Don't Switch to Linux Yet: Fix Windows 11 with WinUtil

Why not just switch to Linux?

0:00 Windows is everywhere. By default, most people are on Windows, whether it's because you need it for your business, or because you want to play video games on Steam with your friends. We all use Windows. Now, some cool people might use macOS, college students. If you're a content creator, but the vast majority of people are kind of stuck on Windows, and I know it's the popular cool thing to switch to Linux, but Linux is a steep learning curve. Now, if you're in for it and you really want to tinker and you're really nerdy, then by all means, then switch to Linux, but also you might be giving up some software that you need, especially if you're in business.

0:44 Now, if you're a gamer, it's getting pretty good on Linux, but that's beside the point. What I am trying to say, Maybe you don't need to necessarily get on Linux. Maybe you can just make your Windows experience a little better. And today, I'm going to show you some tools that help you do that, specifically one tool. It's the Chris Titus Tech WinUtil, or Windows Utility. And this has been in development for probably at least three or four years. It started as a free PowerShell script and that script is still available and it's being updated all the time. I personally like to use his paid version because it's faster and I would really love to support him too. He's a YouTuber and streamer as well.

1:33 And just a really cool tool that lets you do all kinds of things. But specifically, we are going to make a very clean Windows install using this tool. And to show you how to do that, we're going to hop on the desktop.

Getting WinUtil: free script or paid app

1:46 All right, now we are on the desktop. Got my cool Batman wallpaper going on. All right, first, I'm going to show you where you can find this. So we want to go to your web browser, and you just want to search cttstore.com. That's where you can get the paid version. It runs quicker, but if you want to just experiment with the free version, then you can go ahead and go to his GitHub repo, which is just GitHub/ChrisTitusTech/winutil And of course you can always just search in whatever your favorite search engine is Chris Titus Utility or windows utility. And it'll show up see this first result right here is his GitHub page, and if you are running wanting to run the free version all you do is scroll down here.

2:37 And then just copy this and run it as administrator. And he's got two branches, stable branch and development branch. So I'm gonna go ahead and close this. And of course you download the executable and just install it like anything else. So let's see I believe I already installed it. I did. So, you as you can see it's called CTT windows utility. We're just gonna click that. We're going to approve administrator privileges. And as you can see on this first page we have an applications. This is really cool. It's kind of like really good start. If you have a new system, and you want to get all the essentials on here. So say you just installed Windows, and you're like, oh yeah, I want to get, you know, Brave, or maybe I like Firefox, or maybe you just like plain Jane Chrome.

3:25 So what you do, you select the things you want. Say I want Steam on here too. And else would be a good thing to install? Everything. If you don't know what Everything is, it is an amazing search tool find any file instantly what you do is you select things and then you just press install selected. So let's deselect, because I don't want to install anything right now. Next, this is the real goodies.

Tweaks: Standard, Advanced and the best toggles

3:52 So tweaks, usually you're gonna want to select standard. So what standard is gonna do is gonna turn off a bunch of telemetry and extra things. It'll also run disk cleanup, so if you have any extra cached files or old windows updates, I've seen old windows updates as big as like 25 gigs probably, they just stack up on each other. So this will get rid of a lot of stuff, it'll set services to manual, so when you open task manager and you go to performance and under your CPU you can see how many processes you have And each process is like a service that is running on your computer. Mine is somewhat high, just because I've installed a lot on top of the system.

4:38 But generally, on a pretty lightweight system you want under 200 processes. A lot of gaming laptops, for instance, need extra software and things really balloon up quite quickly. So some other cool things here in the tweaks. Of course we have standard, he's also got minimal, so it just turns off telemetry and services and a couple other things, but it's not as extensive as standard. Then we have advanced, which will disable OneDrive, set the right-click menu to the old style. So, in Windows 11 by default, if you right click, it's going to pull up this menu that has some of the options and then a show more option.

