How to set up Windows 11 almost without killing yourself

Here we go again. New laptop, new Windows update.

When you boot up the machine for the first time, do Shift + F10 to open command prompt. Run oobe\bypassnro. The computer will reboot, and you can now make a normal offline account by saying “I don’t have internet” at the WiFi screen, after selecting region.

Then the begging for eavesdropping we’ve all come to love:

• Say no to Windows Hello facial recognition
• Say no to location tracking
• Say no to location tracking again
• Say “Required only” to diagnostic data (Such a fuck-you)
• Say no to them spying on your handwriting
• Say no to “tailored experiences” based on their spying
• Say no to advertising ID (wtf)
• Say no to presence sensing

And now we wait…

While we wait, I will say that it seems they’ve reduced the begging slightly from Windows 10. I can appreciate that. Though, this probably just means that they spy more by default, without presenting you the choice to opt out.

I won’t go into fully stopping the spying here, because as I mentioned in the Windows 10 article, these anti-telemetry tools all seem really sketchy to me, and they seem to get new replacements all the time. Therefore, I don’t feel I can safely vouch for any of them.

Finally, it finishes and we are greeted with the new pile of turd taskbar.

Imagine actually thinking it was a good idea to move the most important buttons away from the corners by default. First thing to do is go to Settings > Personalization > Taskbar so we can:

• Hide the search button, because it’s completely useless
• Hide task view, because we have Alt + Tab
• Hide widgets, because they are retarded
• And of course: Taskbar alignment > Left.

Now we go commit programicide and uninstall:

• Capcut (Are you serious?)
• Office 365 six times in Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English and normal(?), slowly, one at a time, because only one of these uninstall windows can be open at once
  • By the way, I timed it. This garbage managed to waste 3 minute and 7 seconds to uninstall the Finnish copy of Office 365. On a brand new multi-thousand-dollar laptop!
• Do that again five times for OneNote in Danish, English, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish
• OneDrive
• LinkedIn
• Solitaire & Casual Games (To be replaced by Zachtronics Solitarie Collection, of course)
• Family by Microsoft Corp.
• Outlook (New)
• Journal
• Microsoft Bing Search, Clipchamp, News, Teams, To Do, Whiteboard, Power Automate, Quick Assist, Weather, Xbox, Xbox Live

And now we drop by ninite.com for the essentials (Must-haves are 7-zip, VLC, K-Lite Codecs and Everything), before also grabbing:

• FilePilot, because Explorer sucks, and they’ve made it even worse now
• LibreWolf, or any other browser you prefer
• PowerToys, for Always On Top and various other tools
• AltSnap, to make Windows windows usable
• OpenShell, not because it’s good (it’s not), but because my normal Windows search completely broke one week in and now never returns any results.
• qView or Cactus Image Viewer, because Photos sucks

Do these registry edits (Here’s a script that does them for you):

• Restore the functional right click menu: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32 Only needs to contain an empty (Default) String Value.
• Fix wallpaper quality: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop New DWORD (32-bit) JPEGImportQuality set to 100 in decimal.
• Disable Window’s reaction to Win+Shift+F23 (aka. the “Copilot key”): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CopilotKey New DWORD (32-bit) SetCopilotHardwareKey set to 0. The Copilot key should now just bring up the start menu, and should be a lot easier to rebind to something useful with PowerToys or AHK.

This cat and mouse game keeps going. Microsoft keeps making their product worse, and we keep fixing it for them. It’s genuinely comical at this point how far removed from the reality of their user’s experience they are.