Hands-On Windows 167 transcript

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

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at Tiny eleven Builder, a technical but unique way to declutter or de insurify Windows 11.

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Paul Thurrott [00:00:23]:
Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat and this week we're going to go in a slightly more technical direction. It's been a while since we've looked at any utilities that could be used to kind of declutter or de insertify, if you will, Windows 11. But now that Windows 1125 H2 is out, I've been reevaluating some of those tools and while this particular one isn't really designed for that purpose, I think it works pretty well for it. So I thought it would be worth taking a look. So just as a recap, let me bring up my article about this. About a year and a half ago I wrote, I made a checklist of all the ways in which Windows 11 is insuredified, for lack of a better term. And you can read this article if you'd like.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:12]:
But the short version is basically seven items, so it's forced telemetry, pre installed graphware, the constant unreliable feature updates that we get at least on a monthly basis basis but often more than that. The force Microsoft account sign in which you know, for me I don't consider a big big deal bad behaviors in Microsoft Edge. And that's true whether you use it or not. Because if you do use it and don't configure it the way Microsoft wants, it still harasses you, which is not great. The arbitrary system requirements although you know, here in late 2025, not as arbitrary as they used to be, but still an issue for some people. And then the OneDrive folder backup issue that I experience on a really basis where you say no to this feature request and it just enables it anywhere in the background. So to date we have looked at a few utilities that can kind of try to scale back some of that stuff. But there is this tool called tiny11builder.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:11]:
This is a successor to something called tiny11, which was a successor to tiny10, I believe. But the author of this script, or the author of this utility rather has converted it into a PowerShell script that you run against a Windows 11 install ISO, which is the disk image file that you download from Microsoft, and then it removes a bunch of the stuff from it and then you use that to install Windows 11. So the major downside to this tool that I can see is that you actually have to create new install media with it and then you install Windows 11. So you do a queen, a clean install. So you can't really apply it to an existing install. So that may be a blocker for some, but I still think it's worth it because I've been using it now for as we record the show, not quite 10 days, but pretty close. And I haven't seen any scaling back of those behaviors. So it seems like it's working pretty well.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
Well enough that I thought we should take a look at it. Okay, so the way that this works is this is the site for Tiny11Builder on GitHub. If you go back up here, you just click this, download the zip, which I've already done and unarchived it. And that is right here. And there's not much to it. It's an auto attend script. It uses standard Microsoft deployment technologies. There's two versions of the script.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:38]:
The CoreMaker is even more aggressive. Strongly recommend not doing that because you can't install updates after that. The nice thing about the standard script is that you can, you know, it's normal, you can keep get it, you get every monthly update, etc. Etc. Okay, so here's the thing. It is a PowerShell script, which means it can be dangerous to run. However, it's a PowerShell script, so that means you can also take a look at it and you can see that it's okay. If you Maybe don't understand PowerShell or understand everything that's going on here, that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:13]:
But understand that because this thing is open, you know, people have evaluated it, no has found anything scary with it. I've used it several times, it works really well. But the thing that I don't like about it so much is that by default it's really aggressive about removing all of the Inbox apps, the apps that come with Windows 11. And you can see the list here. If you go through this list, you're going to see things in here you probably want, right? So for example, I use Microsoft Paint all the time. I use some of the Eclip Champ, I use the Xbox app, I use your phone, right? And so you could. I did not do this for this install that you're looking at here, but you could go in here and just remove those lines of code and that would prevent it from being not installed. Or you could just do the normal install and then install them from the store afterwards.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
Right. So they're all still available. The most notable items that are not installed and this might be the most exciting part about it, depending on where you're at, is Microsoft Edge is not installed, Microsoft Copilot is not installed, and OneDrive is not installed. Now all of those are available after the fact if you want them. But it's kind of interesting that it can do that kind of a thing. So that's the script to run this. You actually have to do a couple of different things. So the first is you need to Download the Windows 11 ISO, which I have done.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:41]:
