The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022)

by janandonly • 7 months ago

97 86 7 months ago

Doches3• 7 months ago

This should have a (2022) in the title, which begs the question: is this still a relevant tool for de-shittifying Windows 11, or is it limited to 10?

(Asking as I don't have a Windows box of any kind around to test, as I'm not a masochist and therefore all of my machines run Linux or macOS)

jordand• 7 months ago

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil - That's what you're looking for. Kept updated for latest Windows 11

matthberg• 7 months ago

Don't know if 2022 is needed since this seems to be an evergreen page for an actively developed tool (last update was 3 weeks ago).

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/releases/tag/25.12...

Doches3• 7 months ago

It's not clear from the linked page, which seems to have been last updated in 2022, aside from user comments asking for support. Thank you for the clarification!

SunlitCat• 7 months ago

I’m generally skeptical of Windows optimization tools because they tend to change a lot of low-level settings and make troubleshooting harder later on. When someone already has a broken system, it’s often difficult to figure out what’s wrong once a tool like this has touched everything.

This one looks more like a PowerShell automation and debloating script for power users than a classic one-click optimizer, but it still requires knowing exactly what each tweak does. Used without that understanding, tools like this can easily create confusing problems.

Doches3• 7 months ago

When someone already has a broken system...

To be fair, this tool doesn't claim to fix a broken system; as near as I can tell it doesn't actually remove the underlying Windows installation, so the core problem will remain.

65102• 7 months ago

Sounds like a fun fan fiction crowd sourcing project. Have some coding agent rewrite windows from scratch. We can all throw some money/tokens at it periodically to keep it going. It should have a live video stream where it narrates and visualizes the state of affairs. Like a soap opera for nerds. In the end a single exe comes out.

wiseowise• 7 months ago

With Windows you don't troubleshoot issues. You nuke the system, and run the optimizations again.

drekipus• 7 months ago

This is what I learnt back in like 2004.

Glad to see it's still in use.

sweBers• 7 months ago

Don't forget to test the drive and memory before you really get started.

yread• 7 months ago

Oh am I doing it wrong by having an 8yr old w10 install that ive moved over 3 computers?

fa3556• 7 months ago

Tweaks are divided into essential and advanced. The essential ones shouldn't have any negative impact on the system. They also document the changes each tweak makes (so you can undo them): https://winutil.christitus.com/dev/.

keyringlight• 7 months ago

I think the issue is a bit out of the author's control, where tools like this are word of mouth advertised as 'one simple trick' by geeks to a broad audience to fix what they see as wrong with windows. People love convenience and adding "oh by the way, make sure you read/understand the docs first" rarely happens. I think it's part of the move for computing to being appliances that ongoing maintenance isn't seen as needed

phoronixrly• 7 months ago

troubleshooting

I tried that. The advice was to reinstall. Then I remembered that this is the convention with Windows -- when it stops working, reinstall...

hu3• 7 months ago

To bem fair I do the same with Linux.

alimbada• 7 months ago

I guess I'm in the minority. I haven't reinstalled on my desktop machine since 2014 according to the install dates of some of my apps. According to the Windows Registry I've gone from 7 Pro -> 8.1 Pro -> 10 Pro. Both upgrades happened in 2015 and since then I've just stayed up to date with the latest 10 Pro build.

I will be switching to Linux before the ESU program expires though. I use my desktop mostly for gaming and have been planning to evaluate a few distros and desktop environments. I have my own Proxmox/TrueNAS/Debian homelab and use macOS daily for work so I'm fine with the CLI and tinkering but I'd rather everything Just Works™ for my gaming machine. I did a lot of dual booting back in the Fedora[ Core] 6-12 days but ultimately it got too tedious.

II2II2• 7 months ago

Even though he is sending mixed messages, it is clearly stated that misuse may break the system. The other nice thing about going the PowerShell automation route is the ability to see what was done and reverse particular changes (assuming you can track down which change broke things). That's in start contrast to the binary-only utilities I've seen in the past, where you're pretty much stuck trusting the vendor's claims.

fuzzfactor5• 7 months ago

You really hit the nail on the head.

in conclusion:

still requires knowing exactly what each tweak does. Used without that understanding, tools like this can easily create confusing problems.

Which I have always taken as extreme encouragement to use performance-improving setting configuations, and therefore gain the understanding to do so effectively.

If I can do it, anybody can, I'm no engineer.

With this approach in mind it makes the Titus offerings show a remarkable amount of superiority.

As another commenter has noted, 2022 is just when his Utility was beginning to get noticed.

It is being kept up-to-date with Windows 11 as it evolves.

eviks2• 7 months ago

Is there any info on the impact of such tools, like do they have any specific performance improvements (startup time, memory use)? How much Gb of bloat is actually removed?

fuzzfactor5• 7 months ago

You can visualize performance using Windows' built-in Performance Monitor.

