Why you should NEVER use "Gaming ISOs"

hello everybody my name is Eric and today we're going to be taking a look at gaming or custom windows isos whatever they're called uh now I already made a video about Atlas and why you should not use that but I'm going to do this more generally about the concept now this is inspired by a member of my Discord getting probably the worst malware infection I have ever seen and to be clear the iso he used was not infected the problem was the iso he used had obliterated all of the security features in his windows install and then he uh somehow managed to install a boot kit that he uh he ultimately just bought a different SSD to solve the problem so yes getting rid of your security feature especially if you're in the Gaming Community where unfortunately people do like to rat each other bad idea but first of all before we talk about security let's talk about performance because if we can debunk the Ridiculousness of this we don't have to spend uh we it's not a trade-off between security and performance it is simply losing security so here is a guy who's actually benchmarked the isos and even though he so this is Counter Strike 2 and it seems like depending on the bench milk sometimes these trade but it's all within M of error now stock 11 is actually six frames a second ahead of debloated ahead of Atlas ahead of uh tiny uh in fact stock 11 is oh and what is going on with windx life that's the only one looks significantly off uh now this guy ran a bunch of benchmarks and you can see that some of them have different numbers this one de bloed is coming in a bit ahead uh but you can easily tell this is within Mion of error and debloating is fine as long as you're just removing apps the worst thing it can do is cause I I still don't hugely recommend it just because it can cause problems down the line with updates but okay uh but then as we get into these more extreme ones they make serious tweaks like removing Windows Defender uh disabling updates I don't mean like turning it off I mean getting rid of the infrastructure so if there's a critical vulnerability you've got to reinstall Windows uh and here again Windows 11 default is actually near the top of the custom ISO so a few that I hear about ghost ghost Spectre is a popular one now let's see where we can find the download for ghost Spectre uh okay so this is 3 GB that's quite a bit smaller than a retail ISO now let's go just look at some other options then let's just look at this channel because this guy actually at least ran the test on who is doing the best job at the socalled debloating and there is a clear winner although a lot of these are quite old uh this is uh this is uh pable OS 1809 uh and there is a significant reduction in RAM use it seems like pable OS is essentially lost media it was okay so the link didn't work and we found a Discord and this is truly Bazil so these are okay this is where someone was saying do you know where to buy it people people fall for this people are actually this gullible uh okay don't don't pay for this okay ethernet n okay I want to read the description for this Ridiculousness two simple CMD files that tweak your network drivers this has not been useful since Windows 2000 try both and decide which one works best for you okay how about no AMD hidden bios Nvidia hidden bios I'm guessing that's like the AMD CBS [Music] bios uh if you select no hidden Drive bro like I I don't even I I I don't even know what to say okay okay so we had to go with Windows 11 but we do now have a Fox OS downloading you have connection issues that's the trouble is when you go this deep into these uh tweaks uh did they actually strip the hcp from the system we're going to find out we're going to find out what they've done but I I'm just kind of I'm kind of in shock at this point okay so here is Ghost Spectre this is the first and this one at least it's freely available this is 21 H2 and uh you know I'm not expecting it to oh okay okay it's fairly customized only installer okay so oh we have to okay so set up a starting they've added a few things okay they've made the uh Windows installer a lot less readable okay compact I'm going to guess that super light comes with less stuff and plus death is going to be plus Defender uh and in fact look much as I don't recommend it the only tweak that these isos are going to make that's going to have any effect on performance is Defender purely because there is a performance hit and there is not a gaming latency hit none of this will affect your gaming latency I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself I just want to make that very clear but there is a genuine when you open a file everything's got to be scammed by Defender that takes uh a fraction of a second but you can perceive the difference so to that extent disabling Defender does make the system feel a bit more responsive oh wow so ghost Spectra has even completely killed the O and we're just setting a password for the administrator okay and now we got to set it again so we can okay now we're in uh yuck okay I don't I do not like this no okay don't don't be putting your okay that's that's annoying oh oh the toolbox okay so this comes with while it has removed some windows bloatware uh this comes with with uh some bonuses of its own now while that was going I've also downloaded Fox and fox OS at least this far looks more like uh Windows this you would you wouldn't even know this was a drro so so let's go back okay so we get a custom background I actually like it that looks cool reminds me a bit of snow leopard and let's see if the claim the fame of getting rid of bunch Services is true login is actually pretty slow for Windows okay so there are fewer processes and there is okay this is actually less than uh what that other YouTuber found okay so there's only a gigabyte of ram in use for the whole system so okay and they've also uh killed the animations and while this is a Windows 11 build it's looking and behaving like 10 uh but it is it's uh the very first build and it doesn't see our Network cone okay okay I can try the dhtp okay Fox are still going so let's see uh if we can fix ghost Spectre oh and I I think they oh no that that's just a WTF why okay so the only thing you could ever besides testing M the only reasonable thing you could ever use this D for is some sort of offline like if you're running a CNC machine offline never connected to a network fine there's no other this is just this is Extreme they have definitely they've succeeded at reducing the resource usage but no on the bright side there are no suspicious processes and there are a few processes in general so I'll give him p on that now uh let's try foxos which while I don't super trust the people behind it uh it seems closer to vanilla okay and here's uh the post setup okay task schedule delete and this is where it's doing some sort of post install oh oh we got we got a logo ISO is free and not for sale which reminds me that people do pay for uh snake oil isos and they've also they've done made it like Windows XP where the icons don't group to me that seems like an odd tweak okay installing some things installing a power plan okay that's that's another tweak that will actually make performance difference but you don't need don't need uh a customize so for that applying tweaks disabling hibernation disabling remote terminal Services disabling okay oh my so they really people must really be trying to sell this made by cat gamer op okay uh this is such a I I I don't this is such a scary looking all caps I'm just booting my other VM just nope no the networking is fine so it's not that there's something wrong with my VMware it's just both these isos manag to break the networking so we need to run this command oh oh and this shows on every boot okay that's not great I installed this oh okay okay and now it works maybe they did that to stop the Microsoft Account creation that's the only way reason I could think they would do that and we've still got all of our visual effects disabled we can actually uh we can do that we go over to system then we go to about and then we go to advance system settings okay so good they left this on and they left that on fair enough this doesn't this doesn't really make performance difference but it does it does feel more respons Ive without the animations you can see what the results usages out of the box okay so they're definitely the claim that this is using very little in the way of results this seems to be true 900 megabytes and 55 processes so let's just see got any security okay we got window security settings okay but no no uh Defender what uh I I just okay so UAC is off that's not a performance okay like does it is it that it there is no performance effect of having UAC disabled that is not a performance tweak what are these people doing and then we got this firewall off maybe for people who don't know how firewalls work uh firewalls don't like no the default Windows Firewall setting is not adding latency that is ridiculous Yep looks like there's no updating so okay now we could check we can check activation just to see if that's been affected no okay okay so that's still here it's probably so they don't get slapped by Microsoft but that is the least of your worries okay well I guess the only thing really left okay let's try this link where does this go okay this just goes to this Discord where you can buy snake oil tweaks for real money the iso is free but okay there's drivers in here oh and it's still it's not that like this is no no better than any other windows browsers okay and this is legitimately a good tool if you're on Windows and you want to use Nvidia and MV cleaning stall is good H this is fine I don't get bundling all this stuff like people can download it and here is all of the information about this this uh cat guy C guy cat gamer op we can go to his patreon we go to his Tik Tok his twitch his Twitter his YouTube uh cat gamer op let's see okay we get an Nvidia driver guide best way to overclock and invid GPU install multiple Windows yeah all this looks fine how to properly bench milk uh that's good to know now speaking of bench mils as I alluded to earlier I'm just going to pull up the videos I was watching of those bench milks cuz inevitably if you're not convinced that this isn't a good idea if maybe you don't care maybe you have nothing to lose security wise uh the only thing then really you got to worry about first of all is anti cheats are not going to like this and a lot of anti cheets don't like really out ofate windows cuz they think you might be doing it for the sake of running a boot kit for cheats like fold isn't going to like it uh but okay so what's true is that these do out of the box use significantly less resources now latency let's see okay this is latency mod