THIS is what Windows 10 should look like! - Custom Windows Image Tutorial

i hope everyone this year had a wonderful holiday season got to spend time with those that they love and got everything on their list that they wanted i know i did [Music] [Applause] today's video is brought to you by nordpass are you tired of trying to remember all of your username and password combinations have you run out of room on your monitor for more sticky notes nordpass's user-friendly desktop and mobile applications allow you to easily access all of your passwords on any device from wherever you are and with their zero knowledge architecture your data is encrypted on your own device before it ever reaches their servers visit nordpass.com crafttoday to download it for free and take the hassle out of password management that's nordpass.com craft welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff in my last video on windows deployment services i very foolishly mentioned that i would be doing a video on how to create a custom windows image and for the record i would like that week of my life back the process of creating a golden windows image is fraught with problems and very very time consuming and there's a reason that not a lot of people choose to do windows installs this way anymore while there are a number of ways out there to customize a windows install like microsoft deployment toolkit i'm not going to be covering that in this particular video rather i'm going to focus on creating a golden image as the setup process takes quite a bit more time but the installation process is much more streamlined not only that but you can actually combine the two processes of creating a golden image and using microsoft deployment toolkit to install software once your imaging is done so while creating a custom windows image is very time consuming there are still use cases where it is the better option so with all that said if you have not watched my windows deployment services tutorial i'll link it right up here and i do recommend going and watching that before you continue in this video so if you've already caught up let's get on with it before we get started there are a couple of things that you're going to need first you obviously need a windows deployment server so again go watch that tutorial you also need a reference pc this is a system that you're going to install windows 10 onto customize the installation and then capture an image off of you can use a virtual machine for that and that's exactly what i'm doing here but there's also no reason you couldn't do this with a bare metal machine on your windows deployment server you're also going to want the assessment and deployment toolkit mainly because you're going to need windows system image manager which is available in that toolkit it's a free download and i will have a link down in the video description once again i'm using proxmox for my hypervisor and i've created a brand new virtual machine to work as my reference pc it's got 8 gigabytes of memory 4 cpu cores ovmf uefi bios and a q35 machine type and we're going to go ahead and really quickly get a brand new windows install onto this machine for this tutorial i'm going to be using windows 10 pro now you could also do this with windows 10 home or really any other version of windows however with windows 10 home there are some registry and group policy settings that will not apply to that particular version the goal of this build is to have a 100 clean install of windows that is a clean start menu no telemetry a lot of privacy settings ramped up as well as none of the auto install apps that microsoft likes to throw at you to do all of that you really do need the windows 10 professional sku however you can probably achieve about 85 of it still with windows 10 home this process will also apply to education enterprise and ltsc so let's go ahead and get started windows 10 home and next while that installation is running i'm going to jump over to our windows deployment server and open up windows system image manager again this is part of the assessment and deployment toolkit linked down below using system image manager we're going to create what is called an answer file that is a simple xml file that tweaks a windows installation both at image capture and on installation from a windows deployment server we're going to go up to file and then click on new answer file now if you have never gone through this process before you're gonna need to create what's called a windows catalog that is a list of all the settings that the answer file can possibly edit to do that you're gonna scrape the information off of a windows 10 image file that is the exact same version that you plan on deploying so in this case windows 10 pro 20 h2 so i'm going to say yes i want to import a windows image now and i have a windows 10 20 h2 pro image right here then it'll ask you if you want to create the catalog for this image and click on yes with the catalog file loaded up you'll be presented with this interface right here now under windows 10 pro catalog and components there are a whole mess of different aspects and features that you can modify and to be perfectly honest you kind of need to reference microsoft's documentation on where each setting is and where it fits into the process the answer file itself is right up here under well answer file and as you can see there are seven steps in the process windows pe offline servicing generalize specialized audit system audit user and out of box experience system now today we're going to create a very simple answer file that is just enough of an answer file to take care of some of the post installation setup like skipping the outer box experience where you have to select no on all of the microsoft tracking info first up we're