5:25 But once you've run this once. Look at that. I have the full menu and all my options. It's fantastic. It's a little bit ugly because it's not themed like Windows 11 but big whoop. You get that functionality back which is really annoying. So, a couple other tweaks in here that I really like are the Logitech download assistant auto install disabling that. So a lot of times whenever you get a new mouse or a new keyboard. What will happen is that little USB. It's like almost like a little Trojan horse, and it will request to download a program like Logitech Options. And those are nice to have but usually by default they're running in the background, even if you shut off startup applications.

6:12 That's taking up a little bit of RAM and those things add up, especially on a laptop where you need good battery life. Some other things, these toggles are excellent. So they just let you change some of the settings. The ones I recommend the most are probably File Explorer file extensions. So sometimes the file extensions will not render in Explorer by default, which is insane because like you need to know what type of file you're opening because you could name a file PDF. But if it's actually an executable file, you could be running a malicious program and not even know it.

6:54 So just for good computer hygiene, leave that one on. Another one is log on verbose mode. So whenever you are starting up or shutting down, this will tell you in plain text all the things it's doing instead of just giving you that loading screen, which is really handy for troubleshooting if something and goes awry, it's also just really cool to see like why is this taking so long or like what's actually happening with my system here? So that one is highly recommended. A couple other things, mouse acceleration is on by default. And some people probably like this because they're used to it.

7:38 But if you're a gamer, definitely shut this off just because what it basically does is the more you move your mouse, It will change your sensitivity based on how quickly you move your mouse, which is not the best for gaming because you want to have control over all your settings like that. So that's a big one. If you are a numpad user, but not a numpad shortcuts user, turn this one on. Numpad lock on startup. So that way, whenever your computer boots up, you've already got that numpad going. And I think the other biggest one in here is start menu Bing search. Turn that off. So by default.

8:25 When you search something in Windows. Let's say, Donald Trump, there would definitely be like a search result for Donald Trump with like a little picture and stuff, but it's Bing. And Bing is horrible. Nobody uses Bing. You can't change it to Google you can't change it to your default browser. So that search you search function is basically useless. And in fact, a lot of times it will get in your way, because what will happen is you'll want to find a file on your computer, but instead of Searching for the file, it will search for something online first and give you the web result before it gives you the local result, which is insane. Like, who would want that.

9:09 So, by all means, if you do one thing, run standard and turn off Bing's menu search, It's just so much better. It will change your life for the better. Okay. Okay, next menu, we're gonna go over here and this

Config: Windows Sandbox, Hyper-V and updates

9:27 is a system config settings. So I honestly am not in here very often just because I usually set this up myself but this will give you access to different panels Where you can like change your power plan. So it's all stuff that's in Windows still. It's just kind of hard to get to. So this gives you one place for all these settings. One, some things that are important in here, if you are on Windows 11 Pro, turn on Windows Sandbox because it is a very handy little program. So what Windows Sandbox does, here I'll open it up, is literally you launch the app and it spins up a little virtual machine with a basic Windows configuration. And as soon as you close it, it's annihilated. And this is perfect for if you downloaded something and you think it might be sketchy and you were sent a link and you don't wanna click that link, but you're curious.

10:31 Then Windows Sandbox is the way to go here. Let's open it up. So as you can see, it's just like a basic Windows install, pretty plain, but it's great for testing. Or maybe you have a program that's not sketchy at all. You just wanna try it out for a few minutes before you go ahead and decide to put on your main system. So Sandbox is excellent. If you have Windows 11 Pro, which I think this requires, I could be wrong about that. Let me know in the comments if I am. Then enable, it's a very handy thing to have. Some other handy things here is enable Hyper-V.

11:15 I believe that's also a Pro feature, But that lets you use the built-in Hyper-V virtual machine, which is actually pretty robust and pretty good, especially if you're making other Windows VMs. So this is how you can control updates, which is such a godsend for Windows. Unfortunately, this is not really properly enforced unless you have Windows 11 Pro. So if you are not on Pro yet, get on Pro because it's definitely worth it. Now, if you buy Pro from Microsoft, it costs like 200 bucks, which is a lot. What you can do instead of buying it directly from Microsoft, here, let me open Brave, you can go to VIP-SCDKEY.

12:04 And what this site basically does is resell manufacturer OEM licenses. So you could get a license for 36 bucks instead of 200 or 250 from Microsoft. So the updates, what he lets you do is have two options with his tool. You can do security, disable all, or revert back to default settings. So what security is gonna do is it's gonna disable all Windows feature updates. So those are like the quarterly updates where Windows changes a bunch of things. And those are usually the ones that can break your system but it's also going to install every security patch that Windows has available for you. And this is really great because it's gonna offer a lot of stability. It's gonna be very secure.

12:54 Okay, finally, we're going to deliver on what I promised beforehand, which

Building a debloated Windows 11 ISO

13:00 is the bootable ISO for Windows, the lightweight windows. What you are going to want to do, Go ahead and download the ISO from Microsoft. And he gives you a little link right here. You can also just search Windows 11 ISO download and then make sure you're on the official microsoft.com. All you're gonna do is scroll down until you find Windows 11 ISO. We don't want that one, that's for ARM. But basically just download the ISO, which I've already done. I've got one laying in my downloads folder. So we'll just go browse, and then we're gonna head over to my downloads, get a bunch of different Debian Ubuntu right here.

13:47 I just downloaded this several weeks ago, but it should be fine. And then we're gonna say mount and verify, And then you can select your edition. And after all I've said, I hope to God that you pick Windows 11 Pro. And then we're going to run ISO Modifier and Creator. Now, a really cool option that Titus has put in there was that little checkbox that says inject system drivers. So if you're going to do this on a system that you're going to install this medium on or this ISO, then you can choose that. It'll grab all the drivers on your computer and bake them into the ISO. So you're just locked and loaded.

14:40 Okay. Choose an output. So this is where you could plug in a USB drive, or you could save as an ISO file. I'm planning to run this in a VM, so we're going to save as an ISO file. And we are going to call this CTT Win 11 Pro. You can call it whatever you want. I remember whenever I used to follow tutorials when I was 11, I would follow their file name precisely and thought it would change things. Usually it doesn't. So as you can see, it's writing that ISO and look at how fast it's going. Boom. I have a pretty fast computer, but still that took Like two minutes or less. So now that we got that done, we can close that out and we are going to attempt to make a Windows VM off of that.

15:38 So we're going to go into Hyper-V Uh wait yeah it's over here, New, New virtual machine, let's go. All right, next. Name, we're gonna call this CTT Light Windows.

Installing it in a Hyper-V VM

16:04 All right now the fun part so we're gonna go start right click again and then connect this is it feels kind of cool because it's almost like so there I pressed any key it's gonna take this to the setup and one thing that's awesome about this tool is this setup is gonna be a lot faster than it So we're going to see what's our language, time and currency format, English, US, that's all good, US keyboard, getting a few things ready. It's probably going to hit us with that. Do you have a product key? Pretty soon. OK, so that's the virtual hard disk we just made.

16:49 Now it's installing Windows. And this is freaking cool because it's going to skip a lot of the process and do it for us on the background. OK, we're just going to wait and I'll get back to you when it's done. Installing. Yo, is it just gonna work with the whole resolution? No, I have been deceived. So one of the things this tool does is it creates what I believe is called like an unintended, not an unintended, but a unattended install. So it's basically going through all those setup menus for us and choosing some things. It's also stripping out a ton of bloat that the system has by default. So it might take a little longer initially, but this is all stuff. You could be another room right now and it wouldn't matter.

17:37 Oh, you can see now some PowerShell scripts are running. This is part of it. All right, we're getting really close. 94%, let's go. Just a moment. God, I love it. That text is still from Windows 10. Windows is such a beautiful mess, isn't it, guys? Wait till you see how clean our desktop is going to be. All right, Watch how fast this is. US. Let's go. Keyboard. Skip. Doo doo doo. I need good elevator music right now. What's that song? "Waiting on the World to Change"? [sings a few lines about waiting on Windows to install] Alright, who's going to use this device? YouTube create a password. No password.

