A (10:49)

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B (12:51)

So what I'm going to do here is just kind of show you what happens when you come back from this, right? So you run setup, you go through the normal out of box experience, you sign in with your Microsoft account if that's what you want to do. Rufus lets you skip that if that's what you want to do as well. But eventually you make your way to the desktop. It doesn't really change setup in any way. So it's all the standard steps rather. And here you can see what you get at the end. So this is about as bare bones as Windows gets, right? The Microsoft Store is there. You can see that at the bottom. Obviously File Explorer is there, Settings is there, the Getting Started app is there, which is whatever, but really, really bare bones. Most of the apps are not installed. There's no Browser, all right, OneDrive is not there, et cetera, et cetera. So from here you follow a pretty standard set of, you know, post setup steps, right? You're going to do things, let me get this back here. You're going to do things like, well, first I looked at what was, you know, whether the drivers were all installed. You can see on this particular computer, a bunch of drivers were not available. So I go into Windows Update, I got this all up to date. So you download all the updates. This will bring it up to date with both drivers and whatever system updates are available. You want to make sure to go into Windows Update advanced options, optional updates, because this is where you typically see firmware and then some device drivers that maybe aren't as pertinent or important, but I tend to install all of those every single time. Also go into the Windows, the Microsoft Store rather, and get that updated as well. And I don't have a picture of this, but one of the other things that I do at this point, and I did do on this particular computer, was run winget, right, and see what updates are available there. Do this after The Microsoft Store stuff, because you might as well let that just do its thing. But if I run this against the system now, it might find a couple things. Yeah. So there's a couple of apps that could be updated, and I would typically just run a kind of a thing like this sort of a thing, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not going to do this right now. But just make sure everything is up to date. The other thing you want to do is find a bright browser, right? Because there's no Microsoft Edge. And so this is a great way to do that. You could just do like a winget search and then whatever your browser is. So if I search for, say, Chrome, we could install Chrome that way. There's a bunch of them here, but it's going to be one of the. It's going to be this top one here. Or in my case, actually, the way I did this was I searched for Brave, and I already know it's Brave. Brave. But we could do like winget. Install Brave. Brave, right. And that would do that. It's already installed, so I don't have to do that. But that's how you would do that. Okay. So once you have those things done, you just use it normally right now. So there might be parts of Windows that are apps that are installed with Windows that maybe you do want. So you could go to the Microsoft Store and download, you know, Paint, onedrive, Clip, Champ, you know, whatever it might be. Today I had to download the camera app, for example, just to test the camera here. You can see here that after all the installs were done, device managers clean. That means all the drivers are installed correctly. So that's great. And you just use it. And that's the thing. So this is the system. It's heavily modified now. So I'm running this in dark mode. I've installed a bunch of apps. I use an install script for that, actually, but it doesn't really matter. Install the Xbox app. I install Call of Duty. Call of Duty runs fine. Everything works great. Browser's fine. Phone link works with the phone. Everything's working good. So this is good. But the thing is, what I'm looking for here is any regressions in behavior. So, for example, on a typical Windows 11 system, when I come here to the Start page in Settings, there's a yellow bar up here and it says, hey, you should really back up. And it's like, I just backed up two seconds ago, but you should really back up. You should really back up. You do get this. Install OneDrive thing, but it's not obnoxious. When you run File Explorer and go to a folder that is could be backed up by OneDrive, you don't get any weirdness. There's no hey, backup now kind of stuff. I'm not getting any Edge pop ups, there's no Edge. I'm not getting any OneDrive folder backup prompts. There's no OneDrive, right? So you could install Google Drive if that's what you want. Instead I use Synology Drive. There are different solutions. You may want OneDrive, right? But you can do whatever you want. So so far I found that this is working normally. You know a couple of weird things though when you bring up widgets. Now these. This is an example of something in Windows that would typically open in Microsoft Edge even if you chose Chrome or Brave or some other web browser. I've installed a fix for this, but if I originally when I would click this, you'd get a. It would say, hey, you need to associate this file type with some kind of a browser. But the only browser choice is Edge and Edge is not installed. So it's not going to work. The solution to that is see if I ever don't have it here yet. So is micro as Ms. Edge direct redirect, sorry, which is also available on GitHub. And this is just a simple utility, same thing, you download the zip, you run it and basically you just configure this so that it uses your