Hands-On Apple 214 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands On Windows, we're going to take a look at a brand new version of Tiny 11 Builder that I think you're going to like quite a bit.

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Paul Thurrott [00:00:16]:
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands On Windows. This has been a great year for Windows 11. I mean, there's no other way to say it. Microsoft's been working on those pain points. Windows 26H2 is out. Windows 24H2 is out the door. So now we've got 25 and 26H2 and also 26H1. But we've got the new Windows Update features, this new Start menu, the new taskbar.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:44]:
We can move it around and resize it with new Windows Search, new widgets, and more on the way, right? So there's new context menus coming to File Explorer and the desktop and all kinds of other stuff. So the Absolutely. Plenty of talk along those lines as we go throughout the year. But I keep coming back to the same thing. When you look at Windows 11 and you think about the insertification that's in this operating system, and then you look at the pain points and the things they've done, it doesn't really line up, right? There's a lot of things still in Windows 11 that Microsoft is not addressing, like the forced telemetry, the forced Microsoft account usage, the forced OneDrive folder backup, although it's got a little bit better. The forced web usage, right? Pre-installed crap, where it kind of goes on and on. And so we still, as Windows 11 users, if we care about anything in life, need ways to work around and fix those problems, right? And those come in a couple of different forms. If you have an existing install, like I'm running— this is an ARM computer running Windows 11 on ARM 26H1.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:48]:
Um, you can use a tool like Win11Debloat, which we've talked about a bunch, and then MS Edge Direct to get rid of the Edge problems. And those— that works well, that's really good. But if you want to get a clean install from the get-go, the, the choice I've always made and the recommendation I've always made has been something called Tiny 11 Builder. And so Tiny 11 Builder has been around for years. It has improved dramatically over the years. It started out just as a PowerShell script, which took some really strange permissions to get running correctly. The last time we talked about it, it was— it's still a PowerShell script, but it has— it had a GUI front end, which I think actually really helps. But now its author, NTDev, has updated it yet again to include a modern WinUI-based UI.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:39]:
User interface like you see here in the screenshot. So we're going to go through that at a high level. The task here has not changed. You need to start out with a Windows 11 ISO. Like I said, 26H2 has just come out. So if that's your system, or 25H2, I would imagine too, because of the new features there, be sure to grab the latest ISO right from Microsoft, just Google or whatever, download Windows 11, you'll get to that page. We've been there before many times, of course. But make sure you have that latest version of the ISO, and then you can go to the Tiny 11 Builder website on GitHub and download the latest version, which is coming up over here.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:22]:
So it's actually way down the bottom, but you can see it has versions for ARM64, so Windows 11 on ARM, and also x64, so AMD and Intel-based PCs, right? So you can, from either direction, if this is an ARM system, so the one that I'm I downloaded is this ARM version here, but I'm going to work on an x64 ISO, which I'll use to install Windows on other computers. You could do that in the opposite direction, it doesn't matter. You can kind of mix and match here. It doesn't— you don't have to use the same architecture, right, to, to make the ISO. Okay, so I have already downloaded Tiny 11 Builder and the ISO I need, right? So you can see that stuff here. I have gone in here and extracted this thing, and it's a lot of stuff, but let me just get down to the bottom. And you could just run the executable. Now you're going to get a SmartScreen warning, right? And this is because he's distributing it in such a way that it doesn't have a digital signature.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:20]:
It's just an individual developer. But the source code is available if you're so inclined. If you're worried that this thing might be doing something bad, which is reasonable, by the way, you can take a look at the source code for yourself. But this, you know, we've been using this tool for years. I personally trust NTDev, but, you know, that's up to you, obviously. So nice looking UI, you know, a little different from before. It says here it works with 22H2 or newer. I mean, only 25H2 or newer are in fact supported.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:49]:
It supports both x64 and ARM64 ISOs, which I said, and you can actually use Insider ISOs if you're so inclined. Um, other than the UI change here, the big, um, thing that's going on that might be a little different from before is we have 3 options instead of 2. And so before you would choose between Tiny 11 and Tiny 11 Core. Um, in this case you could then customize it, but now we just added a custom option at the top level, which is the one I think most people should use most of the time. Don't ever use this one. Uh, if Tiny 11 Core will install Windows 11 in a very small footprint, But then you can't update it with Windows Update, etc. If you go with Tiny 11 or custom, which is going to customize this version, you, you know, Windows Update is there, you get all the recovery tools, you can install the updates and so forth. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:40]:
So it's basically just a wizard, right? So it's very similar to before. If I hadn't downloaded the ISO, it prompts me here, but of course it's prompted me for the ARM version, which is not necessarily the one that I want. Which is fine because I can just go— I've already done that, so I can just select it and add it there. So now it's ready to go, and you can go in, like I said, you can choose. I just— this is basically the path that we did before, but I'm going to do custom, right? And this is super important because I— there are just some things that it doesn't include in the original, the base Tiny11 that I want. And you can kind of go back and forth in this. I mean, everyone's a little bit differently, but I think it's more important to choose exactly exactly the features you don't want rather than to have it just, you know, just remove everything and then you have to go back and try to find and reinstall some of the other stuff. This bit here is a little confusing to me.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:35]:
It looks like what it means is if I check this, it will keep the servicing, recovery, and Defender features, but those are kept by default. It's only in this version where those are removed. So I'm not really— I don't know why that's there. I don't like that. But You can go through this in different ways. There's a more filtered view for different types of things, bundled apps, et cetera, which is great. But I just go through this list and actually let me go back up to all because I screwed that up. But thinking about the way I would install this for myself, and everyone's different, right? So you can go and do things differently.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:13]:
But these are the types of things that I remove anyway. Like Solitaire is— there's nothing wrong with Solitaire. I just don't need it. I don't— I'm never going to play the game. I don't care. That's fine. So I get rid of that stuff. And, you know, make whatever choices you're going to make here.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:27]:
It doesn't have to be the choices I'm making, obviously. But you can see this is a really big list of functionality. Somewhere in here, let's see, because it's further down the list than I would have liked. But yeah, Microsoft Edge is in here as it was before. So you can remove Microsoft Edge. And WebView2. You're going to find that you will need WebView2 later, but you can install that separately, right? In fact, I think you could just do it right from— wait, no thank you. If I could type effectively, I would be dangerous.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:58]:
Oh, that's not— all right, I'm running the wrong thing, that's why. Let me do that again. So if you do like wget search for WebView2, I assume this is going to come up like edge.webview2 or something similar. Yeah, here we go. This is the thing here. So you just need the runtime because certain apps rely on that. You can get that separately. So this is safe to remove.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:18]:
Remove OneDrive if you're not using that. That's great. Although you can do that from the operating system, but this is just a kind of a convenience slash nicety. And I skipped over a bunch of stuff, but I would go through here and, you know, just download or check off all those things that I don't want. You can also get a kind of an advanced list of all the components. It actually takes a long time, so I'm not going to do this. And it's kind of formatted awkwardly, but if you want to very specifically determine what you install or don't install, you can go through there as well. All right, so then we just sort of, you know, accept the defaults.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:50]:
I think it's going to create a folder in the root, which I don't actually like. I would normally change that, but that's okay because I'm not going to run through this whole thing. And then Turbo Mode is new to this version, and so what this does is batches up the— it's really the scripts that run the removals off of the image into a smaller number of larger scripts that actually makes this thing run faster. And then it keeps up— it keeps more of this in memory at a time. So it needs more resources, but it actually runs significantly faster. So I usually do enable that. And you can choose these other options if you wanted. If you prefer to do a local account setup, for example, this is one of many ways to do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:29]:
It's not the— I don't do this, but it's possible. And then you can review and And then kind of step through the process. Okay, so I've gone through this several times already. I've done this on different computers. I don't want to start this process here because it's very time-consuming. So what I did was just take some screenshots of this further into the process. So I'll just bring this up here. So this is just showing this going through.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:58]:
It's, it's actually the same. Yeah, it's the same ISO. I think this was on a different computer, but it just goes through the process of doing all the different things. You can see here in the history, operation history, which unfolds as it occurs, it will go through all these different stages. So basically, it mounts the ISO, it looks at the settings changes you've made, which are now written into a configuration file, and then it applies that to the ISO, in some cases removing components or whatever it is, the configurations you've chose. Chosen, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think I— yeah, actually, so this took almost 30 minutes. So this is with turbo on.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:36]:
I mean, this can, you know, it can take quite a while. One thing that I haven't seen in the app, but NTDev has said he's working on, is something I think is super important, and I can't wait for this to happen, which is what I would like to do is go into— oh, here, I just found it. Yeah, here it is. I'm sorry, excuse me. Here it is. So you can save this as— they call it a recipe, but this is basically just a template, right? So once you've gone through the process of determining what it is you don't want installed, right, so it will remove that from the installer. You can save this, and then later when you run it, run this app, you can just load that and you don't have to go through that whole checklist again, right? So that's actually— that's the first time I've seen it. So actually, that's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:19]:
And then on the other end, what you get is a custom version of the ISO, which I don't have on this computer. I did this on a couple of other computers, but— which are going to be smaller than the stock Windows 11 install. And then you can install the normal way, right? And so if you have a working Windows 11 system, this isn't the custom one, but you could just double-click this to mount it in the file system. That should be gone by now. Yeah, it never even went there. But, and then just run setup from there. Or, um, you can go into setup, which is on a different screen. Let me fix that.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:49]:
Do, do, do, do. And just go into the recovery tools, which I always go the wrong way, but this is the way I like to do it. And then just restart now. And when you get into the Windows recovery environment, just choose to boot up. I'm sorry, you'd have to— I missed a step. You would have to write this to a USB stick, which you would do with Rufus, and then boot your computer with that. And the way you do that is here. So in other words, yeah, click restart now, go into the Windows recovery environment, choose that you want to boot from a different device, and then choose the USB, and off you go.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:21]:
And then it's the standard process. And then, you know, as we've seen in the past, when you install with Rufus, depending on the configuration, and then Tiny 11 Builder also depending on the configuration, you're going to get a really minimal Windows 11 desktop like we've seen in the past. And you might have to connect to Ethernet just to get online and then allow Windows Update to occur so you can download all the drivers for, for your computer. But when it's all said and done, You'll be up to date through Windows Update. You'll have all the stuff that you want, and all the stuff you don't want will be gone, and should be good to go. This has been a great app in my experience. I've just started using this new version. Like I said, I've done it on, I guess, 2 or 3, possibly, I guess, 3 different computers so far.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:05]:
I've rebuilt some computers here in Mexico, and just to make sure that, you know, it works as expected over time. But yeah, so far so good. So there you go. If you're looking to de-insurantify Windows 11 and you want to do a clean install, Strongly recommend Tiny11 Builder, which is free and open source and available up on GitHub. Alrighty. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for watching. Um, thank you especially to our Club Twit members.