So anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that I'm vehemently anti big tech. I recently became completely free of Microsoft, Google, Meta etc. probably the only big tech I still subscribe to is Spotify, and yes I have a plan to ditch them too, but my music is sacred so that's a long term plan.

I was previously a PC Gamer. Kinda still am, but sadly no Battlefield 6 for me. Unless...

I've decided I'm going to buy an SSD and have it dedicated to runing windows, solely for the purpose of playing those Windows only games. So I began looking into how to disable the tracking and telemetry etc. I came across unattended install scrips, enabling you to essentially strip out all the stuff you don't want and create a minimal and somewhat "private" Windows 11 installation.

I then found a neat tool that makes this process extremely straight forward.

#WIMUtil
https://github.com/memstechtips/WIMUtil

It takes the official Windows ISO and builds a minimal iso based on pre-built or customised unattended scripts.

So, while I'm still a slave to the software, I can rest a little easier knowing I'm not feeding the machine.

I haven't got the SSD yet, but the image boots from my ventoy stick, so far so good.

The only caveat is that critical updates may potentially break things, or just reintroduce features I previously removed. However, I plan to put all my games in their own partition so I can simply build a new iso and reinstall the OS if necessary.

Anyone else been down this same rabbit whole?