I've been working on automated setup and configuration of Windows for my purposes and for family computers etc.
As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc
I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far.
The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do.
Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup.
I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team.
Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.
A tip I got on a previous HN thread was to set HKCU:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\DisableSearchBoxSuggestions to 1 so that when you type something into the start menu search box it actually returns installed applications and files on your hard disk instead of internet search results. That's been a huge productivity boost for me, and reverts the behavior to what it used to be a couple years ago.
Also from this thread I have now added HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Dsh\IsPrelaunchEnabled to 0 to stop Widgets.exe from executing on startup. Unfortunately it still starts up if you accidentally swipe the touchscreen from the left.
As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc
This also installs software from Winget.
This is what I have so far: https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/...
I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far.
The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do.
Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup.
I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team.
Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.