Windows 11

[Mercutio]

Tiny 11 Builder has been updated to support all Windows 11 releases. It's basically a long Powershell script that pulls out a list of bullshit Windows Store applications, but it also gives your Windows 11 install an Edge, Media Player and OneDrive-ectomy. The script is very easy to read and modify, if for example you'd rather keep Media Player and the News apps while saying goodbye to Teams and Clipchamp.

My biggest headache with customizing any Windows 11 ISO is ensuring that I have storage and USB drivers for 12th-gen+ Intel systems. Every time I think I have all the drivers I'll need for that, I run in to some new bullshit laptop that expects a slightly different combination of stuff than I had prepared. AMD? It's all fine and good. Have a party. Intel? Sometimes a wired USB mouse won't even work during Windows installation. Thanks, guys.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, I don't know what's up with Intel based laptops these days, but on 11th gen and newer I've reliably had no mouse in setup, and especially on HP implementations they seem to like to enable RST for no good reason with no way to turn it off, necessitating installation of disk controller drivers during setup that reminds me of the bad old times trying to get AHCI working on XP boxes. I am quite glad to see NTDEV's pivoted more toward distributing the scripts rather than images -- not that I personally didn't trust them, but I've seen the concern raised several times and I've heard of enough "light" images in the past turning out to have been compromised that I'm a lot happier to use a script that I can read through and kind of understand what it's doing by comparison.

Merc, have you heard anything about Edge/Media Player and friends showing back up after Windows updates? I imagine it'd be a much bigger issue for build upgrades but I've heard from a few of my users that apps they uninstalled seem to come back every time our RMM lets updates go through.

 

[Mercutio]

Edge and Media Player aren't the one I hate, but yes, I've seen OneDrive come back in spite of Group Policies and removing the binaries and registry entries for it. Microsoft is VERY thorough in re-adding it in spite of any precaution to keep it off computers.

I manually used the ADK to build my Windows 11 install media with a baseline for a Ryzen 7000 notebook and a 12th gen Intel something. It has updates, custom folders (I toss all my extra utilities in C:\bin) and various scripts to run after the install. The total size for the whole thing is just over 7.8GB, and almost all the extra is drivers. And it probably STILL won't cover every Intel RST/USB scenario. Importantly, I do not give the option to complete setup with a Microsoft account at all. They can add it back on their own.