One simple but advanced approach is to take a new blank SSD, partition it with a "small" 64GB NTFS volume to begin with, then freshly install Windows 11 to that

One simple but advanced approach is to take a new blank SSD, partition it with a "small" 64GB NTFS volume to begin with, then freshly install Windows 11 to that. There will be plenty of free space to install numerous additional software programs or apps later, as long as you install the software only to your resulting C: volume, while making sure you create well-organized folders on volumes other than C:, to safely store any and all valuable data that you or your software may handle or generate. With ordinary multipartitioning you can have a number of different volumes like D:, E:, F:, G:, etc on the same or different hardware drives. People should be accustomed to that now that removable drives like USB have been common for so many years. Having a volume other than C: on a Windows PC is not supposed to be confusing like it was when users in the 1990's had to first adjust to the appearance of CDROM drives as D: containing their own separate folder set. It was widely thought, incorrectly for years, that D: would be assigned to a CDROM drive forever. Users already had to become familiar with C: being a HDD and having folders which could each hold more data than a single floppy, plus A: had been challenging enough for floppies to begin with, where most people had no experience ever using a B: floppy drive at all. OTOH some of the wiser PC users did start out booting to DOS on their A: floppy and directing all valuable data to their B: floppy. Ejecting the B: floppies as they became filled, sometimes even filing the full floppies in physical filing cabinets, then inserting a freshly-formatted floppy into the B: drive to collect more data. A DOS version could then be upgraded by replacing the A: floppy with one that a newer version of DOS had been "installed" on. So today you would use volumes other than C: to store ALL your valuable data, whether on the same SSD or external. C: is so special, while also being the most subject to corruption, that it needs to be built and kept in condition to be almost "disposable", to where you can recover from a full backup image or re-install Windows and apps on a whim, as quickly and painlessly as possible. With all your irreplaceable data safely untouched because you make sure that particular type of data is always on some other volume besides C: to begin with. This is nothing new. Some people eventually do come to the conclusion that it does make more sense to have their huge movies taking up all that space in their own "filing cabinet" in their own F:\Videos folder, rather than further bloating their Windows volume deeply tucked away in C:\Users\mindless_user\Videos, or worse, which is where some of the apps are going to shuffle your data into storage in "parts unknown" on C: by default unless you take pre-emptive initiative. So you don't really want a whole lot of gigabytes for C: when you think about it. Terabytes could really be something to wait through if it went into auto disk checking upon reboot one day. But you DO want to always install additional software to the C: volume along with Windows, and the default location (usually in C:\Program Files\new_subfolder) is normally ideal for that. Installing Windows apps to other volumes than C: has been possible for decades, still not recommended for the faint at heart who might want to do an occasional backup or recovery. And you first build C: by freshly installing Windows completely disconnected from the web, using a Local Administrative account only (going without a password can still be considered a secure choice at this point), then meticulously adjusting settings and disabling and removing some things like you would expect with a fresh Windows installation. You may also want to launch Edge so you can adjust its settings before going on the internet too. Even though things will probably update when you do eventually connect to the web, reverting some of your settings anyway, or adding new "features" having undesirable defaults which might need to be addressed. All of the user-optimized settings you have made to your initial Administrative user are now contained within that one specific-named folder such as C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin. But any new users you may create on the system will take on the non-optimized settings you started out with by default. Because new users will be based on the contents of the C:\Users\Default folder which is where your passwordless Admin account was generated from to begin with. If you would optionally like future new users to have their initial settings based on your carefully configured Administrative settings at this point instead, you would have to replace the contents of C:\Users\Default\ with the contents of C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin\ while booted to an alternate volume, or booted to something like the Command Prompt of the Windows Startup ISO.[0] However keep in mind that some of the contents of C:\Users\Default\ might actually be subject to significant future autochanges once exposed to Windows Update if much different default profile parameters are pushed out generally by Microsoft, and there may not be any warning if this occurs. Before installing any actual software (or maybe even offline drivers) this might also be the first worthwhile time to back up all the work you have accomplished so far. At a time when your Windows is way more useful than it started out when fresh, but still as few gigabytes as it's ever going to be. This is when it's quickest & easiest to backup & recover. Booting to the Command Prompt of the Windows Startup ISO, then using DISM /Capture-Image to comprehensively capture the contents of your idle target partition, in the form of a naturally compressed file-structure-based WIM file. So it's not really a bitwise "partition image" but upon redeployment onto a formatted NTFS volume it ends up acting a similar way, and it's an even more useful recovery compared to bitwise. Might as well consider it a Windows IMage file. You'll have to bone up on DISM only a little bit to accomplish this, becoming familiar with only about 1% of the full DISM capabilities. Then you can move forward installing your (drivers and) desired software, with further backups of C: you may want as you go along. Make sure you become familiarized with each of the added apps so you can correct any default settings they might have for storing DATA anywhere on your C: volume. Change those default storage locations to some volume other than C: that you control, where you can more sensibly back that data up separately from Windows itself, at different times using different backup methods (even manual data backup becomes easy when stored separately from Windows like this). Plus you may no longer have the drive space limitations you had in the 1990's so you may not even need compression of any kind for very much of anything any more, depending on your situation. While each app & its settings reside firmly on C: along with Windows, no differently than mainstream users. Somewhere along the line you will probably connect to the internet, and period-specific updates may compromise recovery repeatability compared to what may be available at a future date, but you can always go back to a previous backup if needed. A 64GB backup or restore requires not that many minutes of data transfer using a SSD. The idea of bloating Windows to the max in Windows Vista after a period of time[1] seems to have first arose in order to discourage rapid comprehensive backups and recoveries which had always been multi-hour ordeals which still functioned unreliably compared to what can be done with great certainty in minutes today. If you really want to have a repeatable Windows build, you could put icing on the cake by documenting which exact version of Windows you install to begin with, each of the changes to default configuration, installation records of each app install and its settings, etc. With the growing documentation referring to increasingly complete comprehensive backups of your evolving C: volume as you bring it up from scratch in a way that would be drastically less time-consuming during a full recovery than during initial system installation & configuration. . [0] Using the Windows 11 Startup ISO booted to the Command Prompt, where your regular established Windows volume is still routinely autodesignated as C: (even when C: is dormant due to alternate booting), you will have to delete or rename the C:\Users\Default folder (to something like C:\Users\DefaultOrig), then using the Robocopy command seems to work with a minimum of permission difficulties: ROBOCOPY.EXE C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin C:\Users\Default /b /mir /mt /r:0 /w:0 /sj /sl Use current Windows 11 ISO for this, the /sj & /sl switches were not implemented until relatively recently. . [1] Vista was originally released in intentionally-slimmed condition which allowed "upgrading" XP machines that didn't have very much free space, it was plain to see this was reversed as Vista peaked and it was then tweaked to retain cruft that had been originally excluded. This appeared like an attempt to bloat Windows faster than HDD capacity could increase, maintaing the status quo where many customers who could afford it would purchase a new PC and get going again after corruption faster than they could by attempting hours of iffy recovery trying to get back to what they had. Especially if they lost everything on the C: drive at the same time anyway. . Edit: If you read this far I can only apologize, sorry, no video ;)