5 ms·

The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022)

97 points by janandonly 10mo ago

Doches 10mo 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 10mo ago
  https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil - That's what you're looking for. Kept updated for latest Windows 11
- matthberg 10mo 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/25.12.01 https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/releases/tag/25.12...
  - Doches 10mo 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!
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
SunlitCat 10mo 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.
- Doches 10mo 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.
  - 6510 10mo 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.
    - taikahessu 10mo ago
      Oh man, we need also incorporate a lean and agile iterative approach, where everyone need to participate in sprint planning. Imagine having to fit in all the necessary sprint items and how to choose between them! And in the end of each sprint a single exe comes out. Or multiple. Like a soap opera for product managers.
      - 6510 10mo ago
        Little computer people was awesome[0]. Upscale it to a full size microsoft office[3]. Give agents neck bearded avatars with green hair named after real employees except from legal, there everyone is a pirate. Make it so that one can zoom in on everything and follow the cringe worthy dialog in overloaded sprint-planners that some~how work out. Take style pointers from KRAZAM Microservices[12] and gar1t's "Nodejs is bad ass rockstar tech"[44] [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkTgX1mGmDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkTgX1mGmDg [3] - https://officesnapshots.com/2014/11/18/microsoft-redmond-building-44-offices/ https://officesnapshots.com/2014/11/18/microsoft-redmond-bui... [12] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ [44] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg
    - 10mo ago
eviks 10mo 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?
- fuzzfactor 10mo 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.
  - eviks 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?
- Koshkin 10mo ago
  Funny you should mention Linux.
- TacticalCoder 10mo 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 10mo ago
delta_p_delta_x 10mo 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/ https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
- B1FF_PSUVM 10mo 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.
- vladvasiliu 10mo 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_x 10mo ago
    I suspect you'll additionally need to make some GPO changes so that things like Game Bar, Xbox, and Copilot are disabled.
Fiveplus 10mo 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.
- LoganDark 10mo 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 10mo 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.
    - LoganDark 10mo ago
      Using the capture card allows me to avoid compression artifacts and a majority of network congestion (and get 120Hz!), and connecting the mouse directly eliminates additional latency and jitter. The keyboard still suffers from it, but in a shooter (like, say, ARC Raiders) mouse input is definitely most important - I can deal with a slight keyboard delay. I may still look into those for the keyboard input, but the only improvement I foresee really making is getting Ethernet for the MacBook (I moved my one line to the PC since the MacBook's Wi-Fi is so much better). Haven't decided between a passive or active switch yet.
touwer 10mo ago
Isn't the ultimate Windows utility called Linux? Or MacOS?
krautburglar 10mo ago
This genre is for those who would rather cope with abuse than confront it.
- antisthenes 10mo ago
  It's not, but please enlighten us, what is exactly confronting the abuse here? Writing your own OS?
  - krautburglar 10mo 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.
apexalpha 10mo 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.
tracker1 10mo ago
While I appreciate the efforts... I find the UX to be pretty bad and not easy to reason with.
b0dhimind 10mo ago
UniGetUI is better
hulitu 10mo ago
> The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022) shutdown ? /s

97 points by janandonly 10mo ago

Doches 10mo 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 10mo ago
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil - That's what you're looking for. Kept updated for latest Windows 11
matthberg 10mo 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/25.12.01 https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/releases/tag/25.12...
- Doches 10mo 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!
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

SunlitCat 10mo 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.

Doches 10mo 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.
- 6510 10mo 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.
  - taikahessu 10mo ago
    Oh man, we need also incorporate a lean and agile iterative approach, where everyone need to participate in sprint planning. Imagine having to fit in all the necessary sprint items and how to choose between them! And in the end of each sprint a single exe comes out. Or multiple. Like a soap opera for product managers.
    - 6510 10mo ago
      Little computer people was awesome[0]. Upscale it to a full size microsoft office[3]. Give agents neck bearded avatars with green hair named after real employees except from legal, there everyone is a pirate. Make it so that one can zoom in on everything and follow the cringe worthy dialog in overloaded sprint-planners that some~how work out. Take style pointers from KRAZAM Microservices[12] and gar1t's "Nodejs is bad ass rockstar tech"[44] [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkTgX1mGmDg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkTgX1mGmDg [3] - https://officesnapshots.com/2014/11/18/microsoft-redmond-building-44-offices/ https://officesnapshots.com/2014/11/18/microsoft-redmond-bui... [12] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ [44] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg
  - 10mo ago

eviks 10mo 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?

fuzzfactor 10mo 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.
- eviks 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago

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

Koshkin 10mo ago
Funny you should mention Linux.
TacticalCoder 10mo 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 10mo ago

delta_p_delta_x 10mo 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/ https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

B1FF_PSUVM 10mo 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.
vladvasiliu 10mo 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_x 10mo ago
  I suspect you'll additionally need to make some GPO changes so that things like Game Bar, Xbox, and Copilot are disabled.

Fiveplus 10mo 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.

LoganDark 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - LoganDark 10mo ago
    Using the capture card allows me to avoid compression artifacts and a majority of network congestion (and get 120Hz!), and connecting the mouse directly eliminates additional latency and jitter. The keyboard still suffers from it, but in a shooter (like, say, ARC Raiders) mouse input is definitely most important - I can deal with a slight keyboard delay. I may still look into those for the keyboard input, but the only improvement I foresee really making is getting Ethernet for the MacBook (I moved my one line to the PC since the MacBook's Wi-Fi is so much better). Haven't decided between a passive or active switch yet.

touwer 10mo ago

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

krautburglar 10mo ago

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

antisthenes 10mo ago
It's not, but please enlighten us, what is exactly confronting the abuse here? Writing your own OS?
- krautburglar 10mo 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.

apexalpha 10mo 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.

tracker1 10mo ago

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

b0dhimind 10mo ago

UniGetUI is better

hulitu 10mo ago

> The Ultimate Windows Utility (2022) shutdown ? /s