The Best Windows 10 Toolbox
# Customizing Your Windows 10 Experience: A Step-by-Step Guide
## Introduction
It has finally happened—I have put a graphic user interface on this fantastic script I've created in the past. Over the course of many years, I’ve expanded on this project, and honestly, this is just like culminating to the best part of this script. Let’s get on the desktop and show you what this thing can do because this script can do it all. It can speed up your Windows, remove Action Center, Cortana, spying, privacy issues—it runs on "shut up." It can install your programs for you, fix your Windows Update so that you can only do security updates (and not have it randomly update for you). It’ll do reg edits to where it won’t auto-reboot ever until you actually tell it to reboot, which is great because you’ll also get your security updates and stay up-to-date anyway.
Enough talk—let’s get onto the desktop and show you what this thing can do.
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## The Script in Action
The same website as before—dbloat-windows-10-in-2020. This is the December 2020 update, and it is all open source. So, if you want to change the script around or do something with it, it’s on GitHub. However, what you can do right now is come on over here, click this little button to copy it to the clipboard, launch into PowerShell—you just right-click the Windows key, PowerShell with admin, right-click to paste this in, and boom! You’ll notice the difference: a whole graphic interface.
This has taken a long time to design and also integrate a lot of my scripts with. I went ahead and made some little things first off—if you need to install Chocolaty (if you’re going to do any of the program installations), so let me just show you that. You just click this to install Chocolaty, it goes through auto-run, and it installs everything for you. Just give it a minute to do its thing, and then when it’s done with its task, you’ll get this prompt: “Operation completed.” Just hit OK.
Now, you’ll be able to add anything you want into here—if you want Windows Terminal, VS Code, Power Toys, whatever it might be. If I made a video about it, I’ll expand on this and add more programs as this evolves—even more system tweaks.
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## Essential Tweaks: Privacy and Security
If you don’t know what you’re doing here, “Essential Tweaks” is basically everything that I didn’t get any complaints about from anything in the essential tweaks. Out of all the thousands of comments on the last video, thank you all for commenting so I could make it better.
Then, I made all these little other one-off things for more personal preference. Essential Tweaks will show you what it does—it downloads "shut up" and runs it with the recommended settings. These are mainly for privacy and security-oriented things: it disables telemetry, location tracking, error reporting; removes a lot of the built-in Windows apps that come with your system; then goes through installs like media features (which is needed for some streaming) and makes sure PDFs don’t just open in Edge because, you know, most people have a PDF reader of their choice.
You’ll get “Operation completed” hit OK—and done.
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## Action Center and Background Apps
Action Center: If you click this, it will disable and remove Action Center. Likewise, background apps—this will disable and make sure not to do background apps. Meaning, you’re going to get more performance out of your system. However, if you’re using Windows Subsystem for Linux or Ubuntu (which is a Windows App Store thing), doing this won’t work right. So, background apps can be good, but if you use a lot of apps out of the Windows Store like the ones I just mentioned, you run into problems.
Cortana: This removes Cortana. OneDrive: This actually uninstalls and removes OneDrive and prevents it from coming back. Let’s say this one takes a little bit longer to uninstall—all right, we got “Operation completed” hit OK.
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## Dark Mode and Visual Effects
Dark mode: This puts it to dark mode if you don’t like dark mode; just hit light mode, and it removes all that customization. Visual FX: This is something that most people won’t want—it’ll make things a lot more minimal. You won’t have any transparency or things that could tax your GPU at all. This is a personal preference. Some people like a lot of the window animations and those types of things—this strips it down to be very bare bones. You won’t get a lot of those window effects, like you’ll see a lot of times.
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## Windows Search
Windows search: This is all the Windows search customizations web search through here; this also disables indexer so you won’t be able to search your computer using Windows search if you do click this button. A lot of people like Windows search—I get it—but it’s a very taxing service, so disabling it is good now.
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## Security: Customizing Your System Vulnerability
Security: This is a personal preference as well and I gave you two options—there’s the high option that uses all of the security settings. If you’re unsure, just don’t click any of these. But some people like things more like Windows XP or even Windows 7—and this will strip out all the antivirus, it’ll strip out the malware scans, it’ll strip out UAC prompts, and this is basically making your system more vulnerable. It’s very reminiscent of how Windows worked back in XP and 7—to where yes, it’s more vulnerable but it also is a lot more convenient. So depending on how you use your system, choose wisely.
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## Windows Updates: Customizing Update Behavior
Windows updates: I always do this on every single system. Security updates—this does three things: It delays feature updates for up to three years; installs security updates four days after release; and sets active time between 2 AM and/or 8 AM, so the only times it can actually install Windows updates is between 2 AM and 8 AM in the morning. I figured that was probably the time most people do—and it also bases it off of your local time. So this is the proper way to do updates—it won’t ever nag you, it won’t ever have problems, and if it ever does install an update, it’s not going to auto-reboot your computer either. That’s up to you to be rebooting your PC.
I always recommend rebooting your PC at least once a week if you leave it on for extended periods of time. If you don’t like any of these updates, you can just not click anything—or if you don’t like the fact that it’s on security updates and let’s say a feature update comes out that’s just completely awesome (which probably won’t happen but let’s say it does), you just click default settings, go into reboot your computer, and then just go into here run into updates and security, run your updates, just hit check updates—it’ll pull down every single new update that this thing was saying “hey, that's not proven yet” (I wouldn’t install that in a business, so I’m not going to install it on your computer). Well, now if you’re on default settings, it’ll just update as you need.
Boom—done! That’s it; we got it done.
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## Conclusion
That’s all I have to say about this video. Let me know your thoughts down below in the comments: Did I miss anything? Did something not work? Let me know because that’s how this script was created—all the customizations is from you, wonderful people commenting and letting me know what works, what doesn’t work, what you’d like to see because I can expand this if there’s certain programs you’d like me to add.
Paul Adam—and with that, I’ll see you in the next video.
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*End of Article*