It's not a comparison app, but you can check different resources in detail both before and after disabling un-needed features.

Disk activity is one of the things reported in real time, as well as memory usage, but the Gb of bloat on the OS drive is not a consideration.

Inhibiting things which are useless to you from occupying memory, may be less than 1 Gb but may still be worth it, but that is different than disk drive bloat which can really get massively out-of-hand.

Drive Gb is expected to grow with each additional program you install, but further drive bloat has often dwarfed that as preinstalled apps have proliferated, written by those who do not have experience using limited resources to a serious degree of efficiency.

And then after non-security updates became mandatory, each year this lack of professional experience has an accelerating impact across-the board, and by now you are expected to accomodate a dozen or more gigabytes than last year.

And both Windows 10 and Windows 11 were more functional in some ways than a year ago too.

Cut back on memory waste by keeping things from loading until an event when you yourself really need it.

Cut back on drive bloat by uninstalling things you know you are never going to need.

eviks2• 7 months ago

Not really, you can't. For example, you might have a service that lies dormant using 0.1mb of memory and then does some scanning/maintenance once a week and uses 50% CPU for 5 minues with 100m memory.

Also, checking those dozens of services will take a lot of time

Unsuspecting users can't even measure space savings correctly since many components can be hardlinked to something else and deleting them will "free up" the space shown in the folder (the size standard size reporting on Windows is deeply inadequate), but not free up anything in reality. Or for some uwp apps you can't even see the size at all as the folders have a very dumb permission set, and these scripts remove those preinstalled uwp apps.

That's the point of public benchmarking - so that ever single user doesn't have to waste time doing the mistaken comparisons on his own, so your suggestion doesn't help at all even in theory.

armchairhacker• 7 months ago

I’ve been using O&O Shutup10++.

It seems to work OK: it didn’t break anything, and disabled some Windows annoyances but not all.

It’s closed source so I don’t fully trust it, but I’m not keeping anything sensitive.

protoman3000• 7 months ago

Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?

Koshkin• 7 months ago

Funny you should mention Linux.

TacticalCoder• 7 months ago

Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?

First: "safe" and Windows never ever matched. Not in Windows 98, not in Millenium, not in Vista. Not ever.

I, reluctantly, after having confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and replacing it with a Chromebook about two years ago (which still works fine for her btw), ordered her a new desktop PC six months ago, running Windows 11.

Six months.

Six months is all it took for this piece of shit to become infected to the point of being unusable. Malware over malware took over: whatever 0-click or 1-click exploit in Edge that took over the machine and tells her to call indian scam center to help her "get her PC rid of viruses", blinking left and right, covering half the screen.

In other words: good old Windows. It's 20-fucking-25, nearly 26, and Microsoft still cannot ship an OS that's not rooted when a grandma is browsing for less than six months.

Pathetic.

Windows is a mediocre piece of insecure (and now spying) turd.

I fully agree with you: reliable Linux distros are the Windows replacement.

And as we've reached a point where everyone except some part of the corporate world can do everything they need from an Android smartphone and these same people are just fine with a Linux distro on their laptop or desktop, people can be switched. And some are. And the numbers of "desktop Linux" users are slowly but surely growing.

I don't care about the snarky "2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop". Linux conquered everything: all the servers, all the routers, 500 of the world top 500 supercomputers, etc. Linux shall conquer the laptop and the desktop too.

And those who don't switch have two choices: MacOS (pricey hardware) or be slaves to that turdery on bits that Windows is.

P.S: actually I don't even care: be it Linux or MacOS or BeOS or Atari's TOS: anything but Microsoft.

janandonly• 7 months ago

My mother is almost 80, bless her heart.

I gave her an iPad Owh, 10 years ago? And I’ve never had to troubleshoot her system ever again. No spyware. No viruses. Nothing.

The worst that happened recently is that the Starlink antenna had te be realigned after a particularly heavy wind blew it off the roof almost. Oh and her printer needed new toners after printing for x years without problems.

lomase2• 7 months ago

Safe and computing never ever matched.

dist-epoch2• 7 months ago

Can you please sell me your infected grandma machine for $100k? I want to get that 0-click from it and sell it for $1M to a vulnerability broker.

I even offer to hire your gradma, she seems really good at locating very valuable 0-days online.

bigstrat20032• 7 months ago

Windows security is just fine. The problem is that many users are willing to uncritically install anything they get asked to, even to the point of directly installing malware when "Microsoft support" contacts them asking them to do so. Absolutely nothing about Linux or any other general purpose OS protects against this threat vector, and if Linux had the market share Windows does you would be saying the exact same stuff about your grandma getting rootkits on her Ubuntu box. Mobile devices protect against this scenario by not trusting the user and heavily restricting what apps can do, but that's not a good model for a general purpose computer.

wongarsu• 7 months ago

Isn't that pretty much Windows IoT LTSC?

