My personal tutorial for Windows 10 privacy and performance mods

[Rizzo]

Hey guys
As many others did, after suffering from a forced Win10 install by Microsoft last June, I modded my Windows 10 system to gain the best privacy and performance capabilities.

As I'm Italian and there were no such online tutorials at the time, I decided to contribute and craft an italian version. There are plenty of english ones as you know, but I still decided to make my own one. Of course I'll post the english version here and not the italian one.

Since some of you asked me about my mods in one of the Win10-related threads (some time before even thinking of filming this tutorial) I thought this could be useful to some. I basically condensed all of the most famous Win10 modding tips there, plus some of my personal ones.

Topics covered

- System pre-configuration
- Privacy and Windows Update setup, “soft” disabling of Cortana
- Manual blocking of telemetries and SpyBot AntiBeacon setup
- System notifications mods, default apps setup, Start menu customization, forced removal of preinstalled apps
- Forced removal of “special” preinstalled apps via scripts, Classic Shell setup and “hard” removal of Cortana
- Hard drive management configuration
- Performance optimization #1: system services, solving 100% disk usage bug
- Performance optimization #2: visual effects disabling, system cleanup, disk defrag

Opinions and critiques welcome! Hope my english is decent
Share or pass to a friend if you found it useful, it would mean a lot!
Cheers

 

[Rizzo]

Bump? Any feedback?

 

[Anant Naag]

Could you do seperate sections of the video ?
Instead of it being one big video, different sections have their own video ?

I like the video, even though I did half of this stuff myself, I am still concerned about privacy in Win 10 and strongly considering moving to linux entirely. Music software support is sadly scant.

Has anyone done a ping test on Win 10 ?

Thanks for the video, it pointed lot of mistakes I made while installing 10 myself.

 

[TedEH]

Topics covered
[Stuff]

I know this is probably not the kind of feedback you want, but whenever I go looking for solutions to tech-y problems, I have zero patience for videos. I don't want to have to watch 20-30 minutes of who-knows-what for the small chance that my specific scenario will be touched on in the video with a viable solution, spoken in a way that I will understand. I find that just leaving things as text (or doing both) is the most usable form of that kind of information. I can just scroll, skim, search, etc. until I find what I need and move on with life.

Realistically, I looked at some of the video, and this is a very paranoid way to look at security for a normal user. For 99.9% of people, none of those settings are serious security concerns. If someone really wanted your information and managed to get a piece of malicious software on your machine, turning off Cortana isn't going to make any difference- malicious software isn't going to just adhere to the settings you've picked. If you're running a server with customer information on it or something, then yeah, lock that down, but for a home PC that people use for gaming and facebook and junk like that, it's all kinda meaningless.

 

[Rizzo]

Thanks for the feedback guys! And @Ted, honest feedback is always the best feedback I HAVE to know the average reaction to the video. Also since it's my first experience with some kind of tutorial so that helps.

As for the lenght of the video, I know, it's quite a lot.
Tried my best to have it edited as tight as possible but that's about how much I can squeeze it. I wanted to avoid dispersion by not having multiple segments (also since one might be just 1 minute long, the other like 6-7 etc.) so I hoped the timestamps could serve as a workaround if someone wants to jump around. Text is also included as an external link.

As for the content, well it was my choice, amongst billions of Win10 related resources. I'm not obliging anyone to follow exactly that haha!
I'm always a bit of a control freak on my own stuff so maybe it's somehow overkill, but again it's matters of choice, plus there is no "black-white scenario" in computer usage anyway.

Thanks again!