So, you’ve got Windows 11 installed on your pc but before you do anything else on your computer you need to follow this guide without skipping any part of it.
As I’m going to guide you on the exact steps you need to take to ensure that your Windows 11 installation performs at it’s possible best, especially if you have a low-end system, and that it’s set up in the most user-friendly way possible, as Windows 11’s default settings are just trash, and you’ll have a tough time using your computer.
Before we get started, I also have a video version if you would prefer to watch that.
I’ve got a fresh installation of Windows 11 running on my unsupported Toshiba laptop which has a third gen Core i5 CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD.
This is the same laptop I used in my Windows 11 on unsupported hardware post and I’m not adding more RAM as I want to show you that Windows 11 can run just fine on unsupported hardware.
IF you set it up properly, like I'm going to show you how to do in this guide.
I’ve installed all of the latest Windows 11 updates and drivers and it’s the first thing you should do too if you want your Windows 11 installation to perform at its best.
Taking a quick look at the task manager before we start anything, I can see I’ve got 111 processes running and 1GB of the 2GB of RAM in use on a completely fresh install of Windows 11 with no other software installed and nothing else running.
For the video, I did the screen recording on another pc via an HDMI capture card, so the laptop literally only has Windows 11 running on it and nothing else.
At the end of the video, we’ll compare the starting and ending Task Manager stats so if you’re going to follow this guide, remember to take note of your stats too so you can leave a comment to let me know if this guide actually worked for you or not.
Debloating Windows 11
Debloating Windows 11 is always the first step to making it better, faster and more user friendly as it comes preinstalled with so much junk that basically no one uses.
But before we do anything we need to create a system restore point just so we have a way to go back to when everything was working in case something goes wrong and we break something in Windows.
If you need help creating a system restore point, you can check out the video version.
Oh, and just so you know, you follow this guide completely at your own risk.
BloatyNosy
BloatyNosy is the first tool we’ll be using to make Windows 11 better and faster and is the ultimate solution to Windows 11 Bloatware.
You can download it from the official page, run the installer & then launch it.
BloatyNosy makes it really easy to debloat and customize your Windows 11 installation.
On first launch it’ll display known potential issues based on the current Windows 11 build you have installed on your system.
And you can click into each of the categories to see which changes it recommends doing based on that Windows 11 build number.
You can also hover your mouse over any of the settings to get more info on that specific tweak.
I’m just going to leave everything selected and click on analyze to let BloatyNosy scan my computer for potential issues.
Once it’s done analyzing it will display a list of all of the potential issues with a summary at the end.
Click on Fix and then Apply Fixes to let BloatyNosy do its thing and accept any prompts along the way.
When it’s done go to the more apps section and select BloatPilot.
BloatPilot
BloatPilot will help us remove even more bloatware from Windows 11 and gives us some more control over the apps that are preinstalled in Windows 11.
You can click on the little dropdown arrow next to the “Empty Bin and Remove Apps” button and select both of the available options to add the most common and hated bloatware found in Windows 11 to the removal list.
You also have control over specific apps that you want to remove on the left of BloatPilot and I’ll move some of the apps I’m not going to use on my computer to the removal list as well.
Once you’re ready to start the removal process, click on the “Empty Bin and Remove Apps” button to remove the apps you added to the list on the right and wait for it to finish.
Once it’s done, you’ll see the summary to verify that it’s completed.
And that’s it for BloatPilot.
Go back to the main screen and select the WinModder app from the more apps section.
WinModder
Click on Explore Mods, accept the prompt and then click on “Install and update Mods signature file.”
Now you’ll see a list of mods you can install with this utility, and you can read the description of each of them on your own time and decide what you want to install.
The most important one to have selected here is Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility as that’s what we’ll be using in the next section of this guide.
Click on Download and Install Mods to get the selected mods installed in WinModder and when it’s done, go back to the WinModder screen.
Select the mods you want on your system and click on Apply.
Now I have a prompt asking if I want to enable the Ultimate Performance Plan because that is one of the mods I selected to have installed on my computer.
Like I mentioned at the start of the video, I’m using a laptop and in reality, I wouldn’t really recommend that you enable the Ultimate Performance Plan on a laptop as it will drain your battery really fast.
But I’m doing this for demonstration purposes and it’s still your choice if you want to enable it or not.
On Desktops I absolutely recommend that you enable the Ultimate Performance Power Plan to ensure that you get the best performance from your pc.
So the Ultimate Power Plan has been enabled, but we still need to set it as the active power plan, but we will get to that later.
All of the mods have been successfully applied and now it’s time for Chris Titus Tech’s WinUtil.
Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility
Select the utility and click on Apply to launch it.