There are even more minimal Windows versions, but easy, convenient, legal distribution is kind of tricky

apexalpha4• 7 months ago

That is what you're looking at.

Any more than this you get sued for distributing MS owned code.

delta_p_delta_x2• 7 months ago

I would instead suggest two things for power users: installing Windows using autounattend.xml[1], and secondly visiting the mass graves to turn your Windows install into Enterprise (or, if you can wrangle it, get an Education licence from your academic institution/alma mater), which completely gets rid of all consumer-oriented stuff.

To be honest, I don't mind the Windows games. In fact I believe the ones shipped with XP, Vista, and 7 were top-notch. What I mind is games with annoying advertisements in them. I mind when my Weather program is not native and is a glorified web app, also ridden with advertisements.

[1] https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

B1FF_PSUVM• 7 months ago

I mind when my Weather program

is changed into a stock ticker and tabloid news cornucopia... dagnabbit, I know where to get those, I just want the weather info.

"They have no taste" was right.

vladvasiliu3• 7 months ago

What do you mean by consumer-oriented stuff?

I'm typing this on my company azure ad integrated windows 11. The system info says it's windows 11 enterprise 25h2.

My start menu still has multiple random xbox crap in there, game bar (what even is that?!), "game mode", "solitaire and casual games". It shows random ads in the weather app. It invites me to do more with a microsoft account, even though the computer is fully azure ad joined and my windows session is an azure ad account with some expensive office365 licence attached.

Before reinstalling the other day for unrelated reasons, I had actually tried to add that account. Turns out it doesn't work with a "work or school" account, it requires the personal one, but it doesn't say it clearly, only that "something went wrong".

I honestly don't see any difference when compared to my personal windows install I use for the occasional game and Lightroom / Photoshop.

delta_p_delta_x2• 7 months ago

I suspect you'll additionally need to make some GPO changes so that things like Game Bar, Xbox, and Copilot are disabled.

LorenDB• 7 months ago

Fresh installs of Enterprise do not have any of the extra garbage on the start menu. It's just a few Office apps, Edge, and Explorer.

Your Windows install probably started as Pro and then was changed to an Enterprise license key later.

Fiveplus• 7 months ago

Be careful with the "debloat" features in scripts like this. In my experience, aggressively stripping out AppX packages and disabling services often breaks windows update or the Microsoft store in subtle ways that don't manifest until 3-6 months down the line. You'll eventually try to install a feature update, it will fail with a cryptic error code, and you'll realize it's because you removed a dependency that the new update expects to be present.

If you really want a clean windows environment, you are better off getting an IoT enterprise LTSC license. It is boring, stable, has zero bloat and doesn't require hacking the registry to stop candy crush from reinstalling itself.

That said, it feels like a constant arms race. Microsoft introduces a new user-hostile pattern (like making local accounts harder to create), the community builds a workaround and then Microsoft patches the workaround. I am tired of fighting my own OS.

LoganDark3• 7 months ago

Apple was a great option before they moved to ARM. Now they can't run much of anything (and it sucks).

I still have my mid-2015 MBP running triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Arch Linux. That machine could run everything...

I now have to keep around a physical PC desktop in order to run games like ARC Raiders. I use OBS with a capture card to use my MacBook's screen as a monitor for the PC, and an application called Deskflow to forward the MacBook's keyboard to the PC (I connect the mouse directly). Also, SonoBus for voice chat, since the PC doesn't have a microphone built-in. It works well enough.

nottorp• 7 months ago

Tried Moonlight/Sunshine?

Works for me without any extra hardware. Just a network connection between the machines. Haven't tried voice chat though.

Edit: Steam streaming works pretty well too, but feels a tiny bit more laggy than the above. Also running non Steam games is a bit of a pain.

vladvasiliu3• 7 months ago

Apple was a great option before they moved to ARM. Now they can't run much of anything (and it sucks).

I used to love my 2013 MBP. ARM Macs run pretty much everything I need, and some things better than Windows (such as Lightroom and PS which don't run at all on Linux).

But what kills it for me is the absolutely bonkers window management, and the fisher-price interface filling up half the screen with empty space around huge widgets.

seec2• 7 months ago

As someone who sarted with Apple in the PowerPC days I couldn't agree more. To me it seems like the only real advantage is good battery, but I can't figure out who exactly is running powerfull/complicated software on the go where it matters.

If you just need to browse the web and whatnot, just get a cheap tablet?

For all the good softwares, it seems like you just get much better performance out of a much lowered priced PC. I just don't get who is benifiting for the 1-2 hours of supplementary runtime out of a MacBook and this is wortht the price delta as well as the hassle of dealing with all the specificity of that software implementation.

But then again, my experience with Apple users is that they are not the most logical peoples around, so maybe that's just it.

