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How to Actually Clean Install Windows 11 (www.wired.com)

submitted 1 year ago by TheOneWithTheHair to c/technology

140 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Basically, install Windows as you normally would, but when asked for Time and Currency format, select English (World) instead of your country.

Then let the installer do its thing. Eventually, you will see a window with an ice cream cone on the floor with the words “Something went wrong” and the error message “OOBEREGION.” This cryptic message means that the “out of box experience” (OOBE) didn't launch because it didn't know which region to launch.

Click Skip, though, and Windows will install just fine. You won't be prompted to buy Microsoft 365, you won't be prompted to pay for a OneDrive subscription, and your Start menu won't be cluttered with apps.

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[–] ichbinjasokreativ 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've created a powershell script for fresh installations that removes all the unnecessary preinstalled garbage and copies a cleaned up startmenu layout file to the appdata subfolder of my user and the default user because in a professional setting, people shouldn't see tiktok and Disney+ and shit like that. Fuck Microsoft. In private, I've switched to Linux and couldn't be happier.

[–] sturmblast 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

post a link to your script somewhere

[–] ichbinjasokreativ 3 points 1 year ago

See my other comment, it's not worth posting a script for that. The garbage removal is also just using winget remove or remove-appxpackage to get rid of OneDrive, the preinstalled Teams, Xbox stuff and so on. You'll write that yourself in 5 minutes.

[–] stevedidWHAT 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got a GitHub link fren?

[–] ichbinjasokreativ 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, sorry. But the line in question is just

copy-item start2.bin C:\users\default\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.StartMenuExperiencehost_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\

Replace default with your actual username. Default is the one that gets used for new users when they log in for the first time.

You need a clean start2.bin file ofc. To get that, just manually create a start menu you like and copy the file from the above location.

The old export-startmenulayout commands from windows 10 don't work for windows 11.

Warning: had to type the directory structure on mobile, might've made mistakes.

[–] stevedidWHAT 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you tried with the newest version of powershell (whatever they’re calling it now) think you still have to go out and download it but I’m not sure.

Thanks for the direct info share!

[–] jsnfwlr 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it is still called PowerShell, but to differentiate the installation source, Microsoft seem to be referring to the cross-platform version you can download from GitHub or via WinGet as PowerShell Core and the version that ships with Windows as Windows PowerShell

[–] stevedidWHAT 2 points 1 year ago

Not quite what I’m referencing, but yeah there are two versions of powershell in this sense, I’m just talking about the latest version (7.X), windows only comes with 5.X AFAIK, but 7 has some cool new features and what not. Wasn’t sure if the 7.x reincorporated/added whatever way it might be worded to mean “working again in”

I should’ve clarified that in the original, my b