And so that's in my Downloads folder right here. You double click this to mount it in the file system. I've also done that. So you can see that's this virtual disk here. You could just run Setup from here, but of course we're not going to do that. So the next step is you need to run a Terminal window and you have to do this as an administrator. So you have to go through that user account control prompt. And I'm going to make this bigger so you can actually see it.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:07]:
And then you got to get into that folder, right? And so I put it. It's in the download folder. I put it in tiny, and then you can see what's in there. And again you see the same list of things. And then when you're running a script. Oh, actually, excuse me, you have to do one thing first. You have to run another PowerShell script. This is built into the system.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:26]:
And what this does is it basically removes the restrictions on what a script can do. Because this thing has to write system files. It's not screwing with your current install of Windows, although it doesn't matter because you're about to blow it away, probably. But this is local to this instance of Terminal, so once you close it, it's over anyway. But you do have to do that. There's doesn't say anything, it just does it. And then from here you start typing until you get the right one. So this is the one you don't want.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:56]:
You don't want CoreMaker, but you do want this one here. So you give it permission to run one time by hitting R. And then it asks you for the drive letter for the Windows 11 image. Now, I know that's F, but I'll just show that to you. You can see here, it's the F is the drive letter. So you just type F and hit Enter. And what it's going to do now is take a look at the installation image that's inside the ISO. It should come back pretty quick.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:22]:
And what it will do is give you a list of the versions of Windows, meaning the product editions of Windows 11 that are available in this ISO. So typically with the next 86 ISO you're going to see several choices. I know that Windows 11 Pro here is number six and that's the thing you need to remember is the number and you want to make sure this is the right one for the version that you have. And there's different ways you can find that out. So for this particular system is it says here Windows 11 Pro, you can also get that from Settings System, which is the about page. It should say somewhere in here, where is it? Sorry, Windows 11 Pro. Okay, so that's the correct one. So we know it's six.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:06]:
If you, if you do this against Windows 11 on ARM, there are going to be fewer choices, but you get the idea. And then you type the number here, here, and then it's going to start doing its thing. So I'm actually going to try to cancel that if I can, because I've already done it. The system that you're looking at here is in fact a tiny 11 builder made version of the ISO. What basically happens is it runs the script, looks at the ISO, creates a new version of the ISO, and then from there you can either apply it to a USB key like you would do with the Microsoft Media creation tool, or you would use Rufus for this. So Rufus IE is the place to go for that. And you can just download this utility and then you can write this to a USB drive. Now for this install, I just did what we did here.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:03]:
So I ran it off, I just mounted it and ran it this way so I could eject this and then mount the other one, run setup and then go from there. And it's from there it's just standard Windows setup. And we'll be back in a moment.

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Paul Thurrott [00:10:49]:
So what I'm going to do here is just kind of show you what happens when you come back from this, right? So you run setup, you go through the normal out of box experience, you sign in with your Microsoft account if that's what you want to do. Rufus lets you skip that if that's what you want to do as well. But eventually you make your way to the desktop. It doesn't really change setup in any way. So it's all the standard steps rather. And here you can see what you get at the end. So this is about as bare bones as Windows gets, right? The Microsoft Store is there. You can see that at the bottom.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:21]:
Obviously File Explorer is there, Settings is there, the Getting Started app is there, which is whatever. But really, really bare bones. Most of the apps are not installed, there's no Browser, all right, OneDrive is not there, etc. Etc. So from here you follow a pretty standard set of, you know, post setup steps, right? You're going to do things, let me get this back here. You're going to do things like, well, first I looked at what was, you know, whether the drivers were all installed. You can see on this particular computer a bunch of drivers were not available. So I go into Windows Update, I get this all up to date.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:00]:
So you download all the updates. This will bring it up to date with both drivers and whatever system updates are available. You want to make sure to go into a Windows Update, advanced options, optional updates, because this is where you'll typically see firmware and then some device drivers that maybe aren't as pertinent or important, but I tend to install all of those every single time. Also go into the Windows, the Microsoft Store, rather and get that updated as well. And I don't have a picture of this, but one of the other things that I do at this point, and I did do on this particular computer, was run winget, right. And see what updates are available there. Do this after the Microsoft Store stuff, because you might as well let that just do its thing. But if I run this against the system now, it might find a couple things.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:48]:
Yeah. So there's a couple of apps that could be updated, and I would typically just run a kind of a thing like this sort of a thing, but it doesn't really matter. I'm not going to do this right now. But just make sure everything is up to date. The other thing you want to do is find a bright browser, right? Because there's no Microsoft Edge. And so this is a great way to do that. You could just do like a winget search and then whatever your browser is. So if I search for, say, Chrome, we could install Chrome that way.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:15]:
There's a bunch of them here, but it's going to be one of the. It's going to be this top one here. Or in my case, actually, the way I did this was I searched for Brave, and I already know it's Brave. Brave. But we could do like winget, install Brave. Brave, Right. And that would do that. It's already installed, so I don't have to do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:32]:
But that's how you would do that. Okay. So once you have those things done, you just use it normally right now. So there might be parts of Windows that are apps that are installed with Windows that maybe you do want. So you could go to the Microsoft Store and download, you know, Paint, onedrive, Clip Champ, you know, whatever it might be. Today I had to download the camera app, for example, just to test the camera here. You can see here that after all the installs were done, device managers clean. That means all the drivers are installed correctly.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:10]:
So that's great. And you just use it. And that's the thing. So this is the system. It's heavily modified now. So I'm running this in dark mode. I've installed a bunch of apps. I use an install script for that actually, but it doesn't really matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:26]:
Uninstall the Xbox app. I install Call of Duty. Call of Duty runs fine. Everything works great. Browser's fine. Phone link works with the phone. Everything's working good. So this is good.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:38]:
But the thing is, what I'm looking for here is any regressions in behavior. So, for example, on a typical Windows 11 system, when I come Here to the Start page in Settings. There's a yellow bar up here and it says, hey, you should really back up. And it's like I just backed up two seconds ago, but you should really back up. You should really back up. You do get this install OneDrive thing, but it's not obnoxious. When you run File Explorer and go to a folder that could be backed up by OneDrive you don't get any weirdness. There's no hey, backup now kind of stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:10]:
I'm not getting any Edge pop ups. There's no Edge. I'm not getting any OneDrive folder backup prompts. There's no OneDrive, right? So you could install Google Drive if that's what you want. Instead I use Synology Drive. There are different solutions. You may want OneDrive, right? But you can do whatever you want. So so far I found that this is working normally.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:33]:
You know a couple of weird things though when you bring up widgets. Now these. This is an example of something in Windows that would typically open in Microsoft Edge even if you chose Chrome or Brave or some other web browser. I've installed a fix for this, but if I originally when I would click this, you'd get a. It would say, hey, you need to associate this file type with some kind of a browser. But the only browser choice is Edge and Edge is not installed, so it's not going to work. The solution to that is see if I don't have it here yet. So is micro as Ms.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:04]:
Edge direct redirect, sorry, which is also available on GitHub. And this is just a simple utility. Same thing, you download the zip, you run it and basically you just configure this so that it uses your browser. So now if I were to go to this widgets interface, which is probably the easiest way, I'll try to find something non objectionable here, which is hard because this is pretty terrible. But somewhere in here I'll just click on this, you'll see this thing actually opens in Edge, which is, I'm sorry, in Brave, which is the browser I use and what I want. So that's good. So MSH redirect free, available, easy. The other thing you might want to install is PowerToys and for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that you have a copilot key on your keyboard like I do here.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:51]:
If I hit that key, Copilot's not installed. And so Microsoft here is asking, well, what do you want to do when you hit the copilot key? And they only have A couple of choices. There's Search. Typically you would have Copilot, and then you have Custom, which doesn't really come up with anything. And I'm not going to go look for an app. And so what I do is I use the key. Oh, I got to run PowerToys. Excuse me.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:16]:
I run the Keyboard Manager that's part of PowerToys, wait for this little guy to come up. And this basically just lets you remap various keystrokes to do different things. And here we go, finally. So if I go into Keyboard Manager, I'm actually kind of surprised. Oh, it is. Oh, I just didn't have it running. I'm sorry. Yeah, I've already done it.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:42]:
So what I do is I mapped it to the left arrow key, and that's because those keys are right next to each other. I tend to hit it by mistake when I'm typing sometimes. And Copilot will come up if it's there. On this system, you get that settings interface. So you can just use this tool to remap it to do anything. And because that key is right next to it, Simple. That kind of a simple fix. So PowerToys free, MSH redirect free.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:07]:
911 builder free. Right. And so here we have this really clean version of Windows 11, highly customized because I did that and with the apps that I want and none of the stuff that I don't want. And so the question at this point becomes, well, does this solve the problem? Right. And if you think back to the. I think it was seven items on that checklist. Right. Force telemetry.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:32]:
It does solve that. I didn't mention this, but at some point in the past year, the author of Tiny 11 Builder updated the script to disable telemetry. So that's part of it. Pre installed. Crapper was the second one. It does fix that. There's nothing pre installed. It's almost even the good stuff isn't pre installed.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:48]:
So that's kind of interesting. Bad edge behaviors, whether you use it or not, absolutely solves that. There's no edge. Right. OneDrive folder backup, same thing. There's no OneDrive solves that problem. Nice. There were two other items that it doesn't solve, but if you use Rufus to make that installer, it will solve those.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:07]:
So that's the force Microsoft account sign in, which frankly, is not an issue for most people. And also the arbitrary system requirements, which again, is not really a problem for most people, especially someone like me who's using a modern system. I'm going to meet their requirements, I am going to sign in with an msa. I don't care about that stuff. So the only one that isn't solved is the constant unreliable feature updates. And that's just. There's no real way around that. You can delay them a little bit, but you know, Windows 11 is going to want to be kept up to date and that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:40]:
The thing I've been looking at, aside from the obvious stuff like checking settings or looking for the pop ups and things, is I've downloaded a couple of system updates. I downloaded a standard kind of patch Tuesday update. There's been a preview update since then as well, just to see if they snuck, you know, edge in there or, you know, did something like that. But so far, so good. So this actually goes a really long way towards solving the problems, especially if you use it with Rufus, which I didn't need to on this particular system. So as far as I'm concerned, this is pretty good. Now the downsides I mentioned up front, the big downside is you have to reinstall Windows, right? And so that might be daunting for a lot of people. It's a little too aggressive in my opinion.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:25]:
By default, I didn't do this on this install, but you can go into the script and remove the things that you actually do want to have installed. So you can fix that if you want, but editing a PowerShell script might be a little daunting for some as well. You know, it'd be nice if there was a UI where you could kind of check the items that you want. But these are kind of minor complaints, frankly. I mean, I spent maybe a couple of hours making this work, you know, getting it together, installing and doing all that stuff. And most of the time I wasn't doing anything. It was just the script running and doing its thing. So it's pretty low maintenance and it appears to work pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:03]:
So I recommend giving it a shot if you just kind of had it with all of the really bad behaviors in Windows 11. But you know, you have to keep using Windows. You want the version of Windows that you want, not the mic, you know, not the version that Microsoft wants you to have. So it's, it's definitely something to consider. It's a little aggressive, but it seems to work great in my opinion. So definitely give it a shot. Hopefully you found this useful. I'm curious if anyone uses this and does so successfully.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:32]:
Let me know if that's the case. But either way, thank you for watching. Thank you so much to our Club Twit members especially. We love you. If you're not a member, please consider that you can find out more about Club Twit at Twit TV Club Twit. And you can find out what more about Hands on Windows. This podcast at Twit Twit TV H We'll have new episode every Thursday. Thank you so much.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:57]:
I'll see you next time.