going to open up the components tab and go down to microsoft windows setup and expand that out i'm going to go down to the user data component i'm going to right click on that and i'm going to add that to pass one and as you can see it's been added right up here inside the answer file itself and if we click on each of these different components you notice on the right hand side there are settings that you can modify first up we're going to click on user data we're going gonna go over to accept end user license agreement and set that to true what that does is skip you from having to accept the user license agreement when windows starts up for the first time also under the user data component is a product key component and this is where you can actually add in your product key so say you have a volume license server or a kms system you can add in the product key right here and never have to do it post install and next we're gonna go back to our component selection but this time we're gonna go to microsoft windows shell setup we're gonna open that one up go down to out-of-box experience right click on that and add it to past seven while we're in here we're also going to go down to user accounts right click that and also add it to past seven and now your answer file should look something like this next go ahead and click on the outer box experience component and on the right hand side is where we're going to hide the majority of the post install questions that is would you like your networking setup how about your wi-fi end user license agreement product registration all of that is going to be hidden so we're going to hide the end user license agreement page we're going to hide the oem registration screen we're going to set true on the hide online account screens this is the would you like to set up a microsoft account bs we're also going to skip wireless setup we're going to set our network location as work we're going to skip machine out of box experience and we're going to ship user out of box experience once that's done i'm going to expand the outer box experience component and i'm going to delete the vm mode optimizations next up go ahead and expand the user accounts component in here you can set a default administrator password for the local system so i'm just going to give this a password of password please use a more secure password than that but i will say one positive about these answer files is once you save them it actually saves the password in a hashed format meaning you don't have to keep them in plain text for my use case i'm going to delete the domain accounts component as i don't have an active directory domain to set up here and we're going to add a new local account so right click on local accounts and click on insert new local account under description i'm going to type in craft then craft for a display name the group is going to be administrators and the username is going to be rambo and if you expand out the local accounts tab you can also see that we can set a password for this user as well and again i'm going to set up password and that is basically all you need for an answer file if you want to skip all of the outer box experience inside of windows after you image a new pc that means when windows boots up for the first time it will boot directly to the password screen and if everything looks good to you you can go ahead and save your answer file so i'm going to go up to file save as and i'm going to save this as unattend dot xml jumping back over to our windows virtual machine as you see it is on its first boot which means we have to go through language setup and keyboard layout set up a new user account say no to all of the microsoft windows trackers really it's just more of a pain than it needs to be unlike this this is delicious and speaking of things that i really don't like about the microsoft windows setup is how would you like to set up your user account would you like to set it up for personal use or would you like to set it up for an organization if you click on personal use it takes you to create a microsoft login that is a login linked directly to microsoft system so you can tie into all of the office 365 and onedrive type services what's more is if you're setting up a windows 10 home pc uh you can't not create a microsoft account it forces you to go that route as long as your pc is connected to the internet so my recommendation for windows 10 home during the out of box setup is to unplug the network port so you can create an offline account but this is a windows 10 professional machine and i really don't want a microsoft account so i'm going to go back and i'm going to say i'm going to set this up for an organization and when you do that it takes you directly back to setting up a microsoft account now there is a way around this down here you can say domain join this pc instead and now you can simply create a local user so we're going to just create user and we are not going to set up a password next up is the choose your privacy settings which i'm sure microsoft will listen to and respect which means turn them all off and then hit accept no i'd rather not set up cortana right now please just let me log in now this is the best part of the setup we're getting everything ready for you what this does is reach out to microsoft find out which apps are currently paid to be placed on the start menu and then installs them this is windows 10 professional i don't need candy crush saga i don't need whatever it's probably installing right now so let's take a look at that leave everything to us this will only take a minute don't turn off your pc almost there there we are and we're finally to the windows desktop so maybe later i will take a tour of microsoft edge probably not and now why don't we go