I still like some parts of macOS but it has been very hard to justify considering how Apple has been behaving lately.

If Apple manages to produce a decent iMac soon enough, it might just bite the bullet once again, but otherwise I'm out.

buybackoff2• 7 months ago

Agreed. I had to run Windows recovery only once over the last 5+ years, after running some debloating script with many thousands stars on GitHub.

I think the Pro version is enough for reasonable experience, most of the terrible stories originate from the Home version, which should be avoided like the plague.

bluecalm2• 7 months ago

I've spent several days trying to get Pro version to usable state. By usable I mean that it doesn't kill my work session because some random app I've never installed, used or asked for fails its auto-update in the middle of the day and kills the WSL process. It still has magically resetting settings so if you are not careful telemetry/ads/spying will be back on the menu. It still has hostile settings to keep your computer connected when it sleeps which are very hard to turn off.

There are multiple settings in Windows that are hidden which only appear in the menu when you add a registry entry. There are so many anti-patterns in Windows it feels like defending against a determined hacker who tries to make your life worse and is hunting for a slight misstep to turn the shit back on.

seec2• 7 months ago

Yeah I don't get the hate. The only issues I have had with the "Pro" version of Windows were hardware related and it wasn't a big deal.

snarfy• 7 months ago

I'm installing Linux over the break. The last time I seriously ran it was Slackware 2.0. If it doesn't run in Wine, it will run in a vm. I'm so done with this shit. And I'm one of the few that actually purchased a Win11 Pro license at full price. I really wanted to believe. They've lost their mind with copilot. Imagine if they put as much effort into making their products better as they have pushing copilot. The sad thing is there will be a copilot hit, and it won't be anything they built with all this effort. It will be an acquisition, like openai. They should just stick to making their products better and buy it when it comes.

anal_reactor2• 7 months ago

I switched to Fedora KDE. It's still has many linuxisms along "bluetooth doesn't work" but if you have some basic IT knowledge, "we're already here". I wouldn't recommend it to a non-IT person though.

Krssst• 7 months ago

If you really want a clean windows environment, you are better off getting an IoT enterprise LTSC license.

Unfortunately seems like there's no way of getting a license legally without being a company. Windows Server seems easier to obtain but harder to morph into something useful (mostly because of missing drivers on Windows Update) though definitely possible.

vladvasiliu3• 7 months ago

As I understand it, even for companies it's non-trivial. There seems to be some kind of relation to specific hardware.

31337Logic• 7 months ago

Gee. You make it sound like breaking Microsoft Store and Windows Updates are /bad/ things. :-/

breakingcups• 7 months ago

Breaking Windows Updates is a bad thing, security-wise.

mycall2• 7 months ago

So look at the dependency tree and add back what is missing. We are hackers here afterall.

farbklang• 7 months ago

The ultimate way of installing windows least bloated is chosing Region "English (World)" - as usually the bloatware is country specific. Avoid US, UK, etc. That's where the Candy Crush comes with.

john01dav• 7 months ago

I am tired of fighting my own OS.

People cite bugs or incompatible software on Linux as a reason to avoid it and use Windows, but they fail to recgonize that Windows actively fights you. I'd take something that's slightly and mistakenly broken on an utterly open platform where I can fix it if I care enough over a closed platform that's actively trying to screw me over.

touwer• 7 months ago

Isn't the ultimate Windows utility called Linux? Or MacOS?

krautburglar2• 7 months ago

This genre is for those who would rather cope with abuse than confront it.

antisthenes• 7 months ago

It's not, but please enlighten us, what is exactly confronting the abuse here?

Writing your own OS?

krautburglar2• 7 months ago

In 2025, we have so many OSes to choose from that don’t have to be de-bulked of tumors. Linux, BSD, Redox, OSX… nowhere to go but up from win11.

apexalpha4• 7 months ago

I just built a homeserver with a decent GPU, too.

I setup both a Windows and Linux VM and give them both the EXACT config from the hypervisor, including GPU passthrough and CPU Host.

The Linux VM runs faster in some games designed for Windows, running on Proton.

I read somewhere that Microsoft admitted Windows is bloated. Which surprised me since I didn't think anyone in the top 150 of Microsoft even knew Windows still existed, but it's a step in the right direction.

This was the first time in 10 years using Windows again, I wanted to play nice and pulled the MS Windows license key from my laptops firmware and used that to get a legitimate copy going. It worked!

Then Windows hit me in the face: because I went the legitimate way they downgraded me to Windows Home and I can't use Remote Desktop.

This got a good laugh out of me. God this software is so hostile to you.

tracker12• 7 months ago

While I appreciate the efforts... I find the UX to be pretty bad and not easy to reason with.

b0dhimind• 7 months ago

UniGetUI is better

hulitu• 7 months ago

The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022)

shutdown ? /s

The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022)

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