For all the cruft that had built up since the Anniversary Update, I decided to do a fresh installation of the Creators Update released earlier this month on my tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140). Re-installations are much easier now than a decade ago with cloud backups eliminating the worries of losing data. However, it still takes some effort to reduce installation time and to ensure that Microsoft’s data acquisition and bloatware installation is limited. Following are my tips learnt from experience.
1. Direct ISO downloads are a thing of the past as far as Microsoft is concerned and it wants you to rely on the Media Creation Tool instead. That’s fine for the most part, but it happens to download a device specific ISO. So, if you happen to have multiple Windows devices, especially with different editions of Windows 10, then it is best to download the international ISO.
2. USB installations are undoubtedly faster than disc based ones. However, SSDs are much faster than standard USB flash drives. In my case, I have converted a discarded 64GB M.2 SSD into a USB 3 flash drive which reduces the initial installation process to just 5 minutes.
3. Rufus is by far the best tool to write the ISO to the USB drive. In order to write to SSD flash drives, make sure you enable the ‘List USB Hard Drives’ option.
4. After installation, when you boot to the profile setup screen, I would recommend not connecting to the Internet. This causes the PC to reboot into the offline setup mode and you don’t need to link your Outlook account. It is said that an offline account limits the telemetry sent to Microsoft, though I can’t vouch for it personally.
5. For additional privacy, you can disable all the privacy options presented on the setup screen. If you need any of them, you can always enable them later.
6. Make sure you keep the drivers from your manufacturer handy before the installation. You can copy them to the USB drive that you use for the Windows setup. In my case, Dell provides a single CAB file containing all the drivers and I usually place the extracted CAB file on my USB SSD drive for easy access. This enables the manual installation of the correct drivers using the Device Manager.
7. A very important step is to disable installation of hardware drivers from Windows update in case you already have all the manufacturer drivers. In my case, I found that the drivers from Microsoft for my device caused a lot of issues, especially with the display and battery management. Hardware driver installation can be disabled from Advanced System Settings > Hardware > Device Installation Settings.
8. Microsoft also tends to install a lot of sponsored apps like Candy Crush Saga on the device as soon as you connect to the web. Hence, it is a great idea to open the Start Menu and remove all the icons for the apps that are awaiting download. Note that you can only do this in case you didn’t connect to the Internet during the setup process.
9. Whenever you login to Microsoft Apps like Mail or OneDrive, make sure that you sign in only to the app and not associate it with the Windows account. This again ensures better privacy and account management.
This just about covers the most important things to keep in mind when undertaking a fresh installation of Windows. It maximises privacy and minimises the conflicts that you may encounter, thereby streamlining the installation process.