now latencymon as far as I remember yeah that was my issue so these are not so so you know how uh that unit looks like a u uh those are micro seconds those are not milliseconds there's a huge difference uh that is those are millionths of a second not thousandths so there is no possible way that any human is going to feel the difference but okay we' Prov there is a difference so here's valerant which may not run now these are outlier results to me uh but maybe there's something going on here now this is uh this is one of the better results the other guy found basically no difference yeah now this is other channel ineffable benchmarks who tried this out and we can see again uh that there's not a big difference and what is really unusual is sometimes stock Windows 10 is beating the mods quite dramatically here which to me just indicates there's quite a bit of ulion of error and see and you can look at frame times two uh and 1% lows uh and it's pretty clear that there's not this huge difference okay so now I'm going to show you how you can debloat uh Windows 11 just the vanilla version that comes from Microsoft no security risks and we're not going to do anything crazy like get rid of Defender uh we're just going to install this and then we're going to set it up uh for better privacy and without compromising security okay so now we got to name the device put anything you want I actually like that they added this back rather than just defaulting it to desktop as they did in Windows 10 now you can still if you have Windows 11 Pro you can skip the Microsoft account uh by doing uh worker School sign in options and then domain join instead even if you don't actually have an active directory system and then you can just put in your username and your password if you want one now let's get rid of all of this junk now of course most of this is off but you cannot get rid of diagnostic data but we can do a bit better with uh the tools that we're going to run once we get in to get rid of more of this okay so now we have the default uh Windows 11 experience and now we can deblo it now the tool I'm going to recommend for this is the Chris Titus Tech tips tool because it's not the most aggressive but it is one that is very unlikely to break your system and will actually leave you with a stable system that you can keep using rather having to reinstall it every few monthes okay so here we get our tweaks and we can okay we can create that we can disable a bunch of stuff get rid of telemetry get rid of this this hibernation uh takes up a bunch of space on your H drive if you don't use it home Group location tracking storage sense probably don't want Wi-Fi sense you probably don't want but if you want uh location services basically does the same thing as location services does on the Mac no shut up that gets rid of a ton of telemetry and we can set a bunch of servic to manual yeah this one you probably don't don't I wouldn't run any of these Adobes you can get rid of IPv6 but why would you uh get rid of co-pilot if you don't like it you can get rid of the notification tray some of these are pretty destructive and you can't easily undo now this is one of the more extreme settings if you want something more like what you would get with one of those isos but there's not a lot of Point don't remove edge uh having a system without a browser is just a nuisance uh don't remove one drive unless you really don't like it then you can uh and you can configure Oho shut up tweaks if there's something specific you want and there's also some nice presets up here in terms of what is recommendable and what is a bad idea here we can get rid of more stuff like suggestions which will get rid of the bulk of telemetry but it'll leave a few things that you might you you might be more okay with these app access I I wouldn't bother with these purely because regular Windows programs which what most people use are unaffected yeah these are all these are all same settings so we can simply leave these as is and just run the standard tweaks and then you're probably good and now we can see down here that the tweaks are finished and the benefit of setting the services to manual real disabled is for example if you have a printer most of these tweak tools will get rid of the principle service but if you have a printer you probably want that so now let's see how our resource usage is doing so we have 30 fewer processes than we do by default instead of our Ram surging up to 2 gb it's hovering at 1.6 GB which is not as low as the uh questionable isos but it's significantly lower and the CPU usage is lower so we've pretty much achieved a lot of what the iso's achieved and we've kept all of our functionality and of course we've kept all of our security our Windows Defender is still running just like it always did except for automatic sample submission which some people may find to be a security risk so that is going to be all for this video I hope you enjoyed it uh please let me know in the comments below uh if you agree or disagree with my opinions about isos and of course there are always edge cases where these things might be useful and I can respect that but telling people to install these on their main computer is bad advice all for now bye

Channel: Eric Parker

Views: 59,831

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Id: nyMHBKlNk9c

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2024