Clean Windows 10 Install

Installing Windows 10 in the most clean way possible without breaking stuff

Thinkpad-X280-Windows-10-install

Just recently I got myself a used Lenovo Thinkpad x280 for 140€. I want to use it for some light productivity tasks without having to boot up my main computer. It came preinstalled with Windows 11. My gaming rig still uses Windows 10, I only tried out Windows 11 once before it releases. While I like the design improvements, to me it still feels slower and less responsive than Windows 10. Also Microsoft puts too much bloatware into the operating system. I really believe Microsoft offers a bad product here. So I had to act, having these options in mind:

Windows 11 (slimmed down)
Windows 10 (slimmed down)
Linux, e.g. Ubuntu

In the end I decided to go for a Windows 10 install for these reasons: Microsoft does not offer a installer for Word and Excel for Linux and Windows 11 basically offers nothing of additional value to me compared to Windows 10 but is slower.

Windows 10 does have quite a few unneeded components as well and getting rid of those can be done with a few different options, some of them are:

AtlasOS
Tiny11 (if I had gone for Windows11)
Chris Titus Tech’s Windows Utility
Windows LTSC

I decided to go for Windows 10 LTSC IoT 2021 here since I like the idea of it being “perfect” out of the box. Information around this version of Windows can be found when searching for massgrave. Can be installed with a local acount as well.

After installation, the start menu really looks empty compared to a normal installation and also RAM uage is low on my 8 GByte Thinkpad. A few additional things I did for my setup.

Setting up winget: This tutorial show how to setup winget on a LTSC install without having to use the Windows Store. winget actually is one really great addition to the ecosystem.
Getting rid of Edge can be done with this script.
Installing only the wanted needed Microsoft 365 components with the Micosoft 365 Deployment Tool. With this configuration only Word and Excel will be installed (I also installed OneDrive, but many people do not like it)

<Configuration>
    <Add OfficeClientEdition="64">
        <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
            <Language ID="de-de" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="OneNote" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="PowerPoint" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Project" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Visio" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Teams" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="Outlook" />
            <ExcludeApp ID="OneDrive" />
        </Product>
    </Add>
    <Update Enabled="FALSE"/>
</Configuration>

I quite happy with the install now and if works well in the next weeks I will probably do the same on my gaming/main rig.