One “simple trick” and your next Windows install will be blissfully free of bloatware.

Basically, install Windows as you normally would, but when asked for Time and Currency format, select English (World) instead of your country.

Then let the installer do its thing. Eventually, you will see a window with an ice cream cone on the floor with the words “Something went wrong” and the error message “OOBEREGION.” This cryptic message means that the “out of box experience” (OOBE) didn’t launch because it didn’t know which region to launch.

Click Skip, though, and Windows will install just fine. You won’t be prompted to buy Microsoft 365, you won’t be prompted to pay for a OneDrive subscription, and your Start menu won’t be cluttered with apps.

  • KogasaEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    Unless you don’t have a lot of ram and don’t want to spill over into swap?

    That has nothing to do with idle RAM. If you are swapping while idle, you have HORRIBLY fucked up. RAM usage is (and should be) determined by memory pressure. When idling, there should be none.

    Aside from that, why would you say that? So if it idled at 8 GB of ram (which it is on its way to eventually doing) would you still say that?

    Yes. Idle RAM usage means nothing. You need to measure how much it contributes to memory pressure.

    Do you have any idea how ridiculous of a concept it is that a clean operating system alone idles alone on 4gb of ram?

    No.

    What in the hell are the services doing that would make it idle that high?

    Preloading and caching in otherwise wasted space.

    • @havokdjEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      Memory pressure? You mean niceness?

      Niceness just gives a program a higher CPU (and thus, RAM) priority.

      Your system is still going to swap. The idling ram doesn’t magically go away. That’s how it works. If it didn’t, you start experiencing bugs, crashes, and data loss, because there is no more room in the pool.

      Just because a computer is “idle” doesn’t mean it isn’t doing anything, it is still performing work to stay on, composite your window manager, display it, run services in the background. Those services are still programs that are often vital to the operating system actually functioning, you can’t just make that utilization magically disappear because you need more RAM because they tend to have lower niceness values than programs in userspace, even Windows understands that.

      Yes, if you are swapping at idle then you indeed did do something horribly wrong, it is a bit comical that you don’t realize that proves my point. The explorer.exe devs indeed did something horribly wrong, they released shitty half baked code because managers think more code = harder/better work when it is actually the reverse.