Window is an OS. But a more comprehensive summary of Windows would be spyware, bloatware and adware first as for the OS aspect, that would place further down the list. Microsoft wants you to pay 200USD for an operating system that steals, collects and sells your data; an operating system that comes with ads, that runs poorly and gobbles your resources like a compute fiend so I think you can also add scam to that long list of traits. So how do we take the microsoft out of Microsoft Windows? Well, we can not but, we can certainly help it. Considering that stock 25H2 will idle at around 4GB of ram and comes with egregious bloat I've cooked up my own Windows and this baby idles at 1.2gig without explorer or 1.4 otherwise. This is still pretty bad considering that a Linux distro will idle between 500MB and 1gig but at least it's way better than the stock because I literally can't afford my os alone consuming 4gigs of ram.
Okay, so let me set the stage before the disclaimers and the hows. The intention with this was to create the best platform for native gaming unless your games also run native on Linux, so we are looking for minimal ram consumption and lean scheduling. So in order to set expectations straight I'll tell you what has been prioritized. First, obviously internet connection so this can go online, second, mouse and keyboard in, third, audio out and finally a more controversial point of discussion, I decided to keep windows update. All of these though with some caveeats that will be expanded on later.
For anyone interested we are running 16gigs of ram at 3200MT CL 16 18 18 38 with an R3 4100 @ 4.45GHz. If you wanna learn more about it check the gaming below minimum requirements video because we are running the demo on that exact platform. Also for screen cap I won't be using recording software because that will obviously alter CPU and ram usage as does task manager actually but we kinda need that obviously. Unfortunately I dont have the capture card on me so we're stuck with camera footage of the monitor.
But, before all of that let's address the elephant in the room: Dynamic Memory Management; something that, 25H2 is good at not. From what i've seen, going down to 8 or 4GB with this cut down build doesnt really affect ram consumption that much. At best it frees 50 to 100MB and at worst it stays the same. I have tested this configuration on my 32gig machine also and in that case I saw around and under 2gigs so an extra 400 to 500MB tax when doubling the dram amount.
Also, if you are of the opinon that unused ram is wasted ram, please click off the video. I personally like the functionality of an OS whilst also leaving as much memory as possible for other applications I might want to run. So in my humble opinion unused ram by the OS is more ram for literally anything else. And no amount of Dynamic Memory Management is saving the shitshow that is stock Windows 11. I think people have been psy opsed into thinking its okay to be running bloat on their machines. And also again, the same thing with the scheduler if you think that it's fine for your kernel do be doing housework harder than a french maid than you deserve the experience that is stock Windows.
Full disclaimer, I'm not here to show you how to brick your OS or how to skew the .iso media or write an autounattend or run third party scripts to disable or delete Windows services, applications or tasks, that is outside the scope of this video and I think would violate Google and Microsoft tos. 
With that being said, If you think that service X is crucial and it's not present here then it's probably bloat. 
Also, I hope no sane person will think of dailying this but I did for the past weeks and I have to say running 4 cores clocked out of their minds on this install was the snappiest Windows I've whitnessed since the 7 days. It's deffenetly rivaling Linux in this aspect of course with much less functionality and obviously the upside of all games runnign native.
And if after what you've seen you came to the conclusion that this looks a whole lot like meintenance hell, yeah, then you'd be correct. I would like to tell you what functionality is broken on this configuration. so without futher ado here is the list:
	- Wireless LAN
	- Wireless wide area
	- Bluetooth
	- Other input apart from keyboard and mouse
	- Privacy and secutiy so among other things, no mic input because that requires camsvc
	- The start is broken but you can still see your list of apps and serach with the classic on-screen keyboard style interface
	- Windows defender
	- Any hope of running TPM/Secure Boot dependant applications
	- Notification center, clock and calendar. Beware nvidia useres because the nVidia app will not work without the notification center running trust me ive tried. Also, I've left in visual basic script because this is an AMD platform and the chipset intaller requires it trust me i've tried without it but you can easily remove that if you don't need it.
