I have a windows 11 machine I recently imaged using their latest ISO and Rufus [0] to burn the image which Microsoft recommend so I could skip the Microsoft account creation and hardware checks. The first thing I do is run windows update, reboot, then O&O's ShutUp10 [1] which also works on W11. Just these few things has prevented any ads or other nonsense. I have not seen any slowness or ads. The license tied to the hardware is for W11 Pro. The home edition may be a different experience. I also block some DNS requests [2] on my firewall / router running Unbound so that could also be masking some garbage.
The hardware I bought had 2 pieces of malware installed from the OEM image so I have gone back to the practice of reinstalling the OS from a pristine image and that may be helping avoid some OEM cruft.
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I have a windows 11 machine I recently imaged using their latest ISO and Rufus [0] to burn the image which Microsoft recommend so I could skip the Microsoft account creation and hardware checks. The first thing I do is run windows update, reboot, then O&O's ShutUp10 [1] which also works on W11. Just these few things has prevented any ads or other nonsense. I have not seen any slowness or ads. The license tied to the hardware is for W11 Pro. The home edition may be a different experience. I also block some DNS requests [2] on my firewall / router running Unbound so that could also be masking some garbage.
The hardware I bought had 2 pieces of malware installed from the OEM image so I have gone back to the practice of reinstalling the OS from a pristine image and that may be helping avoid some OEM cruft.
[0] - https://rufus.ie/en/
[1] - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
[2] - https://github.com/badmojr/1Hosts