Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

For a certain kind of computer buyer, the first thing you always did with a new laptop or desktop from a company like Dell, HP, Acer, or Asus wasn't to open the box and start using it. Instead, you took a Windows install disk directly from Microsoft (a floppy, a CD, a DVD, a USB stick), and you blew away everything on the computer's internal drive, setting up a Windows installation with only the included Microsoft software and few extraneous apps (though your definition of extraneous may differ somewhat from Microsoft's).

This time-honored practice is colloquially called a "clean install," and it was a cure for most things that ailed a new Windows PC. Computer manufacturers often distributed buggy, pointless, or redundant third-party software ("bloatware" or "crapware") to help subsidize the cost of the hardware. This might pass some savings on to the user, but once they owned their computer, that software mainly existed to consume disk space and RAM, something that cheaper PCs could rarely afford to spare. Computer manufacturers also installed all kinds of additional support software, registration screens, and other things that generally extended the setup process and junked up your Start menu and desktop.

You can still do a clean install of Windows, and it's arguably easier than ever, with official Microsoft-sanctioned install media easily accessible and Windows Update capable of grabbing most of the drivers that most computers need for basic functionality. The problem is that a "clean install" doesn't feel as clean as it used to, and unfortunately for us, it's an inside job—it's Microsoft, not third parties, that is primarily responsible for the pile of unwanted software and services you need to decline or clear away every time you do a new Windows install.

The current state of things

The "out-of-box experience" (OOBE, in Microsoft parlance) for Windows 7 walked users through the process of creating a local user account, naming their computer, entering a product key, creating a "Homegroup" (a since-discontinued local file- and media-sharing mechanism), and determining how Windows Update worked. Once Windows booted to the desktop, you'd find apps like Internet Explorer and the typical in-box Windows apps (Notepad, Paint, Calculator, Media Player, Wordpad, and a few other things) installed.

Keeping that baseline in mind, here's everything that happens during the OOBE stage in a clean install of Windows 11 22H2 (either Home or Pro) if you don't have active Microsoft 365/OneDrive/Game Pass subscriptions tied to your Microsoft account:

• (Mostly) mandatory Microsoft account sign-in.
• Setup screen asking you about data collection and telemetry settings.
• A (skippable) screen asking you to "customize your experience."
• A prompt to pair your phone with your PC.
• A Microsoft 365 trial offer.
• A 100GB OneDrive offer.
• A $1 introductory PC Game Pass offer.

This process is annoying enough the first time, but at some point down the line, you'll also be offered what Microsoft calls the "second chance out-of-box experience," or SCOOBE (not a joke), which will try to get you to do all of this stuff again if you skipped some of it the first time. This also doesn't account for the numerous one-off post-install notification messages you'll see on the desktop for OneDrive and Microsoft 365. (And it's not just new installs; I have seen these notifications appear on systems that have been running for months even if they're not signed in to a Microsoft account, so no one is safe).

And the Windows desktop, taskbar, and Start menu are no longer the pristine places they once were. Due to the Microsoft Store, you'll find several third-party apps taking up a ton of space in your Start menu by default, even if they aren't technically downloaded and installed until you run them for the first time. Spotify, Disney+, Prime Video, Netflix, and Facebook Messenger all need to be removed if you don't want them (this list can vary a bit over time).

Along with preinstalled apps, Microsoft puts in a few icons for other non-Windows apps and services, whether you use them or not: the ClipChamp video editor, the Microsoft 365 web apps, and OneDrive, plus the preinstalled version of Teams. Even the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, the replacement for Windows' venerable standalone Solitaire app, is now a free-to-play version stuffed with ads that you need a paid subscription to remove.

Then there's the Bing stuff, which is mainly present in the Search menu and the Widgets menu; the things Bing shows me range from benign-but-useless items (ads for games I'll never play, offering to tell me what my birth flower is) to misinformation-adjacent junky news from SEO-farm websites (usually something about Joe Biden's age and mental state).