browser. So now if I were to go to this widgets interface which is probably the easiest way, I'll try to find something non objectionable here, which is hard because this is pretty terrible. But somewhere in here I'll just click on this, you'll see this thing actually opens in Edge, which is, I'm sorry in Brave, which is the browser I use and what I want. So that's good. So MSH redirect free available, easy. The other thing you might want to install is PowerToys and for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that you have a copilot key on your keyboard like I do here. If I hit that key, Copilot's not installed. And so Microsoft here is asking, well, what do you want to do when you hit the copilot key? And they only have a couple of choices. There's search, typically you would have copilot and then you have custom, which doesn't really come up with anything. And I'm not going to go look for an app. And so what I do is I use the key I got to run PowerToys. Excuse me. I run the keyboard manager that's part of PowerToys. Wait for this little guy to come up. And this basically just lets you remap various keystrokes to do different things. And here we go, finally. So if I go into keyboard Manager, I'm actually kind of surprised. Oh, it is. Oh, I just didn't have it running. I'm sorry. Yeah, I've already done it. So what I do is I mapped it to the left arrow key, and that's because those keys are right next to each other. I tend to hit it by mistake when I'm typing sometimes and copilot will come up if it's there. On this system, you get that settings interface. So you can just use this tool to remap it to do anything. And because that key is right next to it. Simple, kind of a simple fix. So PowerToys free, MSH redirect free. 911 builder free. Right. And so here we have this really clean version of Windows 11, highly customized because I did that and with the apps that I want and none of the stuff that I don't want. And so the question at this point becomes, well, does this solve the problem? Right. And if you think back to the. I think it was seven items on that checklist. Right. Force telemetry, it does solve that. I didn't mention this, but at some point in the past year, the author of Tiny 11 Builder updated the script to disable telemetry. So that's part of it. Pre install Crapper was the second one. It does fix that. There's nothing pre installed. It's almost. Even the good stuff isn't pre installed. So that's kind of interesting. Bad edge behaviors, whether you use it or not, absolutely solves that. There's no edge. Right. OneDrive folder backup, same thing. There's no OneDrive solves that problem. Nice. There were two other items that it doesn't solve, but if you use Rufus to make that installer, it will solve those. So that's the force Microsoft account sign in, which frankly is not an issue for most people. And also the arbitrary system requirements, which again, is not really a problem for most people, especially someone like me who's using a modern system. I'm going to meet their requirements. I am going to sign in with an msa. I don't care about that stuff. So the only one that isn't solved is the constant unreliable feature updates. And that's just. There's no real way around that you can delay them. A little bit. But you know, Windows 11 is going to want to be kept up to date, and that's fine. The thing I've been looking at, aside from the obvious stuff like checking settings or looking for the pop ups and things, is I've downloaded a couple of system updates. I downloaded a standard kind of patch Tuesday update. There's been a preview update since then as well, just to see if they snuck edge in there or did something like that. But so far, so good. So this actually goes a really long way towards solving the problems, especially if you use it with Rufus, which I didn't need to on this particular system. So as far as I'm concerned, this is pretty good. Now, the downsides I mentioned up front, the. The big downside is you have to reinstall Windows, right? And so that might be daunting for a lot of people. It's a little too aggressive in my opinion. By default, I didn't do this on this install, but you can go into the script and remove the things that you actually do want to have installed. So you can fix that if you want, but editing a PowerShell script might be a little daunting for some as well. You know, it'd be nice if there was a UI where you could kind of check the items that you want. But these are kind of minor complaints, frankly. I mean, I spent maybe a couple of hours making this work, you know, getting it together, installing and doing all that stuff. And most of the time I wasn't doing anything. It was just the script running and doing its thing. So it's pretty low maintenance and it appears to work pretty good. So I recommend giving it a shot if you just kind of had it with all of the really bad behaviors in Windows 11. But you know, you have to keep using Windows. You want the version of Windows that you want, not the mic, you know, not the version that Microsoft wants you to have. So it's definitely something to consider. It's a little aggressive, but it seems to work great in my opinion. So definitely give it a shot. Hopefully you found this useful. I'm curious if anyone uses this and does so successfully. Let me know if that's the case. But either way, thank you for watching. Thank you so much to our Club Twit members especially. We love you. If you're not a member, please consider that you can find out more about Club Twit at Twit tv Club Twit. And you can find out more about Hands on Windows this podcast at Twit Twit TV H we'll have new episode every Thursday. Thank you so much. I'll see you next time.