and, reinstalling Windows in 2025 is still painful and annoying

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long time, no see. haven’t felt in a mood to write stuff, but I eventually found some motivation again. so yea, here ya go

The idea of a stripped down version of Windows always seems to show up time and time again. Sometimes it is an officially sanctioned Windows version, like Windows 7 Starter, or that weird Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs version which was nothing but XP but shrunken down to run on older (and by older I mean Windows 98 era) PCs. Other times, it is one of those awful, terrible custom Windows ISOs that were always precracked, preactivated, and fucked around to the point that it barely resembled Windows anymore.1

I think nowadays, the LTSC builds of Windows are the closest you can get to a truly clean Windows experience post-Windows 7: it lacks the MS Store, all those UWP (idk if they changed the name or something but oh well) programs were removed and replaced with good ol’ Win32 versions. It has no Xbox app, no Clipchamp, no Snip and Sketch, no Photos app, no stupid notepad that has AI inside of it for some fucking reason, no more Paint with the AI infection, the search bar actually works for once… If I knew this existed earlier, I would’ve killed for the ability to use it.

You may be wondering how is this possible. How is there a version of Windows that isn’t shit? The answer, as per usual, is it is not intended for us, the average user. LTSC is intended for businesses and those companies that have to roll out hundreds of computers every couple of years. This is big money, and Microsoft, being the shitty company that it is, knows this. So making Windows as least annoying as possible for them is paramount. Meanwhile, those Home and Pro editions of the OS are full of ads, full of AI, full of bullshit, fucking hell. Microsoft doesn’t want you to use this. And sure, you can get Enterprise LTSC builds off Microsoft, but those don’t last since they are only for testing and eventually expire. The real ISOs are pretty hard to find, unless you know exactly where to look. From the same guys that brought you MAS activator, they also host a variety of Windows ISOs. They have XP, 7, 10, even the most recent build of 11. And as you expect, they have a copy of LTSC right there.

Recently I pretty much needed to reinstall Windows once again. I tend to reinstall Windows yearly, or until I encounter an issue somewhere that I can’t be assed to fix, so fuck it, reinstalling time baby! This time, the reason for reinstalling Windows was pretty much two reasons:

The first reason is because of something stupid that past lug did and now I am paying the consequences for. So a while back I was doing some Linux fuckery, and in the process I managed to nuke the fucking EFI partition on the Windows drive which meant that my Windows drive was no longer bootable. So I decided to fix it, and well that was a pain in the ass. Even with a guide on hand, the instructions were very fucking confusing, and I really wasn’t used to CMD fuckery to this degree. TBH Linux command line stuff is more easy than any of this, but oh well. The thing that made it harder was the fact that I have multiple drives on this system, and because of this, I would need to find the correct one out of all of them. And to further complicate things more, I also had another SSD of the same size as my Windows boot drive, which made stuff worse.

Eventually I would figure it out, and I would get Windows booting up again. And everything was fine, until it wasn’t. The second reason why I am reinstalling Windows is because, since I modified the boot partition of Windows, now that I want to use Bitlocker, I can’t use it anymore, since it complains about something that was modified. And this sucked ass. Which meant that if I wanted to use Bitlocker encryption on the boot drive, I would essentially have to reinstall everything from scratch. Why use Bitlocker? It is built in the OS, and it does a good job at encrypting from what I can find, as long as you don’t use the “save the recovery key with Microsoft” option, lmao. And I don’t particularly trust VeraCrypt to actually not break, to be honest. 2

So the Windows version I would end up using is Windows 11 LTSC. The reason why this version, and not Windows 10 LTSC or just regular Windows 10, is because the LTSC version of Windows 10, while still supported up until 2032, is based off a build of Windows from 2021 (the 21H2 version). And some programs will see that you are running 21H2 and will scream “THIS WINDOWS VERSION IS NOT SUPPORTED ANYMORE, WAHHHHHH”. And regular Windows 10 won’t really get updates (unless you get ESU activated), and I just don’t want to deal with debloating and having to check my installed programs page to see if Microsoft decided to sneak in yet another bloatware program on to my PC.

