Debloating Windows 11

OspreyO

OspreyO

OspreyO

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I don't have W11 on my main computers. But I have it on an old laptop to play with. But last install felt sluggish. CPU seemed to be always at 40-60% even at idle. Fan always on, battery struggling. Just ran a debloating app, and it's down to idling at 1-2%. What a difference. Every 5 mins or so it spins back up to 30% then goes back to 1-2%.

What on earth is going on. If this normal with your W11 installs?
 
Not normal with mine
Usually it's 3rd party software
That causes issues (asus armoury crate for example)
As garythesnail said though
What did it actually do?
Could have removed stuff you may later
Want to use

And if that high cpu usage at idle
First thing would be look in task manager
To see what's using the cpu %
 
I'd be very surprised if it was the debloat that made that much difference, you sure it just didn't calm itself down after the indexing was done or something?
 
This is fresh install of windows no OEM or 3rd party software. Hate indexing. Usually turn it off.

I was looking at task manager that's how I knew the % of the CPU that was being used...Just generic windows processes running. No idea what they are doing.
 
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Which debloating tool did you use?

I use MSMG's ToolKit to trim some fat from my installations of Windows 10 and 11. I tend to remove almost all the apps other than the ones I need.
 
BloatyNosy

I have a 2nd old machine desktop running stock Windows 11, and it doesn't have high idle cpu usage. Maybe it was some hardware on the laptop it didn't like.
 
Does the program you use show what it removes/disables? I prefer to do my own custom ISO so I know what's been removed/disabled

Least it seems to of done the job though
 
SpartaP said:
Does the program you use show what it removes/disables? I prefer to do my own custom ISO so I know what's been removed/disabled

Least it seems to of done the job though
Click to expand...
Same here, the one thing that bugs me with programs that remove/tweak Windows stuff is that most people just click away madly, i used to be guilty of the same thing many years ago.

However you soon discover that removing/tweaking without having a good idea of what you're removing/tweaking can cause problems down the road that take ages to track down because you don't know what's been changed where. Then there's the fact that a lot of these tweaking programs change settings that have no effect making you think they did something when they've not (placebo), and change things in a way that makes it harder to undo (setting policies in the registry that don't show up in group policy editor and lock you out of changing things back via the GUI).

I'm not saying they're useless or not to use them but if you can it's a good idea to take the time to research each setting and check what it's actually doing using something like...
www.nirsoft.net

Compare snapshots of Windows Registry

Compare 2 snapshots of Windows Registry, display all changes, and optionally generate .reg file.
www.nirsoft.net

And if all you're doing is removing the pre-installed apps that Windows comes with these days you can do that via settings > apps or if you need/want to be more thorough you can use powershell.
 
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Part of me thinks it was just an update tidying up in the background. This would make sense as it's a fresh install, which is liable to need some Windows Updates installing.
 
Windows is just CPU-hungry, too many background processes even after debloating. I have an old-ish laptop with a 10th gen U (low power) CPU Windows 10 and it does the same thing, the background processes which take up practically nothing on my i7 6700K (which itself isn't impressive anymore) take up about 50% CPU on the idle laptop.

I think of it like seeing computers with 4GB RAM (even 8GB RAM feels like that now) for sale in the purple shirt store. Selling a Windows laptop with a U CPU is selling something that isn't fit for purpose. Laptop manufacturers should be all over Microsoft to produce a CPU-lite version of Windows.
 
throwaway4372 said:
Windows is just CPU-hungry, too many background processes even after debloating. I have an old-ish laptop with a 10th gen U (low power) CPU Windows 10 and it does the same thing, the background processes which take up practically nothing on my i7 6700K (which itself isn't impressive anymore) take up about 50% CPU on the idle laptop.

I think of it like seeing computers with 4GB RAM (even 8GB RAM feels like that now) for sale in the purple shirt store. Selling a Windows laptop with a U CPU is selling something that isn't fit for purpose. Laptop manufacturers should be all over Microsoft to produce a CPU-lite version of Windows.
Click to expand...
Nonsense post.

Windows is not CPU hungry!

What is your laptop brand and model?

What debloat tool did you used?

How many background processes you ran before and after debloating? After debloating, background processes should be about 20-25 after tested on VMWare Workstation.

