"Bare bones" Windows 10?

[stockhausen]

I have noticed that Windows 10 includes lots of clutter that seems to slow down booting and even average day-to-day use.

What cycle stealing, disk using, memory hogging utilities / features can I safely delete from a Windows 10 laptop that will not be used for playing any games and is likely only to used for browsing the Internet, running LibreOffice for Word Processing and viewing photos taken on a Mobile 'Phone and 'PDFs - and how would I (safely) go about this pruning?

This particularly relates to a Microsoft Surface Go 2 that I want to buy for someone for Christmas. This laptop includes 8 GB RAM, a 128 GB SSD and just a Pentium Gold CPU (whatever that is?) It also comes with Windows 10 S which appears to be "linked" to the Microsoft store although I believe that it does also include a full Windows 10 Home licence.

 

[smogsy]

Windows 10 S is a slim version of Windows (tweaked for speed & security) by default.

However you could use
https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater

I personally would switch all third party services in services.msc to manual/delayed automatic start based on requirements (only do this if you going to use the laptop as some things will possibly crop up that need to be "automatic"

but this is a quick dirty approach
* getting every to manual (third party)
* see what doesn't work
* re-enable what you need
* few days you will know what does & does not work

by doing this Default windows is around (idle)
50-70 background processes
90-110 Windows Processes

My tweaked Build using said method: (load)
35 Background Processes
72 Windows Processes

I have currently running Brave+Steam+Razer Software+Nvidia stuff)