[…]The latest beta version of Rufus, which in future will be version 3.19, has some interesting new additions. While it writes your ISO, you can optionally disable some of Windows’ more annoying features.
It has the ability to turn off TPM chip detection and the requirement for Secure Boot, which should enable you to install Windows 11 on older machines if you so wish. It lets you bypass the need for a Microsoft account – although you will need to disconnect the target PC from a network for this to work. It also allows you to automatically respond “no” to all Microsoft’s data-collection questions during setup.
All these sound welcome changes to us. The Microsoft account requirement recently popped up a new irritation on our test install: it automatically keeps the Desktop folder on OneDrive, which we found very annoying when we wanted to briefly keep a large file there.
This means that Rufus rockets up the chart of The Reg FOSS desk’s favorite tools for decluttering Windows, and it might even surpass the very handy Ventoy for USB installs.
Already on the list were two O&O tools: AppBuster and ShutUp10++. AppBuster makes it easy to uninstall most of the
MetroModern apps that Microsoft in its finite wisdom bundles with Windows.[…]
If you like things clean and minimal, you might want to disable Windows 11’s “widgets” and “chat” buttons. At least no external tools are needed for that.
[…]
Source: Rufus and ExplorerPatcher make Windows 11 less onerous • The Register
Robin Edgar
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