On my 8th gen i7 8700K & 32GB RAM desktop PC upgraded back in 2017 used 83 background processes, when it was idle it used just 1% CPU. It did the same thing with my previous 3th gen i7 3770K & 16GB RAM desktop I upgraded back in 2012. All my other Dell laptops, Linx 10 & Microsoft Surface Pro 6 tablets, MeegoPad T1 stick devices with 4th gen i7 4500U & 16GB RAM, Core 2 Duo T7200 & 3GB RAM, Atom Z3735F & 2GB RAM and i5 8250U & 8GB RAM did the same thing too with 1% CPU at idle but with around 63 background processes without VMWare Workstation, Corsair iCUE, Nvidia containers and EA Orign installed. All my devices used stock Windows installations but never been used debloat tools to debloated installations.

Back in 2019 when my niece accidently dropped her old Acer Aspire R3-131T convertible laptop with Celeron N3060 CPU and the screen was smashed, it was needed around £150 to get screen replaced but it was not guaranteed it will be compatible with her laptop 2017 model as there was about 25 different R3-131T models. My sister suggested it best to get second hand Acer R3-131T for around £75 then sell damaged laptop on ebay for around £75 later so I took few months searched for it on ebay then I found very old £75 Acer Aspire R3-131T 2013 model that can upgrade RAM and 2.5 inch SSD which 2017 model cant do both because it was soldered to motherboard. When I received second hand Acer R3 131T laptop 2013 model, it came with slight slower Celeron N3050 CPU, 500GB HDD and 4GB RAM, I booted it first time found out it used Windows 8.1, it ran very slow with CPU usage up to 100% all the time, all bloated drivers was very old dated back in 2013 then I updated it to Windows 10 1909 and installed new drivers from Acer website for other R3 131T 2017 model saw CPU usage dropped to 70% and changed some drivers to microsoft drivers saw CPU usage dropped further down to 30%. I tweaked laptop for 2 months and added 1TB SSD, 8GB RAM and 25 games that ran fine on Celeron N3050 CPU before gave to my niece for christmas 2019 present. But in 2022 she said the laptop iGPU are very slow for new games then she got new HP gen 12 laptop on christmas 2022 that can run latest games.

Your issues is probably down to old bloated drivers that caused too many background processes.
 
I think a lot of people just don't notice it due to their type of usage and/or usage patterns, on a laptop it is more noticeable than a desktop as the fans will often ramp up when it should be idle. Though the behaviour you describe is more like the ~40 minutes post updates when various update related tasks can periodically kick in. It is usually a little less busy than that.

I use a cocktail of program including O&O Shutup 10 and Windows Update Blocker then it mostly idles at 1-3% CPU with just occasional periods where a background task chews 1 core now and again (which is usually about 15% CPU utilisation). Unfortunately you can't entirely tame it without also breaking some useful features.

It is ******* terrible really - why my productivity PCs are still on Windows 7 as it mostly idles at 0-1% CPU with occasional like 5-7% CPU use when a background task kicks in. Windows 10 and especially 11 don't even do anything beneficial over 7 which might excuse it but even then it wouldn't be good.

An OS should be about enabling the end user front and centre anything else very secondary with the end user in full control, anything else is **** poor development or just being an obnoxious ****.

One of the things which can make it worse is motherboard/PC feature control centres especially the likes of Gigabyte's Control Centre which seems to have telemetry which regularly rummages around for various reasons including "AI" based "optimisations", which seem to be worse under 10/11 for making the system busy in the background with the way they use various system processes to do stuff not available in 7.
 
AthlonXP1800 said:
Your issues is probably down to old bloated drivers that caused too many background processes.
Click to expand...

While this can be an additional cause of it not every system has updated drivers available my older laptop which is a perfectly serviceable 4 core, 8 thread CPU with 32GB RAM and upgraded to fast SSDs has some drivers not updated since 2012, a few were updated until 2017. I have a dual boot 7 and 10 on it currently due to having mixed requirements for software compatibility and 10 is definitely the poorer experience. Fortunately the only 2 drivers which cause issues under 10 of this nature are for the multi-card reader (which is blocked from install by default on 10) and lighting/feature control neither of which I need/use and if needed I can plug in a USB card reader.
 
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