ahead and check out that start menu now to be fair it's better than it's been in the past at least at this very moment you have a link to start up a trial of microsoft office on your pc which i guess you know it's your own product i don't mind that at all but at the same time there's also a bunch of office links right here now these do not go to local installations these are actually links over to the web versions in office 365. the problem with that is they don't say that explicitly and if you install the office trial you'll end up with literally double the icons both of which look virtually identical that lead you to two very different places not only that but there's a fair bit of redundancy with pre-installing all of these different apps for instance if you install microsoft office trial you'll have access to microsoft outlook the local version or you can use microsoft outlook the office 365 version or you can simply use microsoft mail the windows 10 app store version now i don't begrudge some of these icons like microsoft edge the microsoft photos app even microsoft to-do list sure it's this lower section that really just grinds my gears first up there's spotify music which i get yes it's a very popular service but not every professional machine wants a spotify client installed on their work machine and likewise when we open up this folder here uh roblox really roblox dolby access photoshop elements hidden city hidden object adventure again windows 10 professional what are these doing on here but it's not just the start menu that really kind of gets me going about my dislike for what microsoft has done with windows there's things like the forced update policy there's things like forced app installs that you never asked for but someone paid microsoft to inject down onto your pc and they'll just do it like candy crush or roblox there's also microsoft's telemetry that they collect off your system use including what applications you run for how long and even in some cases what websites you visit or even what keystrokes you enter does anyone else see a problem with that for both home and professional uses because i certainly do so the whole point of creating today's windows 10 image is to fix all of those issues and have a 100 clean install so the first thing we're going to do is actually delete this user account because i don't want it to exist and i don't want it to persist after we image this version of windows so we're going to right click on the start menu and go up to computer management i'm going to go to local users and groups and open up the users folder we're going to open up the administrator account and then uncheck the box that says account is disabled to turn the account on click ok then we're going to right click on administrator and set ourselves a password once you have a password typed in go ahead and click ok and then we can go ahead and log out of this user so again right click on the start menu go to shutdown or sign out and then click on sign out when you're back at the login page go ahead and open up administrator and log in and yet again microsoft is going to get everything ready for us on our windows 10 professional machine like installing roblox and hidden city hidden object adventures now we did remember some of our choices about the machine as a whole but as you can see online speech recognition is still on as our location services inking and typing which is literally a key logger uh is almost always enabled for default accounts let microsoft tailor your experiences which is feed you advertising directly there's also an advertising id which assigns your user an id and the ads won't be relevant to you anymore oh darn to fully delete a user account off of a computer there are two steps you need to follow first up i'm going to open up a new file explorer window i'm going to go to this pc and then down here below the drives i'm going to right click and click on properties this will take me to the legacy windows system display now why do i have to right click in that particular location well in 20 h2 that's the only place that i found that you can get access to this exact menu in fact even if i right click on the icon this pc and go to properties it opens up the new system properties which doesn't have the menus that i need to delete a user profile and microsoft it's been eight years please unify your control panel i don't care if you want to use the new one or the old one but please dear god make all of the settings accessible from one place please anyway under your system panel go ahead and click on advanced system settings then under user profiles click on settings here we're going to see three user accounts there's a default profile which is the new profile that's created every time you generate a new user there's the administrator profile which we kind of want because that's how we're logged in now and then there's the user account go ahead and click on that and click on delete now what this does is it deletes all of the users home folders that is desktop documents app data everything their folder is no longer in existence however the user themselves still exists so we're going to close out of this window we're going to go back to the start menu right click on it and go up to computer management go to local users and groups open up the users folder we're going to right click on user and go down to delete so now that user has been completely purged off of this system now let's address this now i could go through all of this right click each icon go down to uninstall or unpin from start but the problem with that process is that only affects this local user if you create a new user account it regenerates all of this for that new user account so not only do i want to remove this i want to remove it