	- Windows power because that requires RPC
	- Printing/Scanning/Camera/MIDI/Media cap
	- The ability to add a Microsoft account and all the functionality that it brings
	- Windows troubleshooting and diagnostics
	- Changing Windows language
	- Changing users or accounts and signing in or out 
	- Sleep is unavailable so you're left with shut down and restart only
	- Any fancy theme, transparency or contrast options
	- Windows recovery, backup, restore and dism
	- Automatic disk defrag and trim so you have to do it manual. Alternalively you can also disable optimize drives and do it via powershell admin command. This one is semi-important because the NTFS compared to a EXT4 will cause worse fargmentation.
	- UAC
	- Anything windows store/UWP/MSIX adjacent
	- Bitlocker
	- History on the machine and a bunch of logging
	- Setting passwords, pins or biometrics
	- Windows-wide location services
	- Remote desktop
	- Hyper - V and virtualization
	- Search
	- Any XBOX related services and games
	- Global macros/shortcuts
	- And many many others that are of leeser significance
As ive said you're basically left with wired internet, audio out, keyboard and mouse in, wired display and a crippled explorer and that's your lot. Unfortunaltelly this means that some servicing whill have to be manual but this will run Steam, it will run most games and I think this is one of the best options for gaming native if you exclude Linux native games.
So, now for the juicy stuff, basically you can get Windows working with a total of 37 services running, 50 scheduled tasks and about 53 processes just for the OS alone. This is with drivers and you can expect around 1.2 gig idle consumption. If you decide to use explorer than that will consume 200mb extra. Now I'll tell you why windows needs these services and tasks and I'll start with the services.
	- WMI. you need this running for device manager, disk management, task scheduler, networking and also some driver reporting such as GPU enum and SMART info as well as probably a lot more important stuff
	- State repo. This is used exclussively for MSIX/ universal Windows platform and the gui wont let you disable it but you can get around that with powershell. I kept it on here because it might break Windows update and I haven't tested wether it does or not
	- SAM. Do not disable this. you wont be able to get into Windows. It handles log in as well as UAC if you have that enabled and also did i mention that you should not disable it.
	- RPC and RPC mapper. Again do not disable these. They are responsible for IPC, dcom, kernel transitions and other crucial os things.
	- Prof. Reffer to SAM
	- nsi. You need this for networking
	- mps. I don't think i have to explain this one.
	- lsm. Reffer to SAM.
	- lanman. Needed for networking
	- iphelper. Again needed for networking
	- fontcache. You dont need this per say as windows will work just fine without font caching.
	- event system. This one is kinda interesting because it handles a lot of random stuff from scheduler triggers to plug and play, shell events and volume event. Long story short Windows kinda needs this
	- display broker. I think this one is self explanatory
	- dhcp. Another one from the networking stack
	- dcom. This handles com so a lot of stuff depends on it think plung and play, windows update, wmi, audio, scheduler, services and a bunch of stuff that you really want to be running or ready to run.
	- core messaging. This does low level broker work in your session and it supports explorer, start and the input stack as well as some UI events and display policy
	- broker infrastucture. Another big one that you need. Windows says that its for background tasks but that's summarizing it a lot I think. It's used mostly for winrt applications but it also backs shell, settings and com. If i were to guess you could probably get Windows running without it but I wouldnt touch it.
	- bfe. Network and firewall stack
	- audio and audio endpoint. Again, self explanatory. While were here tough, if you go a layer above this is unrelated but i wish Microsoft would do something about the wasapi shared delay or it'd be really amazing if more games came with exclusive or asio output support. Which fun fact is specified by Yamaha because of course it fucking it.
	- next is user manager. Reffer to sam
	- text input management. Need I say more
	- system events broker. Refer to broker infrastructure
	- schedule. 
	- lanman server. Networking stack
	- gp. Another self explanatory one
	- dns cache. Networking
	- crypt. Again, pretty easy to see why you need this. Reffer to anything that requires trust, signatures or integrity like windows update, security policy, installers and many other 
	- appx. This handles installations or deployments of store apps or msix packages but more importantly .net and vc++ runtime.
	- WinHttpAutoProxy. Networking
	- plug and play. I hope I dont need to explain this one
	- netprofm. Networking
	- Time broker. It handles background universal windows platform applications. I think you could get away with it disabled but I havent done much testing on it so you may or may not need it.
