Debloat and Optimize your PC What's your Favorite?

HTA said:

Love that MiniBin!

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Yes, THAT should be built into Windows! Simple, common sense stuff like this! To have to hit Winkey + D all the time just to get to the Recycle Bin gets old real fast. I personally have my Recycle Bin pinned to an ObjectDock which pops up down at the bottom, much like Apple's iOS dock can.


There's no subscription for it. It's one of the few pieces of Stardock software that can be bought as a one-time purchase. I'm glad they've stuck to that.

~

Windows 11 is like an obese man. It needs to go on a diet and some of the unnecessary fat needs to be trimmed off, big time. I've no problem sending Windows to the proper (de-bloating) fat farm when necessary. Just be careful when doing so.

glasskuter said:

All I use is Revo Uninstaller, Brink's tutorials, and enough common sense to know some things are best left alone. No third party tweakers or debloaters used here.

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That, and occasionally Windows Disk Cleanup and MS PC Manager, and that's all.

cheaterslick said:

THAT should be built into Windows!

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That's precisely why I want Taskbar Toolbars!

TraderGary said:

I don't debloat and optimize. My preference is to run a clean system with no hacks or modifications.

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Well, you're no fun!!!
I'd go out of my mind running Windows 11 Out-Of-The-Box!!!

Edwin said:

Well, you're no fun!!!
I'd go out of my mind running Windows 11 Out-Of-The-Box!!!

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That would get pretty dull without any kind of personal enhancements, tweaks, or 3rd party utilities for convenience. Kind of like only being allowed to watch TV for the news but nothing else.

FrancoDT said:

Kind of like only being allowed to watch TV for the news but nothing else.

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More like, only being allowed to watch the Test Pattern and nothing else!!!

Edwin said:

Well, you're no fun!!!
I'd go out of my mind running Windows 11 Out-Of-The-Box!!!

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I spend my time with my main applications, Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom, and software development with Visual Studio. Only a small fraction of my time is spent at the OS level.

The bottom line for me is that Windows must be fast and reliable. In my experience that's when Windows is hack and modification free.

TraderGary said:

I spend my time with my main applications, Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom, and software development with Visual Studio. Only a small fraction of my time is spent at the OS level.

The bottom line for me is that Windows must be fast and reliable. In my experience that's when Windows is hack and modification free.

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I agree with you to a point.

While my actual desktop and mini PC running Windows 11 are pretty much bog standard, when I am playing with debloat stuff in virtual machines, the tool that I have found that I like the best is Winhance. My son used it for his new PC build and has been really happy with it too.

Following up on the other topics discussed in this thread.

1. RAM usage: Personally, i don't care how much of my RAM shows it's in use. Truly free RAM is wasted RAM. The more that I have in RAM, the faster everything is going to be on my machine. The OS will free up that memory when an application needs it.
2. Aside from my desktop, where i run a GPU for gaming, I really like small form factor stuff. My primary daily driver computers at home are my Beelink Mini PC running Windows 11 and my Mac Mini M1 running MacOS Sequoia. The actual footprints of these devices are not much more than my house. Sure, they aren't going to set a PC benchmark record.....but I don't care....that's not what I use my PC's for.

pparks1 said:

RAM usage: Personally, i don't care how much of my RAM shows it's in use. Truly free RAM is wasted RAM. The more that I have in RAM, the faster everything is going to be on my machine. The OS will free up that memory when an application needs it.

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Just let your OS do what it do... Windows, macOS, Linux, whatever.

glasskuter said:

All I use is Revo Uninstaller, Brink's tutorials, and enough common sense to know some things are best left alone. No third party tweakers or debloaters used here.

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I agree except that I don't use Revo Uninstaller as I'm not comfortable with any third party that "cleans" my registry. No third party tweakers or debloaters used here either.

Some of my favorite Winareo Tweaker settings include additional desktop context menu entries, increasing the file explorer icon cache size from the default 512KB to 4096KB (yes it makes a noticeable difference in how fast your explorer icons load if you use icon views for certain folders like hundreds of wallpaper or pictures), setting a custom startup sound wav file, easily turn off ads and tips, enabling verbose login and shutdown messages so you can see what your PC is actually doing during startups and shutdowns. There are others as well but those are my favorites.

RevoUninstaller > is the first program installed and i remove everything Microsoft
Chris Titus Winutil
Winaero Tweaker
WinToys
Wise registry cleaner
Wise disk cleaner
CacheRelocator
DriverStoreExplorer
TCPOptimizer
AutoRuns
AMD RamDisk > for all browser caches
Edge Blocker > so i can remove Edge and Webview

Misc ..
Local account only
VeraCrypt > all drives including external encrypted
Aomei > for system backup, life time licence
FreeFileSync > for personal data backup
AVG Internet Security
Cloudflare WARP
Vivaldi Browser

all services set to manual by WinUtil with 72 services disabled
half a dozen regular registry tweaks > clear swap file at shutdown/restart, unload DLL's, increase VRam, disable and remove Copilot, disable notification centre, turn off web search, disable CPU turbo boost, disable reserved storage, enable NoNetCrawling explorer

camara and microphone disabled in device manager, i dont use them
apart from that all is running normally

best of luck Steve ..