[sxp]

One thing to do is to turn off unnecessary services and startup programs. Once you do this, the system becomes amazingly fast. I had to recently setup up a WFH machine with just Chrome and nothing else. I ended up using Win10 (Win11 didn't support the mobo) and went through and uninstalled everything that was activated by default. I also set up autologin and fastboot. The system ends up booting from a cold start in a few seconds and can get to the desktop before the monitor is fully on and displaying something.

Be careful with disabling services. On a different machine, I disabled the Windows Store because I thought I would never use it and then later spent hours debugging why an app I downloaded from the web failed to install with a mysterious error. One thing to try is to turn off/disable/uninstall a service or program each day and log what you're doing in case you need to reverse something that breaks the next day.

[fuzzfactor]

>setup up a WFH machine with just Chrome and nothing else.

If you really narrow your use case(s) you can disable all kinds of things that are taking up memory and distracting your processor.

I just did this for somebody too. Previously had current W11 since it came out, but the web platform was just changed, and suddently they couldn't keep Edge from interfering with the intended workflow any more.

The employer only ever claimed to support W10 and Chrome so that's what I cooked up for the multiboot menu now.

Only partitioned 32GB of space, and it's only about half full, there's nothing else installed except Chrome.

Edge has been fully neutralized, and it's smooth sailing.

No more Teams either, its webcamming in the browser now.

They've been at it doing WFH a long time, way before covid, years ago I tested a Linux distro using Chrome and it worked even though no Linux or Mac was supported.

Now with this stepwise change, for the actual tasks being accomplished, it does seem like a lot of the worker interaction with the main office which was once solely to co-ordinate with the team and all contribute very comparable value-added work independently, is now as familiar as possible while more likely being utilized to train a different entity to perform the value-added work in the future.

For this type of thing Windows 11 does appear to be offering more possibilities than ever before, but Windows 10 doesn't look like a real slouch either.

[resource_waste]

>Once you do this, the system becomes amazingly fast.

Until the next update.

You people told me if I bought windows pro, I could forever turn off ads. Welp, the update happened and I got more ads.

I would be on Fedora if not for a customer requiring Windows software. Its such a garbage OS, Linux is literally better now. Even for grandma.

Btw does anyone else have some weird UX/UI bug where the right clicking makes the text the same color as the background? I don't have bugs in Fedora.

[freedomben]

> The system ends up booting from a cold start in a few seconds and can get to the desktop before the monitor is fully on and displaying something.

Are you exaggerating or is it really that fast? If so, that is amazing. I'd love to read a blog post or something to see what your hardware is and how you got it that fast.

[JojoFatsani]

One word: nvme

[freedomben]

I am fairly certain you're right about there being an nvme, but GP did also mention disabling a number of services.

[fuzzfactor]

>disabling a number of services.

This has always been helpful, now seems about essential.

The one I just worked on in my other reply has the regular old W11 on one partition and the clean new carefully prepared W10 on the other partition of the same chip-based SSD. Page File (swap file) and hibernation have been disabled, these are not needed since there is plenty of memory and it's a low-energy desktop PC.

When you boot from a cold start the UEFI firmware takes a couple more seconds since the extra partition is there, but after that W10 pops up in less than 20 seconds. It's not a very powerful PC, a bit below mid-consumer range, and it's a SATA version not nvme.

It's just not really painful at all to reboot between W10 and W11 whenever you want to.

The advantage is like having two different PCs, which is also the disadvantage because you have to install two OS's for real.

If I was a gamer I would want at least one OS to be that way, optimized but not exactly for WFH.