Unfortunately, it didn’t want to launch via BloatyNosy when I was recording the video, but I just went to the GitHub page linked below and copied the launch code.
Below is the launch code you can copy and paste into Windows Powershell to launch WinUtil:
irm christitus.com/win | iex
Then I launched Windows Powershell as admin, pasted the launch code and pressed enter on the keyboard.
Press Y and then Enter when you’re prompted to install Chocolatey.
And when it’s done, you’ll see the main WinUtil screen.
If you’ve never seen this before, this is an awesome utility made by Chris Titus, that’ll help us make Windows 11 even better and faster.
It allows you to install various useful utilities with one script, do some tweaks and make changes to Windows updates.
Let’s start with the tweaks.
Here you can select a variety of tweaks split between essential tweaks and miscellaneous tweaks.
I’ll just select the recommended Desktop tweaks and I suggest you do too.
This will do things like disable telemetry in Windows 11 and run O&O ShutUp10 which is a great tool for protecting your privacy.
As well as some other recommended tweaks that will improve the performance and usability of your pc.
You can toggle the dark theme here which will be turned on by default if you use this utility.
And you can also add or remove the ultimate performance plan here if you didn’t already use BloatyNosy to do it.
Let’s move on to the miscellaneous tweaks.
Here I recommend the following selections, but I also have some important notes.
Disable Power Throttling
Enable NumLock on Startup
Show File Extensions
Set Display for Performance
Disable UAC
Disable Notification Tray/Calendar
Disable TPM on Update
Remove Cortana
Disable Mouse Acceleration
If you’re a novice Windows or computer user in general, don’t disable the User Account Control as it offers another layer of protection against viruses and unwanted programs being automatically installed on your system.
You can choose to remove Microsoft Edge with the Chris Titus Windows Utility and judging by a recent community poll on my YouTube channel I guess a lot of you will choose to uninstall Microsoft Edge.
I use Edge as my main browser, so I’ll leave this option unchecked and in the next section of this guide I’ll be using another utility to tweak and make Microsoft Edge better too.
You can also choose to enable the classic right click menu here but personally I prefer to use another right click menu that has enhanced features and I’ll cover that in the next section of this WinUtil guide.
When you’re all done and happy with the selections you’ve made click on “Run Tweaks” and wait for it to finish.
In the Updates section you have the option to disable all updates, but I don’t recommend this.
Instead, just select the “Security updates” setting which will delay feature updates and install security updates 4 days after they’re released.
This way the chances of your Windows 11 installation crashing because of a bad update is really slim but you still get the benefit of being protected by the latest security updates.
If you want to receive all Windows updates as soon as they’re available, just leave it on the default settings.
Now back to the main WinUtil screen.
Here we can install a bunch of useful and often essential software with a single script, and you can have a look at all of the available options here.
BloatyNosy’s InstaPackage also lets you install many useful software with ease, but I won’t be using that in this post.
One of the utilities you absolutely must install, especially if you didn’t enable the classic right click menu in the previous step, is the Shell Context Menu by Nilesoft.
This is a much better and more useful right click menu than the default one’s that come with Windows.
You still have access to all of the normal context menu options, but it has some added shortcuts like tools for developers, file management shortcuts, folder shortcuts and what I find most useful, shortcuts to the control panel.
You can use these shortcuts to easily get to the normal control panel or to access all control panel items which Microsoft has made quite difficult to get to in Windows 11.
Shell by Nilesoft alone makes Windows 11 much better and more user friendly and is a must install on any computer running on Windows 11.
Once you’ve made your selections, click on “Install Selection” and wait for the script to finish installing all of the software.
Once that’s done you can close the Chris Titus Windows Utility and then go and download WinAero Tweaker which is the next utility we’ll be using to make Windows 11 better.
WinAero Tweaker
Extract the files and run the installer.
I recommend using portable mode which will just extract the files and won’t install an additional program on your computer.
Go to the WinAero Tweaker folder which will be on the root of the C: drive if you didn’t change it during installation and then run the WinAero Tweaker .exe file.
Agree to the terms and then you’ll see the main WinAero Tweaker screen.
Now this utility has a lot of tweaks, way too many to cover in this video, instead, I’ll just quickly run through the ones we still need to double check & enable or disable.
You can also find a description of each of the settings I’m about to change in WinAero Tweaker to help you decide if you want to do it on your system too.
First, check that Background Apps are disabled.
Next, Remove the Windows Spotlight Desktop Icon.
In the behavior section under “Ads and Unwanted Apps” make sure all of the boxes are checked.
In the Boot and Logon section disable the “Let’s Finish setting up your device” screen.
Next, disable the Lock Screen.
In the Desktop and Taskbar Section, disable “Web Search.”
