WINDOWS AND BLOAT. Two words that, however much you

might feel like Windows 10 has become a svelte and lithe OS,

go together like peanut butter and jelly. Preparing a new

PC usually means a new installation of Windows, and what

follows—at least if you’re anything like us—is a painstaking

pruning of autorunning applications, a violent excision of

useless Metro programs, and the installation of all the stuff

that actually makes Windows worth using.

Now, we’ve looked at trimming Windows to shape, and

scraping your disk clean of accrued files, and even silently

installing a whole cache of favorite apps in the past. That’s

not quite what we’re doing here: Arguably, the most efficient

way to ensure a quick and painless Windows install is to

customize the Windows installer itself.

Cooking up your own ISO means cutting out some chaff

before it even reaches your boot drive, and integrating

new components into the Windows installer (or at least

including those installers on there, so you don’t need to

manually download them later). Note that while this is,

legally, perfectly acceptable, it’s generally more of an

enterprise process, and carries no guarantees with it.

You also (obviously) need a unique Windows key, of the

correct version, for every machine to which you apply your

customized ISO.

This isn’t a walk in the park, nor is it pretty. Indeed,

Microsoft’s own primary ISO hacking tool is a command-line

affair, and the vast majority of its front ends are GUI as GU-

why. There are, thankfully, prettier options, and although

perennial ISO chopper NTlite has heavily restricted what’s

available to non-paid users in recent years, you may find that

the free version offers enough of a taste to get you salivating

for more. The kind of Windows ISO you produce is really

going to be up to what you’re looking to achieve—while we

could tell you exactly what to remove or what to tack on, and

we’ll certainly give you some direction, your customized and

excised Windows is yours to sculpt for yourself.

Cut down or bulked up; Alex Cox helps

you to have the Windows you need

CREATE A

CUSTOM

INSTALLER

WINDOWS

44 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com

custom Windows installer