entirely and not allow it to return regardless of what user i log in as now to do that both for the user you're logged in as as well as any new users you create i created this script well actually most of it i copied it from a number of different sources and then vetted it out to work the way that i wanted to i tried to include most of the source information inside of the file itself so all the proper users on github do get credit for the script as well as some pieces that i've written myself now before you just go down to the video description and download the script heed the words from the great tom lawrence of laurent systems never just blindly run a script that you download off the internet i am going to go through this in a light amount of detail but please don't take my word for what exactly the script does read through it yourself and know the consequences both pro and con of running the script on your pc the way i designed the script was to be a pre-imaging script to get rid of all of the bloatware and settings inside of windows that we don't want what it is not meant to do is take a pc that you're currently using clean all the settings off and then allow you to continue using it so warning heated let's go ahead and open up this script and see what's inside now the main chunk of this script actually comes from one that i found a good long while ago i think back sometime in mid-2016 and his username is tagged right up here it was disassembler so a lot of credit for this goes to him his script essentially takes care of all of the privacy and telemetry settings that we want to disable inside of windows things like telemetry itself let's send microsoft a report of what i was doing on my pc disabling wi-fi sense which was a very very flawed system of sharing your wi-fi passwords with pretty much everyone in your contact list if you wanted to it disables the bing search in the start menu meaning that if you want to search for local files on your pc you can search for local files instead of getting bing results for document.doc it disables location tracking now word about this you will not be able to use the find my device service if you disable location tracking now for my instances i'm using desktops i don't need that service activated but you can comment this out if you do want it activated there's disable feedback disable advertising id disable cortana a whole host of things that locks down the security and privacy of your local pc for service tweaks i didn't do too much but i am disabling the windows update automatic restart that is microsoft will still serve you updates on their schedule however you get to decide when you actually want to restart your pc it won't do it automatically based on when it thinks you're using your pc and not but i can't tell you the number of times that i've experienced reboots while i'm using my pc or exactly when i should be using my pc like every wednesday night at epm pacific time when i do talking heads we've done 163 episodes and for a couple of years my pc likes to reboot at 7 50 pm on wednesday nights and even one time during the show while i was broadcasting it automatically rebooted on me next up we come to remove unwanted applications now one of the first things i like doing on pcs is trying to disable one drive but it's kind of like those applications in the start menu that keep cropping back up it doesn't want to be killed in here we have a registry entry that will disable the onedrive service from running it will hide the onedrive icon in your quick access under file explorer and it will then uninstall onedrive and prevent it from being automatically reinstalled there's also a pretty large list of automatically installed windows apps like microsoft being finance being sports get started microsoft office hub and down here all of the xbox game overlay text to speech mixed reality portal things that really don't need to be on a windows professional desktop next up is a script that removes all of the pinned items to both the taskbar and the start menu but for the default user that is anytime you create a new user account it will automatically have all of those pinned items blacklisted scrolling down a little bit further is a bug fix that i added to this script now the reason it's a bug fix is if you delete the ink and typing keylogger essentially it will actually fail to do a sysprep to prepare the machine for imaging scrolling down a little bit further we come to a bug fix that i added to this script now the whole point of this script is to remove a lot of the bloatware and automatic trackers from windows however if you remove one in particular it will prevent sysprep from working properly that service is the dmwap push service and it's part of the ink and typing keylogger that microsoft has on the system so what i've done here is i have re-enabled that but i do recommend adding this one line to the run one section of your windows answer file to redisable the service after installation to redisable the dm dmwap push service i'm going to copy this one line right here we're then going to go back to the windows system image manager and open up our answer file with the answer file open we're going to go down to microsoft windows shell setup expand that out go to first log on commands and then right click on synchronous command and add to pass seven then on the right hand side of the window we're gonna paste that command under command line we're gonna give it a description so disable dm service and you do need to insert an order that this should occur so we're going to set this as 1 since we don't have any other commands that we're running next under require user input we're going to set that as false as this command will run and automatically apply the registry setting and we're going