DescentBB

I'm getting ready for the free upgrade to Win 11 Pro on my laptop and gaming rig. What I'd like to know is can I use Rufus to do this? Of course I want a local account, currently both systems have MS accounts, but I also want to decrapify Windows before it's installed and I want to make sure it's the Pro version I download. Do I download the Windows ISO from Windows Update or Microsoft and go from there with Rufus?

You can use the windows 11 media creation tool to download an iso and then use rufus to make some tweaks and then do an upgrade with it, but probably the best way to dejunk and make sure you get a local account is to nuke the drive entirely and start with a fresh install using the rufus modified bootable disk.

Actually I think rufus can even download the iso automatically... its been a few months since I've done it, can't remember exactly. Doing an upgrade over your existing OS and preserving your programs/settings is probably going to come with some limitations initially, the tweaks will have to come after the upgrade is done most likely.

Also, take a screen shot of your start menu either way. Windows 11 has a different start menu and ignores everything you had set in the previous one even if you upgrade in place preserving programs and settings.

Yeah, I'm playing with Win 11 Pro on my new office PC and already don't like the differences, so I've been rearranging the furniture a little. Call me an old fart, but I don't like the Apple look of centered icons in the task bar. OneDrive has already been nuked via Revo Portable and CoPilot is now in jail. There doesn't appear to be a way to totally uninstall Copilot since it's not listed in the uninstall programs section. So far no sign of Recall on the system....yet. I was already thinking of nuking the drives on both systems for a clean install anyway. The laptop might have issues since there are operating programs I'm sure won't work in Win11, so I'll see what gets installed. I heard MS has a better driver for the Synaptics Touchpad than Synaptics anyway. Some programs, like the Killer Software and Performance Software I'd like to totally dump anyway. Thanks for the screenshot of the Start menu idea. I remembered to do that with the desktop and my browser, plus export the links to an HTML file on a USB stick. There is a YouTube video on how to tell Rufus what to install with Windows, so getting rid of the crap that comes with it would be really nice for my 2 other rigs. Do you completely turn off Widgets on your gaming rig? I already turned off the damn MSN news feed and notifications there.

And another irritation. How to you get Windows to quit spinning up and accessing a second data drive, yet leave it accessible if I need it? I've already got indexing turned off for that drive. It's not an SSD, just a regular HHD and I only occasionally use it to store files for redundancy. In Power Options, there's no distinguishing between the OS SSD and the Data HHD in any settings.

One thing, the majority of modern windows programs store all their settings in your appdata folder. Just pull up %appdata% in explorer and it will take you right there. For instance, say you use firefox and want to copy your profile over to the new PC. Well its in appdata/roaming/mozilla/firefox. Just install firefox on the new os, delete the new profile it creates and overwrite it with the profile from the old one, and like magic, all your bookmarks, themes, extensions, history, saved passwords, etc show up as if you never installed a new OS. I would say about 95% of modern programs work this way, and I always image my OS drive to one of my HDDs before I flatten and install fresh so I can usually have all the programs I want to keep back up and running within like 2-3 hours tops of finishing the OS install. And if I forget something, I can just pull its configuration out of the old disk image. Even stuff that stores its setting in the registry, you can just load the hive from the old OS, export the stuff you need, then import it into the new OS.

Can you do that for other applications like Steam and it's installed games? Most of my games are on a separate drive from the OS drive. Only some of the info is on the OS drive, namely Steam itself.

Steam's configuration is stored in the steam folder, just install steam but don't launch it, then copy the old folder over the new install. (Note that when you go to run a game for the first time on the new OS, steam will still run the installers prior to launching, even if it won't have to download the game itself.)

Although I've only ever done that with the games actually installed in the steam folder, not a separate drive, it might take a little bit more to reconnect steam to a separate game drive/folder but I'm pretty sure it is doable.