Installing A Windows Desktop

Pre-Setup

BIOS Time Set To UTC vs Local Time

Windows Vista and 7 have support for setting the time to UTC, but default to local time out of the box. Windows 8 may detect if the BIOS time is in UTC or local time.

There are still a couple of bugs as noted below, but the trade-off may be worth it to you. Every other OS expects the clock to be set to UTC.

• Windows will not sync to time servers if told that the BIOS clock is UTC.
• Windows may hang if running during the switch to and away from DST if told that the BIOS clock is UTC.

If you are unsure of how UTC relates to your time zone, you can use Google to query UTC time.

Partitioning

Please read Drive Partitioning first as it contains a lot of good information.

Since Windows Vista, Windows will properly align partitions.

By default, Windows will create a 100MiB/350MiB System Reserved partition when given a disk with no partitions.

• As MBR has a 4-partition limit, you may wish to create the Windows partition yourself before installing Windows.
• As GPT has a 128-partition limit, you may wish to let Windows partition the disk the way it wants to.

If you're trying to end Windows at a particular boundary, you may want to under-allocate and then use something like GNU parted to re-create the Windows partition at the boundary you want and then use diskpart with expand filesystem when you get back into Windows.

Install From USB

You can run the Window installer from a USB flash drive rather than the DVD-ROM. This should provide faster and quieter operation.

• Rufus is an open-source project that can create bootable USB drives from ISO images. The latest version can be downloaded here.
• Microsoft also provides the Windows 7 USB DVD Tool for users of Windows Vista, 7, or 8

Pre-Download

You may also wish to download video card drivers before hand, as AMD and NVIDIA usually offer drivers that are more up-to-date than what's available via Windows Update. Download either AMD Driver Auto-Detect or NVIDIA GeForce Experience

Use Windows Update Downloader to download security updates for your version of Windows.

• Use FOR %U IN (*) DO START /W %U /QUIET /NORESTART to execute all security updates in a given folder.

Download Anti-virus such as Avast, AVG, Avira, Bitdefender, etc.

You may also wish to check out Ninite which automates the process of downloading and installing dozens of software programs.

During Setup

The default in Windows is that the first user created is part of the Administrators group and subsequent accounts are Standard Users. This wiki recommends you choose one of the following:

1. Create one account not named Administrator that will be part of the Administrators group and use that for administrative duties while creating Standard User accounts for daily use. This allows you to have laxer password complexity on the account that acts as an Administrator.
2. Create an account for yourself that you will later drop to Standard User after re-enabling the Administrator account using net user administrator /active:yes. This route requires that you know full-well that people will try to attack the Administrator account but you feel confident in your password complexity.

Use a short name rather than a full name when creating user accounts to get short directory names. (E.g., john instead of John Smith.) You can use netplwiz to change full details. Changes to the name in User Accounts in Control Panel only affect the full name.

Post Setup

Common Configuration Options

DPI settings

For HTPC setups, 96 DPI is unreadable from 9 feet away.

• 7: Control Panel → Appearance and Personalization → Display → Set Custom text size (DPI)

This will only affect your login. To make this change to the login screen, you need to edit the registry.

NB: dword values are hexadecimal, not decimal. 0x60 is 90 decimal, 0x78 is 120 decimal, and 0x90 is 144 decimal.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]
"LogPixels"=dword:00000090

Temporarily Disable System Restore

Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, some Hotfixes, and some third-party installers will all create a restore point. No sense having this running during the initial setup of Windows as you're so close to sqaure one anyway.

rstrui.exe

Turn Off Drive Indexing

If you have an SSD, you may want to turn this off since it creates more writes and SSDs are fast enough to make indexing pointless.

• Start Menu → Computer → Right click SSD drive → Properties → uncheck Allow this drive to be indexed → Apply → Ignore All

Hibernation

For desktop computers, or computers with SSDs, you may not want to hibernate.

powercfg -h off

Power Management

For at least the duration of setting up Windows, you may want to keep the computer fully awake.

Page File

With the RAM that most computers have nowadays, it makes little sense to have much of a swap file. You still want some space so that Windows can swap out parts of memory that aren't really being used. Some Windows programs will balk with the lack of a swap file.

wmic pagefileset where name="C:\\pagefile.sys" set InitialSize=512,MaximumSize=512

Set Windows to use RTC in UTC

Only do this if your BIOS clock is set to UTC instead of local time!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

Tweaks

• Fix Optical Drive Not Appearing in Explorer

REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\UpperFilters]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\LowerFilters]

• Disable Home Groups in Vista and 7

Other Programs

Recommended For All Setups

Can Be Taken Care Of With Ninite

7-Zip | Audacity | CDBurnerXP | Chrome | Firefox | GIMP | Inkscape | InfranView | KeePass | LibreOffice | MediaMonkey | .NET 3.5 Runtime (XP) | Notepad++ | Opera | Paint.NET | PDFCreator | Pidgin | Skype | Steam | SumatraPDF | Thunderbird | TrueCrypt | qBitTorrent | VLC

Not Taken Care Of With Ninite

AVIDemux | CamStudio | CCleaner | Dia | Exact Audio Copy | Flash Player | Handbrake | LADSPA for Audactiy | LAME for Audacity | Lightscribe

Recommended For Advanced Users

Can Be Taken Care Of With Ninite

PuTTY | VNC | WinDirStat | WinSCP

Not Taken Care Of With Ninite

Alcohol 52% | CPU Burn-in | CPU-Z | HWiNFO | HWMonitor | HxD | Joystick2Mouse | MyDefrag | VirtualBox (Extensions)

Limited-Use Programs

ASUS Update | eBLU | nLite | rt7lite

Ongoing

Extend Evaluation Periods

If you are using an Enterprise Evaluation edition of Windows, you can re-arm the 90-day evaluation period up to 3 times:

slmgr /rearm