to save that answer file now if you're asking why i didn't do this when i first set up the answer file it's because i forgot next are a bunch of registry tweaks to disable all of the settings that you normally do in the out of box experience the online experience and windows tracking location id all that kind of thing but it disables it for every user globally on the pc and finally probably the most important fix in this script is setting windows to dark mode by default once ram the script will automatically reboot your pc and prepare it for imaging however if you have other software that you'd like to install i do recommend doing that before running this script and just to show you that you can install packages and software onto this windows installation and capture in an image file i'm going to install the c plus plus runtime rollup as well as hardware info we'll install all of those and hardware info now i don't recommend installing packages that are updated very frequently there are other software solutions to install those after install and that is one great reason to use microsoft deployment toolkit however having hardware info automatically integrated in to me kind of makes a lot of sense before we run the decrapify script i'm gonna go ahead and reboot my computer one last time once you've rebooted go ahead and open up a powershell script as administrator so right click on the start menu and go up to windows powershell admin and to run the script inside a powershell you need to tell powershell that yes you're allowed to run scripts so we're going to type in set dash execution policy space unrestricted also if you're installing this on a business environment i would recommend setting that execution policy back to restricted before actually creating your image but if you're ready to run the script we're going to type in a period and backslash to say we want to execute the 2020dcrapify.ps1 and opening the start menu you can see that a couple of our icons are already disappearing same thing with over on the left side our windows mixed reality is now missing i expect xbox game bar and your phone to go here pretty soon yep there they go and it automatically restarts and when it's booted back up go ahead and log in again and let's go ahead and take a look at our handiwork first up we're going to click on the start menu and there's nothing there there's no tiles there's no weird games there's no programs that we actually don't want installed it's just windows you can also see that all of my taskbar icons are now showing as default which is my preferred method also if we open up a new explorer window it opens up number one in dark mode and number two it defaults to going to my computer rather than your home directory and if everything looks good to you i'm gonna go ahead and delete this script and we can get the imaging underway now before you do this i do recommend doing one last thing and that is taking a snapshot of your virtual machine the reason being is if sysprep fails you have to start from the very beginning that is install a brand new version of windows and go through the entire process of customizing your image again so i'm going to go ahead and do that right now so we'll go to shutdown since i'm using proxmox it is a very simple process i'm simply going to click on the virtual machine click on backup and then say backup now the whole process takes just a couple of minutes and when it's done we can boot it back up and finally capture our windows image once you've backed up your vm go ahead and start up the virtual machine again and we can start working on the windows image the first thing we're going to do is copy our answer file that we created earlier into the sysprep directory so i'm going to grab that file right there and we're going to copy it over to the c drive windows system 32 and then sysprep and the directory looks something like that now this file does need to be named unattend.xml or it will not automatically be picked up by sysprep you can use answer files with different names but you need to start sysprep with a command line argument to make that happen once you have your answer file copied go ahead and open up sysprep under system cleanup action we're going to say enter system out of box experience i'm going to click the generalize box right here and then for shutdown options i'm going to go down to shutdown and if everything looks good to you go ahead and click on ok now what sysprep does is strip out all of the unique identifying information from the windows installation and allows you to capture an install that can then be imaged onto other pcs this is things like the computer name driver files or any other unique files that windows used to identify this pc as unique luckily this process is fairly quick taking only two or three minutes for a windows install of this size and there it goes now the next part of this process is very important so do pay attention you do not want your reference pc to boot back into windows before you capture the image once windows has been booted up it automatically installs device drivers and sets all of the unique identifiers back to their default values meaning you will not be able to capture a clean image so before you boot it is always a good idea to double check what your boot options are so in the virtual machine i'm going to click right there and then go over to options and we can see under boot order that network is set to boot up first if you're doing this in another hypervisor or on a bare metal machine your process is going to be a little bit different but make sure that you boot only to the network and if everything looks good go ahead and boot up and don't miss the press enter to boot to network because then windows will boot and that's bad now we are booting up into the windows deployment setup environment however we are not going to log in to the windows deployment services rather we're going to open a new command prompt window and capture an image through that opening a command prompt window is as simple as holding shift and pressing f10 with that opened up we're actually going to mount a network share from the windows deployment server to do that we're going to type in net use then z colon for the drive letter followed by a pair of backslashes and the ip address of your deployment server which in my case is 192.168.1.227 and then we're going to mount the rem ins t share for remote install and lastly we just need a user to connect with so forward slash user colon administrator and then whatever password you have set for your deployment server and if it says command completed successfully go ahead and go to your z drive now to capture our windows image we're going to use the deployment image and system management tool otherwise known as dism so we're going to enter in dism forward slash capture dash image forward slash image file colon and then whatever you want to name your windows image so in my case i'm going to type in win10 dash pro dash 20h2 dash decrapify dot wim next we need to define what we're going to capture so forward slash capture dir colon c colon backslash to capture the entirety of the c drive and lastly we need a name for windows deployment services so we're gonna do forward slash name colon and then in quotations windows 10 pro 20 h2 decrapify and if everything looks good go ahead and hit enter if everything was entered correctly you should see a deployment image servicing and management tool notification as well as a progress bar and all you have to do is wait the five or six minutes that it takes to capture this image and we can move on to the next step once the image has been successfully captured we can finally add it to our windows deployment server and start dualing it out to new pcs so i'm going to go ahead and close our reference pc jump over to our windows deployment server and locate our image which is right here inside of the remote install directory to add the image in we're going to jump down to windows deployment services open up your servers tab open up your server and then go to install images now if you followed my wds tutorial we're simply going to add this image to our windows 20 h2 image group by right clicking on the group and saying add install image we're going to browse for the file go to remote install and then select our image click on next verify that this is the image that we want so there's our windows 10 pro 20 h2 dcrapify looks good to me go ahead and click on next and next again to add once that's done go ahead and click on finish and you should now see the windows 10 pro decrypify image inside your image folder but we're not quite done here we still need to add our answer file to this image so i'm going to double click on the image itself go to allow image to install in unattended mode and select a file click on browse and browse to your answer file and there's our unattend dot xml so open that up click ok and click ok again and now it's time to test everything out by deploying this image so i'm going to go back to proxmox i'm going to select a brand new virtual machine with the exact same settings so uefi and q35 machine type and we're going to start this one up once again we're going to boot up to our windows deployment server but this time we're going to log into it and actually apply our image so hit next type in your machine name backslash administrator and your password in our image list you can see our windows 10 pro 20 h2 decrapify image i'm going to select that select the hard drive to install it on and then hit next all right windows is booting up and getting things ready and what it means by getting things ready this time is installing device drivers nothing else and there we go it boots right up to the login screen created our craft user and we can log in with the password of password and here we are at the desktop now it looks very much the same compared to the clean install of the retail image however if i close the please tour microsoft edge window and then go over to the start menu you'll notice a pretty stark difference if i scroll down here you'll notice there's no windows mixed reality there's no xbox game bar and even better there's no pinned tiles here with applications we didn't want like hidden object adventure games and roblox it's a clean install of windows and that's it opening up a file explorer window ah didn't keep dark mode well i'll see if i can fix that one before i release the script or if one of you wants to tackle it please be my guest but you'll notice there's no microsoft onedrive anywhere it's just gone and it will probably never come back it's everything you need and nothing you don't and there you have it how to create a clean windows install that you'll actually want to use if you like this video or found it helpful at all make sure to hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already videos like this take an exceedingly long time to do and the reason i'm able to do that is because of patreon and floatplane if you like this type of content consider joining either of those links are both down in the video description and as a bonus you'll get exclusive access to my discord server where you can chat with myself and the other hosts from talking heads thank you all so much for watching this one and as always i will see you in the next video cheers guys [Music] you

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 378,239

Rating: 4.9399123 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: PdKMiFKGQuc

Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020