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My favorite trick is to install with English (World) language to avoid auto-install of all sorts of crap. Windows Store won't work in this mode, but it's just a matter of reverting to your preferred language after first boot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/15gk07n/english_...

Edit: in my experience, changing the language to something else immediately after install is done still adds the crapware automatically. I think I needed to reboot once or twice for whatever post-install service Windows runs to no longer get executed.

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EvanAnderson 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> My favorite trick is to install with English (World) language to avoid auto-install of all sorts of crap.

Edit: This sounded neat so I tried it. I just loaded up a physical box from a 24H2 ISO on a thumb drive (booted from Ventoy with no special options loaded to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement).

I got an oddball "Something went wrong" / "You can try again, or skip for now" / "OOBEREGION" window with a silly and wholly inappropriate for a corporate-targeted OSA depiction of a dropped ice cream cone (pink flavor, by the look of it). I've definitely never seen this one before.

I clicked "Skip" and then it proceeded thru the OOBE as I'd expect, including demanding an Internet connection.

I added "BypassNRO" to the registry, rebooted, and completed the OOBE with a local account (seeing the same silly ice cream cone again).

Once I got into Windows I found the Start menu looked a little emptier than normal. Memory usage seems a little lower than I'd expect. The running process list is still ridiculously long.

I connected the Ethernet to a network with Internet access and didn't see a huge change.

The Store app doesn't work. It returns "Sorry about that!" / "Something went wrong...".

The Co-Pilot pinned shortcut returns a blue modal error dialog in the Windows 8 style saying "Search Support" / "Something happened on our end ... 0x87E10BC6".

Installing this way definitely did something. I'm just not sure exactly what. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the machine updates. I already see it loading drivers and doing device detects.

	▲	chem83 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Screenshots and step-by-step of the process also here: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-clean-install-windows-11
	▲	EvanAnderson a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Update on this machine: After applying all pending updates to-date it has remained clean and runs about 2.7GB memory used at the desktop with nothing foreground open. While that offends my sensibilities in the general sense (remembering running Linux w/ X and Netscape in 8MB of RAM, or Windows XP in 128MB) that doesn't seem bad for what it is.

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accrual 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For all of Windows faults, one thing I love about it is that (with persistence and skill) you can usually bang and hammer it into whatever shape you need it to be. Someone got XP running on a 486 using only a handful of MB memory recently.

	▲	thewebguyd a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yep, mostly thanks to enterprise. There's a group policy for just about anything you could ever imagine you'd want Windows to do (or not do). Granted, a lot of it isn't super discoverable, or exposed to the user in a pretty GUI (it mostly lives deep within the registry, a good chunk undocumented), but it truly is a general purpose OS in every sense of the word. Unlike most here I actually like and enjoy using Windows (doubly so with WSLv2 and the new windows terminal), although I'll admit since WSL I pretty much use Windows as if it were another Linux distro. But over the years I've come to learn a lot of the ins and outs of what it can do. That said, if Microsoft continues down this MS account, consumer hostile behavior even more it's going to be time for me to say my goodbyes to windows.
	▲	rs186 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The millions of registry options are not for joke, I guess