ntlite.com via the three-line ‘hamburger’ menu, and run through its installer — you can also create a portable version of NTLite at this point by checking the appropriate box, so you can drop it on a USB flash drive, and take it from PC to PC if necessary. Before you run it, mount your Windows ISO (you can download one from the Microsoft website, if you don’t have one handy) by right-clicking the file, and selecting Mount, then copy over the files to a writable folder to prepare them before unmounting again. Open NTLite, click the Add button on the ribbon, and point it at the folder where you dropped your installer files. Pick the version of Windows you’re looking to hack,
wait for it to mount (it may take a couple of minutes), then select Components below Remove in the left column, and accept the dire warning of potential doom that appears.
The full list of features available for removal is going to be pretty daunting, and unless you’re generating a kiosk Windows that’s designed to be impervious to interference by certain means, there’s probably little reason to go too crazy here — you can cut out some of the same services that you might have disabled previously, and really trim the size of your ISO by excluding support for every piece of hardware you know you don’t have. You’ll see a bunch of stuff in blue — these are components you can’t remove unless you pay €40 (about $63) for a full licence.
Check out the Settings, Services and Extra Services panels, too. The former enables you to preconfigure your ISO to look and act just as you’d expect, again saving you time poking around the Settings screen and Control Panel later on, while the latter pair gives you full control over services, as discussed previously. Extra Services, in particular, enables you to manipulate a bunch of services that would usually be pretty inaccessible through Windows itself; switching some of these from Boot to Manual can boost your PC’s boot time, although you won’t know until you install your image, so this may be a false economy. The Integrate and Automate categories are where you include the software and drivers that you want to integrate into your new ISO — any third-party programs and apps you also want to install on your refreshed PC need to go in the ‘Post-setup’ section.
When you’re done, use the Apply section at the bottom of the list to finish everything off. We recommend opting for the ‘Save and trim’ option, which cuts out everything but the specific version of Windows 10 you’ve been working on. Since most ISOs contain multiple editions, and few people have any use for Windows 10 S, N and the like, this is a good way to cut down the size of the install image.