This post is primarily 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, if you care as much as me. 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 think 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 playbooks 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 amelioration, but it’s possible. I find these playbooks leave me with a low CPU usage 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. 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.
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 alternatives is because I assume 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 impactful in comparison but will get you close to the CPU improvements.
First, is just adding exclusions to defender for example, App Data, Program files, your audio games 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 App Data 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.
Updating software
I have started to use
UniGet UI
to manage software updates, but you can also install programs with it. The advantage of using this over WinGet, etc is it supports all package managers available for windows, and there's like 3 of them, and it will manage apps you installed with the store or traditional installers as well. While it's maintained I still go back to
Ninite from time to time
but I am transitioning to this thing overtime. Now the only software I have to maintain is some of my drivers for my video card, everything else is kept up to date even nightly browsers.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something new about optimizing windows for yourself. I try to keep this thing updated, so come back from time to time to see if my opinions have changed.