Create A Custom Windows Installer

Cut down or bulked up; Alex Cox helps you to have the Windows you need.

- Alex Cox

Windows And Bloat. Two words that, however much you might feel like Windows 10 has become a svelte and lithe OS, go together like peanut butter and jelly. Preparing a new PC usually means a new installation of Windows, and what follows—at least if you’re anything like us—is a painstaking pruning of autorunning applications, a violent excision of useless Metro programs, and the installation of all the stuff that actually makes Windows worth using.

Now, we’ve looked at trimming Windows to shape, and scraping your disk clean of accrued files, and even silently installing a whole cache of favorite apps in the past. That’s not quite what we’re doing here: Arguably, the most efficient way to ensure a quick and painless Windows install is to customize the Windows installer itself.

Cooking up your own ISO means cutting out some chaff before it even reaches your boot drive, and integrating new components into the Windows installer (or at least including those installers on there, so you don’t need to manually download them later). Note that while this is, legally, perfectly acceptable, it’s generally more of an enterprise process, and carries no guarantees with it. You also (obviously) need a unique Windows key, of the correct version, for every machine to which you apply your customized ISO.