Hello
While I happen to be a new user around here, I'm not by any means new to Windows tweaking. I have lots of Win7 tweaking experience, where things were still far easier for one home user to customize and maintain, without necessairly needing to bother with deployment tools for a pre-configured custom ISO image, IMO. I applied a lot of things manually, just knowing them pretty much off the top of my head, with help of a few documents and files, so it wasn't that much of a problem for me. This is not possible on Win10 anymore, at least in any practical and time efficient sense. The amount of things to configure to get from a default fresh Win10 to something a well balanced power user and privacy conscious person would use has increased dramatically. Even the manual things get too complicated and sizable to spend so much time onto, particuarly because I kinda got that experience with Win7 and I'm reluctant to do that all over again, one thing is learning how to do things in a manual way, another thing is wasting time with it with net loss and zero benefit. Even if I find tweaking/maintaining/optimizing kinda interesting, I have some limits with it as well, and interests that I want to spend time on, many more interests in actually using a well configured OS to do programming, video editing/transcoding, developing, an other things I'm looking forward to dig into.
To make matters a lot worse, Win10 updates resetting configurations, reinstalling things and also being frequent with larger upgrades far more frequent than traditional service packs, completely breaking things apart is just a total circus I really don't want to be a part of.
So for the past 2 years I've been thinking about going the custom-ISO route, even if it's just a few PCs at home, and perhaps other family memebers, the extra effort initially spent on figuring things out to create a custom iso should be worth it in the end. Foruntately I found the dedicated communities out there and one of them is NTLite and I'm so glad I found this place, at the right time, right before when I was slowly deciding whether to go for a new PC this winter 2020, while keeping the older one and refreshing it with a new Win10 version.
The current installation of Win10 is not a custom ISO, it was just a fast test install, that I did configure using tweakers/scripts, but I mainly "moved" onto it due to my Win7 SSD prematurely going corrupt (actually it was bad Sata port on Mobo), I did learn a bunch about Win10, so I'm not completely fresh, but anything past 1607 I have barely any idea, features, service renames, new services, etc ... However since I got back into it 2 months ago, started reading up on tweakers, etc, I have some things I know where I want to keep the same trend, and naturally that's with Windows Updates, to just ignore them completely, and any other MS connectivity altoghether, except maybe make it possible to manually install updates them on a case-by-case basis as I have done in the past in cases where I really knew what the update was for and to fix a bug that I was actually experiencing in practice, so pretty much offline completely, no store, no MS account, nothing that could mess up the tweaks I have spent great time and effort tuning.
I would like to explain the background well enough first, it helps make things clear throughout this thread, so every bug/suggestion/question is based on the PC2-2013 session, in terms of platform/host/versions/etc.
Starting first getting my old 2013 level PC up on a newer Win10 version. After several weeks of research, back and forth, I've decided on version 2004 or 20H1 to try first, if that pans out nicely with all the development, production, profiling and troubleshooting programs then I'm fine with it even if I don't get that 5% peak FPS that other tweakers are focused on.
In this case NTLite is being run by host machine I plan to install this custom Win10 edition onto, but on a different SSD. I will keep the existing install until I completely transition over, but I may keep it for backup as I usually do, if not on physical device, a clonezilla image.
I'm not fond of in-place upgrades so I haven't used the update feature in NTLite, it's should be several weeks older version. I'm afraid continuing in the middle of this, with the same preset/settings on a cleanly installed new version could potentially introduce hidden bugs, I wanted to be safe and avoid that risk so I just settle for this version and hopefully it'll work out until I finish this session with a final custom ISO version. I'll update once I move to the other PC, when I'll be recreating the presets anyway (but it should still be faster with the experience).
PC2-2013:
Motherboard: Asus P9X79
CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 (Sandy Bridge-E)
GPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon RX 480 Nitro
RAM: 32GB
NTLite:
Win10 Source ESD: 19041.450.200808-0726.vb_release_svc_refresh_CLIENTBUSINESS_VOL_x64FRE_en-gb.esd
Win10 Source Version: Windows 10 Professional (2004) x64 - Client 10.0.19041.450 (en-GB)
Win10 Custom NTLite ISO Configuration:
Preset Ver 1:
Excuse me if some of these points are already WIP or planned, as I'm new here, I haven't had the chance to read up on the forums well, but I did search a bit for each point and ofcourse read all the changelogs.
www.ntlite.com
Post-Setup Keeps Remembering:
www.ntlite.com
Storage Sense Settings not applied:
www.ntlite.com
A little intro:
While I happen to be a new user around here, I'm not by any means new to Windows tweaking. I have lots of Win7 tweaking experience, where things were still far easier for one home user to customize and maintain, without necessairly needing to bother with deployment tools for a pre-configured custom ISO image, IMO. I applied a lot of things manually, just knowing them pretty much off the top of my head, with help of a few documents and files, so it wasn't that much of a problem for me. This is not possible on Win10 anymore, at least in any practical and time efficient sense. The amount of things to configure to get from a default fresh Win10 to something a well balanced power user and privacy conscious person would use has increased dramatically. Even the manual things get too complicated and sizable to spend so much time onto, particuarly because I kinda got that experience with Win7 and I'm reluctant to do that all over again, one thing is learning how to do things in a manual way, another thing is wasting time with it with net loss and zero benefit. Even if I find tweaking/maintaining/optimizing kinda interesting, I have some limits with it as well, and interests that I want to spend time on, many more interests in actually using a well configured OS to do programming, video editing/transcoding, developing, an other things I'm looking forward to dig into.