I could keep going for a while, depending on how deep you want to go—the Microsoft account and OneDrive status messages in the Settings app, persistent reminders to use Edge as your default browser and Bing as your default search engine, and a whole battery of extra add-ons if you decide you want to use Edge (there's also a separate OOBE to click through, even if you're just using Edge to download another browser). In the fall, Windows Copilot will debut as yet another built-in service.

A gradual shift

This didn’t happen overnight, but like a frog in a slowly warming pot, I looked around and found myself surrounded by extra stuff I don’t want in a new Windows install, and there's a growing list of things to disable and uninstall before I get to the work of installing software I actually want to use.

Here are a few attempts to be fair to Microsoft:

• It’s hard to know where to draw the line when it comes to built-in software and services, and where you draw the line might not be the same place I would draw it.
• Windows 8’s bundling of Microsoft’s good-enough-for-most-things first-party anti-malware scanner (a separate installation in previous versions) has surely been a net positive for user safety and security.
• The Microsoft Precision Touchpad standard has made PC laptop trackpads better, if not exactly great. I'd rather have built-in controls for things like RGB LEDs than rely on overstuffed and buggy third-party apps.
• If I used OneDrive or had a Microsoft 365 subscription—a big "if"—I'm sure I would appreciate the convenience of having that software available with minimal extra effort.

And it's not as if this is all new to Windows 11. Most of this behavior started during the Windows 10 era, the beginning of the modern Windows-as-a-service, when Microsoft began offering Windows upgrades for free and never technically stopped (to this day, Windows 7 product keys will successfully activate new installs of Windows 11). The Windows 10 OOBE process offers all the same things as the Windows 11 one if you sign in with a Microsoft account, and it plunks most of the same third-party apps into the Start menu.

But there are a few reasons why Windows 11 is rubbing me the wrong way where  Windows 10 never quite managed to. First, Microsoft account sign-in was made mandatory instead of optional (though third-party tools like Rufus can work around this, and Windows 11 Pro still lets you use a local account if you know all the right buttons to click). It's the Microsoft account sign-in that prompts most of the annoying behavior during the OOBE process.

Second, first- and third-party add-on apps and services have become more prominent in Windows 11. Teams is directly in the taskbar and system tray. The third-party apps are front and center in the default Start menu view, instead of being shunted off to the side and into a folder as they are in Windows 10 (the taskbar-mounted Bing widget that shows you the weather was also a relatively late addition to Windows 10, added years after the initial release).

Third, and maybe most gratingly, Windows 11 has made all of these problems worse and not better, and the trend line isn't promising. Microsoft is often testing places to stick new reminders about OneDrive or Microsoft 365 or Bing, even if it sometimes backs off of these efforts in the face of user pushback. The most annoying Microsoft Edge add-ins and pop-ups have been enabled during the Windows 11 era, taking the browser further and further from its "streamlined, Microsoft-skinned version of Google Chrome" origins. Copilot will be all about pushing Bing services, rooted as it is in the Bing Chat preview the company has been testing out all year, and it's yet another pinned-by-default feature that lives in your taskbar.

Everyone is doing this, but not everyone is this obnoxious

Microsoft is far from alone in these kinds of behaviors. Apple has also shipped an entire suite of productivity and creative software—from Pages to iMovie—for free with every Mac and iPhone it has shipped for years. It encourages you to sign into iCloud and services like iMessage and FaceTime when you configure a new Mac for the first time. And for years, it has added more and more features meant to encourage iPhone buyers to grab iPads or Macs instead of PCs (and vice-versa).

The same goes for iPhones, iPads, Chromebooks, Android devices, Amazon's Fire tablets, and an entire galaxy of smart speakers, screens, thermostats, smoke detectors, and other Internet-connected gadgets; every device you use now strongly pushes or mandates some kind of account sign-in, the better to lure you into a wider subscription ecosystem that can keep shareholder-mandated continuous growth going when direct hardware and software sales slump.

But to continue the Apple comparison—probably the most relevant—Apple doesn't mandate Apple ID sign-in. Apple does put "helpful" "reminders" about setting up Apple Pay, iCloud backups, and a few other things into its setup screens, but it doesn't take over your full screen again to try to get you to opt in to things you've already said no to. There is a notification in the Settings app asking you to sign in and set a few things up if you haven't, but they're dismissable, and they stay dismissed. Safari doesn't pester you to switch back to it once you've switched away, like a 4-year-old who asks you what time it is every time the clock changes (I don't know if this is a widely relatable example, but it's my lived reality at present). There are no third-party applications installed beyond the under-the-hood open source bits and pieces that are baked into macOS's foundations.

You get my point. My frustration is not so much with what Microsoft is doing but how it is doing it. So many of Microsoft's reminders and notifications feel like they happen at the expense of respecting the user's choices.

This is irritating enough when it's a passing offer for some kind of subscription—sure, maybe last time I clicked through, what I meant was "not right now" instead of "never." But it's worse when I end up with app icons I don't want, and it's much worse when the reminder message flies in the face of some configuration change I've gone out of my way to make. If I've already changed my Edge search engine, installed a separate browser, or signed into Dropbox, Windows should get out of the way by assuming that I have done these things on purpose.

Windows Elev(enshittification)

Once I've removed all the stuff I don't want, I still, by and large, like Windows 11 and most of the stuff it does. It's as visually coherent as any version of Windows has looked in a very long time, and we regularly cover small, smart quality-of-life enhancements that Microsoft is continuously adding. The fact that the company has managed to take this huge, sprawling, taped-together battleship of an operating system from a three-year update cycle to a several-times-a-year update cycle without breaking too many things is a major technical achievement.

But it does feel like Windows is increasingly getting sucked into the vortex of what Cory Doctorow colorfully calls "enshittification"—the tendency of platforms to gradually stop centering the user in favor of centering revenue and then getting ever more desperate to bring in more revenue, ruining the product in the process.

To be clear, I still think we're a long way off from that. Once I've skimmed the pond scum off the top of Windows 11, there's essentially a heavily modified version of Windows Vista/7 under all of it, and I can still get it set up the way I like. I'm also probably more attuned to and frustrated by this stuff because, as someone who tests and writes about technology, I'm running up against the Windows install and setup process more often than most people ever will.

But the subtle, ever-encroaching creep of Microsoft's non-Windows stuff into Windows feels like the company trying to squeeze its users for just a bit more revenue as Windows' market share gradually ticks downward year after year. All the extra stuff and data collection in Windows 10 and 11 have given rise to third-party "minimalist" Windows installs that try to strip as much as they can out of Windows without breaking it (sometimes they don't succeed, and some of these setups can't even install security updates; I can't recommend that you install one on a system you actually intend to connect to the Internet and use every day).

The 90-day preview of Windows 11 Enterprise that Microsoft offers gives us a look at what a clean install could still be like if Microsoft wanted it to be. There's no Microsoft account sign-in requirement, which skips over most of the setup screens for additional products and services, and the default Start menu has no third-party apps and very few first-party apps pinned.

(Part of the reason that Windows 11 Enterprise looks as clean as it does is because Microsoft expects most businesses to enforce some kind of sign-in requirement and replace lots of Microsoft's recommended content feeds and third-party app pins with their own. But that's all left up to the discretion of your company's IT department rather than being forced upon you.)

People who install and use Windows deserve something better than the current out-of-the-box experience, something where apps aren't installed unless you want them to be and Microsoft backs off a bit on pushing its own add-on subscription services. Microsoft should provide that experience to everyone who chooses to do a clean install of Windows. Failing that, it would at least be a nice value-add for people who fork out for the Pro version. Until that happens, I'll be here, manually uninstalling a dozen things from every new Windows PC I set up.