18:21 Thank you. Hi. Getting things ready for you. Wow I'm touched. This might take a few minutes. Don't turn off your PC. Okay because I was seriously thinking about it at this point. Hey but have you noticed we haven't signed up for a Microsoft account. We haven't been asked to for OneDrive. We haven't been asked to pay for Game Pass. So we've bypassed a ton of shenanigans. Is this as smooth as macOS or a competent Linux distribution? No, not even with the debloat. But is it miles ahead of the default Windows experience? Abso-freaking-lutely.

First boot, UniGetUI and the results

19:04 Display config? Whoa, and guys, this is actually my first time. I'm gonna be real honest with y'all. This is my first time using Hyper-V on Windows like properly Look at that guys look how plain this is. I'm gonna leave alone for just a second because it might reboot again I think we're good though. I think it's done. So is it gonna let us change? See it at home look at this guys Nothing pinned. Well, let's see what we got installed. We got accessibility Okay, you probably need some accessibility in your operating system. We got some calculator. You need to do a few calculations. Okay, maybe you got a webcam. You need to know what time it is. You need to set an alarm. But what do we not have?

19:48 We don't have Instagram. We don't have Facebook. We don't have TikTok. We don't have Candy Crush. We don't even have Spotify, although you probably download that anyways. Literally so basic. We got the Xbox app. You might not use Xbox, but there's some built-in features like game bar and stuff so like that's not too bad but basically only system utilities and then we got Edge which is like eh would I prefer not to have it absolutely but the first thing I do on any system is you don't open up the Microsoft Store I know I know it's a dark place but we can get through this together okay guys so we're gonna go to the Microsoft Store to replace the Microsoft store, okay? So we're gonna go UniGetUI. This application is such a godsend because practically what it's doing is just turning it a package manager like WinGet or Chocolatey or whatever your package manager of choice is for Windows and it's turning it into a searchable list and you can also update and install things it's it's fantastic so we're going to install this We really want to make sure app installer Working. Oh, my goodness. That's actually really cool.

21:03 I didn't know that. Look at this. Added an MCP server for WinGet. So theoretically, that means you could just be like, yo, Claude, install this. And it'd be like sure, boss. That's really neat. I didn't know that was a thing. But as you can see, if I do Donald, there's no Donald Trump, see? So a lot of those tweaks are installed by default. And, oh yes, the best part. Let's go to task manager. Let's just see what kind of processes we've got going on. 140 processes, guys. That's pretty freaking lightweight. And we still have the Microsoft Store and Edge. And I think, I'm not, no, I don't think we have OneDrive.

21:50 We don't have OneDrive, but that's fine. You probably don't need that unless you're a business. And look at this RAM usage, guys. This is diabolically good. 2.3 gigabytes. When's the last time you saw less than eight, less than 10 on a Windows system? That's freaking incredible. Of course, we don't have anything installed right now, but still, two gigs. Guys sanity check did I did I ever press install I'm not sure I did I could have I've been talking this whole time so I don't know I really don't know All right so now I'm going to show you the beauty of this program guys Install as administrator.

22:34 Right so we're gonna get brave This hit enter loading packages now it's gonna show us every brave download and You can either get the WinGet package directly, or it'll install it from the Microsoft store, but you never have to open the store. And we're gonna get Brave. Look at this, we already have some software updates it found. So I just say select, update selection, and I'm gonna say update as administrator. So it's gonna give us one prompt, the elevator prompt, taking us upstairs, and it's just gonna go through and do it all. And I would say on about 85% of whatever it finds on your system to update, it'll work flawlessly.

23:23 And occasionally you'll have to go in there and choose the manual option which will bring up the menus that you normally have to go through yourself So yeah guys that is how you use the Chris Titus tool all its functionality and especially its image creator and yeah I'll link those down below thanks for watching