For Microsoft Edge I recommend that you make the following changes:
Disable the Desktop Shortcut Creation after Edge Updates.
Disable Enhance Images.
Disable The Sidebar.
Disable the Personalized Web Experiences
And Finally Disable the “Follow Creators” in Microsoft Edge
Basically, disable everything except the updates.
In the File Explorer section, enable classic search and change the starting folder to This PC.
In the Windows Apps section, Disable the Auto Update of Store Apps, Disable Cortana and the Windows Ink Workspace.
Lastly in the “Get Classic Apps section”, Activate the Windows Photo Viewer and then set all of the available file types to open with Windows Photo Viewer.
I honestly hate the built-in Windows Photos App.
I’ve hated using it ever since Windows 10 and having the classic Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 11 just makes it so much better.
So now we’re done with WinAero tweaker and we need to restart file explorer for all of the changes we’ve made to take effect.
If you’ve installed Shell by Nilesoft you can restart Windows Explorer by holding down the left shift on your keyboard and then right clicking anywhere on an empty space on the taskbar.
You’ll then see the Shell properties at the top of the context menu.
Head to that, open the manager and then click on Restart Explorer.
If you didn’t install Shell by Nilesoft just open the Task Manager, find the Windows Explorer process and restart it.
BloatyNosy Continued
Now just for interest's sake I let BloatyNosy analyze the computer again and it actually still found 5 features to disable after everything I’ve already done.
One being to disable the Widgets which I definitely want to do.
Another being the search box that’s being displayed again after I ran the Chris Titus WinUtil.
Honestly, I don’t mind having search displayed on the taskbar and I’m going to change it to display the “icon only” in the “Windows settings” section of this guide.
Then BloatyNosy wants to enable the classic right click menu which isn’t really applicable as I have Nilesoft Shell installed.
And lastly it wants to adjust the visual effects for best performance which I also want to do.
So, I’ll leave everything selected and click on Apply Fixes, accept any prompts, wait for it to finish and then we’re done with BloatyNosy.
Quick CPU
The next utility we’re going to use to make Windows 11 faster and increase the performance of our computer is QuickCPU.
By default, Windows will park CPU cores to save power if they’re not being used.
QuickCPU basically gives you more control over your CPU and allows you to disable core parking if you have a multi-core CPU.
It also has a lot of other useful features I’m not going to cover in this post, but you can visit their website linked above to find more info on all of its use cases and features.
Once you’ve downloaded, installed and launched Quick CPU you’ll see the main screen which will display a lot of useful information about the CPU in your computer.
Start by setting the power plan to Ultimate Performance and then move all of the sliders at the bottom to max and click on apply.
You can verify if you have any parked cores by looking at the graph on the top.
Now just for some clarification, this isn’t overclocking your CPU at all, it’s simply preventing Windows from parking CPU cores to save power.
It will definitely increase the performance of your computer, but at the cost of consuming more power.
With that being said, it’s not really advised to do this on laptops, but you can still do it if you want to.
Windows Customization with Built in Settings
Now let’s do some manual customizations using Windows 11’s built in settings to make it more user friendly.
Start by right clicking on the taskbar and then select taskbar settings.
Turn on the search icon if you want it to be displayed like me, otherwise just leave it hidden.
Next scroll down to taskbar behaviors and align the start button to the left of the screen.
Head back to the personalization tab, scroll down and select start.
Here, turn off the sliders for the “show recently added apps”, “show recently opened items” and “show recommendations for tips” settings.
Click on Folders and select the shortcuts you want displayed on the start menu, I’ll select them all.
Next unpin all of the items that you don’t want displayed on the start menu and pin any items you want displayed to the start menu.
In settings, head to apps, then startup apps and disable any programs you don’t want to run at startup.
Unpin any items from the taskbar that you want removed and pin any of the apps that you’ll be using on a regular basis to the taskbar.
When that’s all done restart your pc and then it’s time to see if Windows 11 is actually better, faster and more user friendly.
After everything I did, I managed to get the processes down from 111 to about 80.
The same amount of RAM is still being used but seeing as I only have 2GB installed I can’t expect it to go down too much.
Even though Windows 11 isn't supported on this laptop, it still runs surprisingly well after all these changes and feels really snappy and fast even with the 2GB of RAM.
But that is thanks to the SSD I have installed and if you don't have one installed in your computer, best get one as soon as possible, I promise, you won't regret it.
Click the link below to Purchase the same SSD I have in my laptop from Amazon (Affiliate Link).
You can choose the size and style (SATA or M.2) you want before checkout.
If you’ve followed this guide, then remember to leave a comment with your starting and ending Task Manager performance stats and I’ll leave it to you to let me know if this guide actually made Windows 11 better, faster and more user friendly for you or if it was a complete waste of time.
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