[userbinator]

For me, the first hour or so after doing a clean install of any recent version of Windows is spent carefully going through all the settings (not just both(!) control panels, but everywhere else including the services, task scheduler, group policy, etc.) and turning off everything unwanted. It feels like cleaning an infected machine: you're never sure whether you got it all, or something is going to make an unpleasant appearance later.

[LeoPanthera]

There's a free tool called ShutUp10 that makes this process very fast. It even warns you if Windows reverts a setting you changed - which happens all the time.

[userbinator]

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Wow.... looks like 100+ individual settings to toggle. It gathers them all together, but when I'm going through the configuration, I'm not only modifying the telemetry/privacy stuff but other preferences too, so it might not save all that much time.

(That UI is a little reminiscent of the Group Policy Editor, although I think the extra layer of ambiguous "slider buttons" make it even more confusing at first glance --- e.g. if the "App access to camera disabled" setting is red, does that mean the setting is not applied and apps can access the camera, or does the red mean the camera access is disabled? A "[*] Allow app access to camera" checkbox would be far more straightforward. That said, gpedit.msc's mix of enable-to-disable and disable-to-enable isn't much better either --- it's almost as if they are trying to mislead you.)

[LeoPanthera]

It's true that there are a lot of choices, but they are grouped into safe/risky/unsafe categories. I always just tell it to auto-flip the safe ones, and that does everything I want.

[tartoran]

> It even warns you if Windows reverts a setting you changed - which happens all the time.

New dark pattern from Microsoft. One of the reasons to get off the platform forever. If settings change themselves they shouldn’t call themselves settings

[0-_-0]

There's also W10Privacy [0], with way more settings.

[0]: https://www.w10privacy.de/english-home/

[temporallobe]

Yes you can do that, but it requires lots of time and dedication, and sometimes special knowledge. It’s sad that Windows comes out of the box like this.

[indigodaddy]

You would think there would or should exist some script that could do all this? I’ll look for something online..

[SirYandi]

I've had success with Blackbird[0]. Will look into the other programs mentioned above and compare results. But after blindly running blackbird on a fresh install it changed most settings I would have changed manually and performance has been stable.

[0] https://www.getblackbird.net/

[indigodaddy]

Looks like someone further on down in comments posted O&O ShutUp10 & Windows10debloater— will have to check those out