In my opinion, Microsoft seems to be on a decade long journey to turn windows into a Tablet operating system, but instead of slashing out the last 2 times they wanted to do this, and only having one telemetry stream for you, they have many different ones, made at different times, all running and doing things at the same time on your system. Am I misinformed? Leave a comment.
Not only that but Microsoft antimalware, and windows defender tends to steal resources from you, unless you either remove it or add exclusions to it. What is this, a mac?
This post is for me to describe what I do to keep some sanity in my windows life, but I know people don’t like the ways I hack at windows to remove this stuff: So I plan to go over other methods to obtain the same thing, so you can make an informed decision for yourself. Don’t feel like you have to do anything though. I’m mostly writing this so people know what’s out there. I’m a power user, so this is probably for power users, or people who can take care of their technology like I can.

First what I do.

I use ame wizard, with a playbook of settings and things to remove from windows. Currently, the two best user facing ones are Atlas OS, and Revision. These will help you remove CoPilot, along with windows defender, and many other things, but the process isn’t the most user friendly. You have to use a lot of object navigation with NVDA to get through the ameliation, but it’s possible. I find these playbooks leave me with a low CPU usidge but without disabling to many features. Revision is the best if you’re new and just don’t want to many issues after the fact but I use Atlas now myself. Ame themselves make a playbook, but IMPO unless you want to go back to 2004 it will leave you with too much missing. I need to try their new in beta playbook though, it has a different name so maybe things have gotten better in that department.

Secondly, after amelioration

I may still need to use aurora, winaero tweaker, or explorer patcher along with either the revision tool, or the tweaks in the atlas folder, but I’ve only ever used explorer patcher to fix up explorer things after I ran ame wizard. Aurora is useful for a few different reasons, and it’s maintained by a blind person. It’s also pretty close to playbooks as well. The reason I don’t put it in the alternatives is because I asume that people will look at this thing the same way they look at playbooks.

What are some other options?

There are some other options you have, which might be less impactfull in comparison but will get you close to the CPU improvements.
First, is just adding exclusions to defender for example, AppData, Program files, your audiogames that windows defender flags as a virus but are not one, etc. I’ve heard that just adding thunderbird’s app data folder to defender will kill a lot of accessibility slowness with Thunderbird: So why not just add the whole fucking AppData folder to it. I think it’s crazy that people don’t see a problem with this state of affairs, but moving on…
The second option I think you have is tricking defender into disabling itself. I have not tried this.
The third option you have is completely removing defender from a windows iso.
This makes amelioration such a fun experience since you don’t have to go through disabling windows defender.
Lastly, you could try tiny11 builder, which will allow you to apply tiny11 tweaks to any iso you download. I have not tried this.

I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new about optimizing windows for yourself. Maybe one day AI will make this article seem pointless and old. Nah.