With emphasis on "you", because there's a lot of guides online that might actually do more harm than good.
Because I need the web-camera to work on my brand new laptop, I'm stuck with Windows 10 for now. So far I've installed the classic shell to hide ads and access notepad, blocked everything non-essential in the firewall to prevent it from trying to access the internet every millisecond, and uninstalled everything non-essential that runs at startup. CPU usage when idle went down from 100% (out of the box) to 58%, but the computer is still sluggish unless I disconnect completely from the internet (20% CPU use).
This is not a rant against the workers at Microsoft, because everyone already knows that they pulled the plug on Windows from lack of funds and this is what I get for buying a computer with an abandoned operating system that they only provide for those already stuck with legacy applications.
How do you make Windows 10 barely usable?
If you have the KB4512941 update installed, try removing it, they managed to cock up something in it, that manifests in Cortana hogging the CPU. (If you search for it, theres a bunch of guides on how to remove the update, or how to fix it in registry.) Otherwise it shouldn't eat up that much CPU, I'm currently running Win10 on a 2 year old Lenovo Y720 laptop (i7-7700HQ) with 6-10% usage with Chrome running a bunch of tabs, plus Slack and IntelliJ running in the background.
You seem to have pretty much done everything to convert it from highly usable to barely usable. Good job!
How about a few more registry clean up tools and maybe one or two shutup tools so it simply has to break on the next update?
48 minutes ago, Endurion said:You seem to have pretty much done everything to convert it from highly usable to barely usable. Good job!
How about a few more registry clean up tools and maybe one or two shutup tools so it simply has to break on the next update?
It would all be solved if I could uninstall Windows update and simply route all traffic through a single browser that's kept updated with the latest script blocking on trusted plain-ascii web sites. Internet would then shut down when closing the browser after my monthly visit to the internet and no more auto-update attack vectors.
16 hours ago, Dawoodoz said:It would all be solved if I could uninstall Windows update
You can do that
Just make a C# application that finds, access and modifies the registry keys? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/dd939844(v=ws.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN
Also you can create a super denied account and auto logon to that, there is no obstacle in making your win 10 a heavy duty server 
I managed to block everything except browsers, e-mail and svchost.exe using Comodo's free firewall. It also allowed marking any applications as malware so that they cannot run. Then the file system could be unlocked and I permanently deleted Windows defender and some other bloat. Now Windows 10 can't do a thing against me and CPU usage is down to 4% when idle. ?
On 9/17/2019 at 4:11 PM, Dawoodoz said:CPU usage when idle went down from 100% (out of the box) to 58%, but the computer is still sluggish unless I disconnect completely from the internet (20% CPU use).
wtf was installed on here to begin with? None of that is normal...
1 minute ago, Hodgman said:wtf was installed on here to begin with? None of that is normal...
While normally I'd agree, under no circumstances is Best Buy's Geek Squad to be underestimated when it comes to bloatware.
45 minutes ago, Hodgman said:wtf was installed on here to begin with? None of that is normal...
It's a Lenovo laptop, so the track pad's slow drivers are taking most CPU time after disabling Windows Store, Windows Defender and Skype.
Hahaha, people spending time with uninstalling stuff they paid for ?
Seriously, the initial problem that tied you to that os was the camera, have i got that right ? I'd think that another camera (and OS) probably costs much less time(=money) than trying to fight against windmills ... ?
