Taming Windows 10.

[onetech]

For those of you who have shied away from the upgrade or are not happy with the results of the upgrade, let me show you what I have been doing for the upgrades and I have processed a lot of these upgrades. For lots of my customers way past their 60's(they don't like change), they are extremely happy with the end results. I also use this setup for configuring gaming systems to keep MS background chatter to a minimum and avoid 90% of the learning curve MS has thrown at us with this Metro crap(yeah, I said it) UI. I am not touching on troubleshooting any of the stages here, just my setup tips.

Stage one - Installation of 10.
Process the free upgrade of 10, if all goes well at some point you will encounter these options:
1. Setup a local account with password and do not use a MS login account as they try to lead you into this during install.
2. I personally turn off all the Telemetry stuff sliders except for webpage protection feature.

We now arrive at the desktop and login(password should be used for Homegroup sharing in the future)
Killing the Metro UI start button and all the tiles(take a little bit of time here).
A. Right click on every tile and disable the live tile options
B. Right click on every tile and Uninstall those that have that feature.
C. Right click on every tile and Unpin from Start Menu to empty it out.
D. Download from MajorGeeks.com the small program called "10appsManager", select each app and uninstall all of them, but not the Store.

Replacing the start button so it looks like and acts like XP/7 start menus.
1. Download from Classicshell.net the classic start menu program and install it.
2. Choose an Aero windows desktop theme.
3. Right click on start button, now we have new menu, and go to settings.
4. I prefer the single column start menu with start button, no captions, and smoked glass skin.

Services and features I prefer not to use.
1. Open Services, find SuperFetch and stop the service and disable it from startup.
2. Find C:\Window\Prefetch and clear out this folder.
3. Open Computer and right click on C: and Uncheck Indexing option and let it process.

Fix the size of the swap file so windows does not have to manage the size dynamically.(Summarized from http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=faq-Windows-10&faq=52)
1. Run-Dialog [Windows+R] and enter the command "sysdm.cpl ,3" - there is a space after .cpl and don't include quotes.
2. In advanced "System Properties" select the Tab "Advanced" and click the Button "Settings"
3. In the "Performance Options", please select also the tab "Advanced" and click the Button "Change..."
4. In "Virtual Memory", please un-check the box "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"
5. Set in a static number like 4096 (min and max settings) and click set and you will exit and reboot to finalize.

Hopefully some of you find this helpful and you can tame the Windows 10 beast.
(Updated 06-02-16)

[wendy oltman]

Good info. I never got the Start Button thing and here mentioned is the way to replace it. Thanks for sharing.

[Grumpyboy]

I disable Cotana and Telemetry too, and use Start 10 to replace the default start menu

[onetech]

As Grumpyboy stated, you can disable Cortana. HowToGeek has a nice writeup on this process by editing registry or using their reg hack. I'll try this too and see if anything unusual occurs.