To make matters a lot worse, Win10 updates resetting configurations, reinstalling things and also being frequent with larger upgrades far more frequent than traditional service packs, completely breaking things apart is just a total circus I really don't want to be a part of.
So for the past 2 years I've been thinking about going the custom-ISO route, even if it's just a few PCs at home, and perhaps other family memebers, the extra effort initially spent on figuring things out to create a custom iso should be worth it in the end. Foruntately I found the dedicated communities out there and one of them is NTLite and I'm so glad I found this place, at the right time, right before when I was slowly deciding whether to go for a new PC this winter 2020, while keeping the older one and refreshing it with a new Win10 version.
The current installation of Win10 is not a custom ISO, it was just a fast test install, that I did configure using tweakers/scripts, but I mainly "moved" onto it due to my Win7 SSD prematurely going corrupt (actually it was bad Sata port on Mobo), I did learn a bunch about Win10, so I'm not completely fresh, but anything past 1607 I have barely any idea, features, service renames, new services, etc ... However since I got back into it 2 months ago, started reading up on tweakers, etc, I have some things I know where I want to keep the same trend, and naturally that's with Windows Updates, to just ignore them completely, and any other MS connectivity altoghether, except maybe make it possible to manually install updates them on a case-by-case basis as I have done in the past in cases where I really knew what the update was for and to fix a bug that I was actually experiencing in practice, so pretty much offline completely, no store, no MS account, nothing that could mess up the tweaks I have spent great time and effort tuning.
Win10 for/and PC2-2013 Configuration:
I would like to explain the background well enough first, it helps make things clear throughout this thread, so every bug/suggestion/question is based on the PC2-2013 session, in terms of platform/host/versions/etc.
Starting first getting my old 2013 level PC up on a newer Win10 version. After several weeks of research, back and forth, I've decided on version 2004 or 20H1 to try first, if that pans out nicely with all the development, production, profiling and troubleshooting programs then I'm fine with it even if I don't get that 5% peak FPS that other tweakers are focused on.
In this case NTLite is being run by host machine I plan to install this custom Win10 edition onto, but on a different SSD. I will keep the existing install until I completely transition over, but I may keep it for backup as I usually do, if not on physical device, a clonezilla image.
I'm not fond of in-place upgrades so I haven't used the update feature in NTLite, it's should be several weeks older version. I'm afraid continuing in the middle of this, with the same preset/settings on a cleanly installed new version could potentially introduce hidden bugs, I wanted to be safe and avoid that risk so I just settle for this version and hopefully it'll work out until I finish this session with a final custom ISO version. I'll update once I move to the other PC, when I'll be recreating the presets anyway (but it should still be faster with the experience).
PC2-2013:
Motherboard: Asus P9X79
CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 (Sandy Bridge-E)
GPU: Sapphire AMD Radeon RX 480 Nitro
RAM: 32GB
NTLite:
XML:
<AppInfo>
<Version>2.0.0.7618</Version>
<Licensed>Yes</Licensed>
<Protections>Yes</Protections>
<Host>Windows 10 Enterprise 2016 LTSB (1607) x64 - Client 10.0.14393.0 (en-US)</Host>
</AppInfo>Win10 Source ESD: 19041.450.200808-0726.vb_release_svc_refresh_CLIENTBUSINESS_VOL_x64FRE_en-gb.esd
Win10 Source Version: Windows 10 Professional (2004) x64 - Client 10.0.19041.450 (en-GB)
Win10 Custom NTLite ISO Configuration:
Preset Ver 1:
Excuse me if some of these points are already WIP or planned, as I'm new here, I haven't had the chance to read up on the forums well, but I did search a bit for each point and ofcourse read all the changelogs.
Questions:
Host label "Client":
Host label "Client" makes no sense to describe activation type?
For example: Windows 10 Professional (2004) x64 - Client 10.0.19041.450 (en-GB) Does it make sense that it just says "Client" in there? Because the different activations are labeled as CLIENTCONSUMER_RET and CLIENTBUSINESS_VOL and I don't know about OEM, so CLIENT alone doesn't wouldn't mean...
www.ntlite.com
Bug Reports:
Post-Setup Keeps Remembering:
Post-Setup page is remembered and populated after loading known ISO from previous session without loading preset.
I've checked that the Post-Setup configuration is inside the preset XML, so it shouldn't be anywhere else right? Yet for me it auto-populates out of "thin-air" without loading any presets, perhaps it's not getting cleared after shutdown. This as infact made me think a preset was loaded and I...
www.ntlite.com
Storage Sense Settings not applied:
Storage Sense is turned on in Settings despite off in NTLite
Hi So I saw Storage Sense being turned on when I navigated into it in UWP Settings, while I have checked now and yes I did disable it in NTLite The other settings did not apply either. Delete Temp files was checked, wrong. Clean Recycler Bin after 30 days, wrong. Tested in VirtualBox VM...
www.ntlite.com
Suggestions:
Last edited:
