[OSButler]

I have a unix based system for work and am using a Windows 10 PC solely for gaming purposes. Win10 makes it incredibly difficult to try and trim down your Windows installation to its bare minimum, so that the disk, cpu, and network activity won't affect your gaming experience.

Then there's the forced update system, which allows you to define a time interval where it won't automatically install updates, but it can't be set to more than a 12hs window. It just feels like an OS that thinks it knows what's best for you, but it actually results in an inferior experience compared to the previous versions due to its limited configurability.

I haven't played around with the registry and internals that much since Win'95, just because it adds all this unneeded overhead without any option to remove it from within its own settings.

Don't get me wrong, it certainly works and I'm getting used to all its new features and changes, but Win10 makes it really hard to optimize it to your specific needs for seemingly unnecessary reasons, so I can understand why people want to stick to their Win7 or even Win8 installs.

[eropple]

> Win10 makes it incredibly difficult to try and trim down your Windows installation to its bare minimum, so that the disk, cpu, and network activity won't affect your gaming experience.

You are laboring under some really weird assumptions from the jump. Namely that you have to "trim down" anything at all. My Windows desktop is almost exclusively for games (occasionally a little C#). The only changes from the default settings I made is to use a local account instead of a Microsoft account, fiddle with the times for Windows Update

When I am idle, the machine is idle. There is no unnecessary disk activity (there is indexing, but I want that and the switch is in the exact same place it's been since XP). There is negligible CPU usage. There is no network activity unless Steam decides to do something in the background.

This is the future. We're in it. And if you are buying reasonably new hardware, stuff really just works.

[OSButler]

Except when it doesn't.

My Win10 install was showing a constant 100% disk usage right after upgrading from Win8.1. I read online that it can be caused by Windows search indexing all the files, so I simply left it running. After 2 days I had enough, stopped all the search related services, and disabled them where possible. Then the Cortana update got released and the exact same thing happened again with search processes taking up all the available disk I/O.

Network speed was also an issue where Win10 kept on downloading updates while the PC was in heavy use instead of doing so when in idle status. That's when I found out about above mentioned 12hs update window, where it kept on downloading stuff in the background whenever I had a late/early gaming session.

CPU usage was not as bad as the disk usage issues, in my case, but there are the occasional spikes from Windows processes even when in idle status.

That's why I had to start looking into options in regards to trimming down Windows to its bare minimum features, as the system was barely usable with its constant disk usage spikes.

PC configurations differ, so of course your milage may vary. Just from my own personal experience I know people on both ends of the spectrum, where everything just worked for them, or it was so bad that it rendered their PC useless and they went back to their previous Windows version. In my case I just had to figure out how to prevent Windows from doing certain tasks that would end up having a noticeable effect on the system performance.

[doublerebel]

As a DJ, windows 8 touch was actually a godsend because I could give up the keyboard and just use the screen in the dark. Win 8 had a number of services to turn off in order to reclaim CPU, memory, and disk (necessary for real-time live shows with no glitches), but it was manageable.

Win10 refuses to stop updates, the antivirus (defender), turning off cortana is a mess, it even forces reboots as early as every 12 hours. Completely unusable for a professional. I'll have to upgrade to win 10 pro, and even then they don't make it easy, I have to edit the group policy.

This is nuts for anyone in pro audio. Even though I have thousands invested in Windows compatible software and hardware, I'm seriously considering switching to osx. Windows touch has no equivalent, this is an awesome underrated opportunity and they are blowing it.

[eropple]

Granted, I just dabble in audio, but I'm surprised you're using Windows in the first place. Fully anecdotal, of course, but everybody I know runs OS X with one or another setup (Live or Logic, depending). I do audio more for podcasts and the occasional composition and Logic Remote on my iPad (an old iPad 2) is a really solid touch surface with surprisingly low latency.

[doublerebel]

iPad only has toy DJ apps, it doesn't allow remote playlist control or really anything useful that compares to having the full OS as a touchscreen.

Also the iPad is more fragile, twice as expensive, and has a fraction of the storage for audio, compared to my Asus ultrabook. I only use the iPad in the studio.

It's much cheaper to get started on Windows, the plugins and programs are vast and often free compared to the Mac equivalent. The majority of my stuff also works on Mac but I'd have to relearn my workflow.

I do have a Mac but using it feels like I'm in the office compared to Windows touch experience. As an app dev I'm always trying to push the boundaries in music interfaces.

[eropple]

To clarify: the iPad acts as an interface to the DAW, not as a DAW itself. Either Logic Remote or the OSC-based equivalents are really nice ways to drive applications (touch-based mixers, etc.).

[pritambaral]

> When I am idle, the machine is idle.

Perhaps this is the case for the majority of Windows 10 installations. Or perhaps you're a lucky — and exceptional — case.

I can only add my anecdotes to your anecdotes, and I have no large scale statistically significant figures to claim my anecdotes are the general case.

But my anecdotes completely disagree with you. Two Windows 10 installations under my care in the past exhibited wild, mind-of-their-own-esque resource usage when they were supposed to be idling. One was a upgraded-from-Windows-7 physical installation (with no malware, I can attest to that) on which explorer.exe would start consuming ~ 60% CPU usage when left idle, another was a virtual installation of fresh Windows 10 without any apps installed on which the host hypervisor reported arbitrary, persistent (upto tens-of-minutes at a time) CPU usage rise.

And the sheer lack of things I could do about it frustrated me. Ultimately, I had to replace the Windows on the physical computer (a friend's laptop) with Kubuntu (thankfully, she liked the new experience), and replaced the virtual machine with Windows 7.

[biktor_gj]

You're forgetting the tiny little switch that made me loose my nerves so much that I've even started to find a new virtualization platform for all my work servers and substitutes for most of the vms...

Windows defender cannot be disabled. Well, you can, but it will turn itself back on, no matter what you tell it to, and it even tells you that in settings. Like, as you don't know what you're doing, we're deciding for you. I mean, if you're going to decide what's best for me,in my machine, why bother making a setting?

Then there's all privacy checks auto enabling with each update, though at this point given what they've done with the 'upgrade experience', that was foreseeable...

[sireat]

Are there quality guides to customize Windows 10?

The inability to minimize and customize Windows 10 is really starting to grate on me.

Win 10 keeps making decisions for me and does not let me choose.

I have had to configure Windows 7 and Windows 8 Embedded for work so I am used to being able to configure Windows to minute detail.

I wonder if MSFT will even release Win 10 embedded.

[0xcde4c3db]

> I wonder if MSFT will even release Win 10 embedded.

There is "Windows 10 IoT Core" that they threw together to jump on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon [1], which suggests that they'll do a Windows Embedded 10 at some point.

In short, Microsoft can trim down Windows 10 just fine, they've just made it hard for customers to do so.

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot

[OSButler]

I've been looking for a comprehensive guide before but haven't found anything yet. Most of the custom changes I've done were the result of software mentioned in online articles, or google searches in regards to my specific issues.

[dingo_bat]

Rather than fight Microsoft, just ditch windows. That's what I meant. Using years old software which is unsupported is foolish. This sort of behavior leads to IE6. I'm glad Microsoft is ending the cycle here. The people who like 10 will stay, the people who don't (the reasons are definitely valid) should move to Linux or OSX. Why use something that the manufacturer is not ready to support? Vote with your wallet and demand an Ubuntu PC.

[OSButler]

Yes, but that doesn't work if you require Windows, such as for gaming. There's SteamOS, but its support is still limited. If gaming was as universally supported on linux as on Windows, then I'd switch right away, but unfortunately Windows is still its major platform so you need to try and make the best out of its shortcomings, if you're serious about gaming.

[Mithaldu]

> forced update system

Those are forced only on Windows Home.