Installing A Windows Desktop

Pre-Setup

BIOS Time Set To UTC vs Local Time

Windows has had support for setting the BIOS clock to UTC since NT 4.0. However, this support was undocumented and forgotten about until XP. Fuller support is available in Vista and 7, but there are still two bugs as noted below. However, the trade-off may be worth it to you. Every other OS expects the clock to be set to UTC, so if you dual-boot between Mac and Windows or Windows and Linux, you can make things easier on yourself.

• 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.

If you are using BIOS/MBR, you may wish to partition the drive yourself using a Linux utility like parted. If you leave partitioning up to Windows, it will align the partitions on cylinder boundaries, which will clobber performance on 4K sector drives (some 500GB, all 1TB and higher drives). Windows does nothing special with BIOS/MBR setups, so it safe to partition the drive the way you want before installing Windows.

If you are using UEFI/GPT, you may wish to leave partitioning up to Windows as it wants to create an ESP and MSR (EFI System Partition and Microsoft System Reserved, respectively) partition in addition to the basic data partition. Windows should repect proper alignment for paritions on GPT. If you want to be cautious (or particular) you can create a smallish (20GB) partition for Windows, install Windows, and then use a Linux untility to check alignment and expand the partition to exactly where you want it. (Use diskpart to expand filesystem if you expand the partition after the filesystem has already been created.)

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 a tool to do this that can be run under Windows XP, Vista, or 7. XP users must install Microsoft .NET Framework v2 and Microsoft Image Mastering API v2 before using the Windows 7 USB DVD Tool

Pre-Download

It is recommended to download the latest Service Pack, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and antivirus before installing Windows. This way you won't have a (too) vulnerable system attached to the internet. Note: Windows Media Player requires a Windows Genuine Advantage check to install. If you wish to bypass this, use a program like 7-Zip to extract the EXE contents and run wmfdistnn.exe and wmpnn.exe to install Windows Media Player.

You may also wish to check out Ninite. The Ninite Installer automates the process of downloading and installing dozens of software programs, including .NET 3.5 and antivirus.

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 (Requires .NET 3.5).

During Setup

There really aren't a whole lot of options. There are only a couple things to keep in mind.

1. Decide how you want to handle having an Administrator account.
   1. The default in XP is that everyone becomes part of the Administrators group. NO!
   2. The default in Vista and 7 is that the first user created is part of the Administrators group and subsequent accounts are Standard Users. Better, but most people only create one account (for themselves) and use that. NO!
   3. 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.
2. Use a short name rather than a full name when creating user accounts in Windows XP onward. For example: john instead of John Smith. Windows XP an later hide a bit of the complexity in creating user account by setting the name/directory and the full name to whatever you type in for name. This way you get short names for directories.
   1. You can use CONTROL USERPASSWORDS2 (XP) or netplwiz (Vista onwards) to change full details.
   2. In XP, Vista, and 7, changes to the name in User Accounts only affect the full name.

Post Setup

Common Configuration Options

DPI settings

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

• XP: Control Panel → Appearance and Themes → Display → Settings → Advanced → General
• 7: Control Panel → Appearance and Personalization → Display → Set Custom text size (DPI)

That 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. 0x78 is 120 decimal and 0x90 is 144 decimal.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

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

Enable ClearType in XP

• Control Panel → Appearance and Themes → Display → Appearance → Effects.
• Select Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts check box
• Select ClearType from the list.

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.

[XP users] pagefileconfig /change /i 512 /m 512 /vo c:

[Vista,7,8] 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

Activate Windows

Windows Media Player and some Windows updates won't work until you do.

Additional XP Themes

The traditional three XP themes are old and tired.

• Royale Royale Nior Zune Embedded
• Royale Noir is incomplete and cannot co-exist with Royale

Essentials

• Install the latest Service Pack
  • XP 32-bit: SP3 and Windows Update Agent 3.0
  • Vista: SP2 32-bit 64-bit
  • Windows 7: SP1 32-bit x86 64-bit x86 64-bit IA64
• Install Latest Internet Explorer
  • Windows XP Home/Pro 32-bit: IE8
  • Windows Vista: IE9 32-bit 64-bit
  • Windows 7: IE9 32-bit 64-bit
• Install Latest Windows Media Player
  • Windows XP: WMP11
• Install Video Card Drivers
  • ATI or NVIDIA
• Install Anti-Virus
  • Microsoft Secuirty Essentials 32-bit or 64-bit
  • Avira Free Edition
• Download Updates from Windows Update

Tweaks

• Remove Outlook Express in Windows 2000 and XP.

REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WAB]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\WAB]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{44BBA840-CC51-11CF-AAFA-00AA00B6015C}]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{7790769C-0471-11D2-AF11-00C04FA35D02}]

rem @ECHO OFF

SET SPFILES=%WINDIR%\ServicePackFiles\i386
SET DLLCACHE=%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE
SET SYSTEM32=%WINDIR%\SYSTEM32
SET PFCOMSYS=%PROGRAMFILES%\Common Files\System
SET OUTLKEXP=%PROGRAMFILES%\Outlook Express
SET WINHELP=%WINDIR%\HELP
SET WININF=%WINDIR%\INF

FOR %%F IN (CSAPI3T1 MSOE MSOERES OEIMPORT OEMIGLIB WABFIND WABIMP) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%DLLCACHE%" "%OUTLKEXP%") DO DEL %P\%F.DLL

FOR %%F IN (MSIMN OEMIG50 SETUP50 WAB WABMIG) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%DLLCACHE%" "%OUTLKEXP%") DO DEL %P\%F.EXE 

DEL "%OUTLKEXP%\MSOE.TXT"

FOR %%F IN (DIRECTDB WAB32 WAB32RES) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%DLLCACHE%" "%PFCOMSYS%") DO DEL %P\%F.DLL 

FOR %%F IN (INETCOMM MSOEACCT MSOERT2) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%DLLCACHE%" "%SYSTEM32%") DO DEL %P\%F.DLL

FOR %%F IN (MSOE.CHM MSOE.HLP MSOEACCT.HLP WAB.CHM WAB.HLP) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%WINHELP%") DO DEL %P\%F

FOR %%F IN (MSOE50 WAB50) DO ^
FOR %%P IN ("%SPFILES%" "%WININF%" "%SYSTEM32%") DO DEL %P\%F.?NF

• 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