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chem83last Tuesday at 7:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

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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EvanAndersonlast Tuesday at 9:06 PM

> 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.

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accruallast Tuesday at 8:04 PM

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.

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