	- hid. Windows doesnt actually need this running it's just that i have one of those keyboards with a stupid amount of auxillary buttons that i frequently use and they wont work without hid running.
	- clip. I recommend you read about clip for yourself as i haven't really looked into it that much. From what i've read it handles licensing and drm but i havent touched it yet, as I said I dont know much about it but you could probably run Windows without it if I were to guess.
	- appinfo. Here it's description is all you really need to know about it. It's responsible for uac, appv, mic and installer detection but most importantly you cannot elevate without it.
And thats it for services; now, onto the tasks. I wont explain each one because there are 45 and that would take a while; instead I will just group them:
	- 2 for .net
	- 4 for cleanup
	- 1 for cam if you decide on using cam
	- 3 for disk and integrity scan that are optional
	- 1 for device setup
	- 2 for directx
	- 2 for flighting
	- 16 for windows update
	- 1 for sound
	- 3 for pnp
	- 3 for shell
	- 1 for spp
	- 1 for task manager
	- 3 for time sync
	- 1 for bfe
	- and 1 for windows colour
And that's it.. that's what Windows needs for running with normal input, audio, networking and update as a bonus. 37 services from which clip, time broker and state repo might not be needed and 45 tasks of which SyspartRepairData, Integrity Check And Scan and Data Integrity Scan are optional and flighting reconcile and shell update picture might again not be needed. This creates the process snapshot that you can see on screen right now. A total of 53 processes consuming 1.2gig of ram. As far as I am aware this is the most optimal way to play isaac.
Now, I actually forgot to clarify the explorer situation. I decided to keep the stock explorer and not go for opensheel because I like what Microsoft did with it for Windows 11, credit where it's due unlike some other UX elements like start and context menus and search and the list goes on but back to explorer and you might be wondering; Why kill explorer? well, for one it's the biggest consumer of ram remaining and 99% of applications will work just fine without explorer and in extreme casess when you are running memory intensive applications and you happen to be memory bound, well then this becomes more appealing and also task manager run alone already kind of gives you the keys to the kingdom so you can certainly do without explorer. Now would I actually recommend you kill explorer, well yes but it's not the sane approach so I guess no but there is always the option.
But how does the system perform at startup and shutdown. Before that let me remind you that we are limited to PCI 3 by the CPU and we are actually bouncing off the PCI 3 limiter because we're running the show on a Crucial, rest in peace Crucial, P310 gen4 nvme. So with that said, the thing turns on in 10.04 seconds..... and ladies and gentlemen the computer shuts down in 1.25 seconds so thats is faster than me keeping the front panel power butten pressed with my toe until it dies which is saying something.
Another quirk of the system is the fact that somehow it bypasses the usually obligatory shut down when killing a flagged service so when you kill for example update orchestrator and press shut down, it doesnt actually shut down but if you terminate something more important like rpc then you'll be met with a bsod as in black screen of death. Idk why Microsoft made some of the traditionally blue screens black but here we are; this one states obviously that a critical process died so that's useful.
Okay so, is it possible to go past 1.2, well yes, if you decide against Windows update but more than that there are still clip, time broker and state repo that you can test without and the flighting and update picture tasks. Apart from that I think server core with gui will yeald better results but good luck running jack on that and there's also kernel custom drivers you can look into; windows development kit is available on VS. Other than that maybe just get a Steam deck, apparently their scheduler is pretty good.
Aight thats everything I wanted to talk about Windows in this video. In conclusion please do not install Windows on your machine its damaging not only for your data and files but also for your mental wellbeing. I recommend Bazzite or Cachyos or Artix if you are allergic to systemd and thats about it.
Optimizaing Windows 11 down to 1.2 gig felt like wading trough heaps upon heaps of shit all the way trough. It's unbelivable how they managed to absolutely butcher the goat OS but thats just how it goes sometimes. Before we end I'd like to cover the Windows version this demo was ran on that being 26200.7701 which was the latest as of january 2025 I mean 20 20 26 and also the footprint on disk that we got was about 25gig so in line with stock Windows.
Also, idk if you heard but we got a new mic so that's doing miracles and, yeah sorry for kinda going missing on Youtube and sounding a lil dead in the recording but that's what you get for recording in the AMs. Anyway, I wish yall a fine day and tank you for watching.