so the reinstall i guess

I think the worst part of reinstalling Windows is figuring what you need to reinstall later. Unlike Android or iOS, there is no one way to actually back stuff up, and it usually ends up in a egg hunt, trying to figure out where everything you need to back up is, that kind of thing. Sometimes the program saves everything in the Appdata folder, other times they save everything inside the program folder or somewhere else, and the worst offenders save their config files inside the fucking registry. To be honest every time I do a Windows reinstall, my computer will be in this very uncanny state of existence of unfinished-ness for a couple of weeks until I finally tune every setting, and set up every program just the way I want it.

So this part is where I usually start writing down programs that I need. Then I go ahead and start backing up config files. Yuzu files, Krita, .Minecraft saves, all of these are moved and saved to my Nextcloud server. This time I was like “fuck this” and just copied over the whole fucking Appdata folder to the server, and I just called it a day. Another tool I used to save time was the ever awesome UniGetUI package manager, which can create new “app bundles” that can help you batch install a bunch of programs with a single click.3

The reinstall was pretty painless to be honest. It went as you’d expect a Windows install to go down. I remember when installing Windows was a whole day process, but now with SSDs you’re up and running in less than like, 30 minutes? SSDs are fast and awesome tbh. Eventually I was up and running to a desktop in an hour, and I was ready to start setting everything up again. However, I would end up with a very annoying, very painful issue that it took me literally 5 hours to figure out the fix.

bluescreen jumpscare, fucking kill me

So this time I ended up doing two very stupid fucking things, the first one was to enable Bitlocker, and then just, forgetting to back up the recovery code. I mean, I did save it to my Keepass vault, but Nextcloud couldn’t back it up in time, and well, shit happened, After updating my system, I would end up with this very weird, very awkward blue screens, with an error with something to do with ndi.sys. A quick search revealed that it was something probably related to network drivers (specifically, my WiFi and BT card), and well, i never really had this issue ever in my life.

I decided to do a sanity check and reinstall windows on a second spare drive, and to my surprise, I had the same result: a blue screen. Which made me realize it could be either the install media being faulty, Windows trying to install a faulty driver, my SSD could be dying, who knows. So I guess what I ended up doing is doing the whole reinstall again, and then using theGroup Policy thing to make Windows Update to stop updating my drivers. Then, I went to the manufacturer’s website to install the network drivers manually. And I think this time, I managed to fix the issue. Windows Update no longer causes me BSODs when updating, and installing any other drivers didn’t cause me issues, so I guess I can comfortably say that it was most likely an issue related to just the network adapter I had installed. Inside the Windows Update optional updates, and in the Driver tab, there is an update for the Bluetooth portion of the card, which seems to be the culprit of so much pain.4 It is pretty recent, from this year, and it is a couple versions newer compared to the one offered by the manufacturer. I am not touching that at all, fuck that lmao. I guess the lesson is to never trust anything that comes from Windows update, especially drivers.

Oh, and I was unlucky enough to end up dealing with the annoying WinRE issue, where mice and keyboard stopped working because of a really cool bug! Thank you MichaelSoft! Thankfully, I had my boot USB still at hand, and I ended using that to boot up into its WinRE recovery thing.

final thoughts i guess

After 8 hours of troubleshooting, I think I finally manage to get a working system. Stuff finally fucking works. And well I guess here are my thoughts of Windows 11 LTSC.

I really like the LTSC versions of Windows. And Windows 11 without the bullshit isn’t half bad. While the UI is kinda jank (what trying to accommodate both PCs and tablets does to a mf), it is probably a bit better compared to the flat ugliness of Windows 10. I don’t really mind the UI design in Windows 11 that much. And TBH, the animations in Windows 11 are pretty neat to look at. I like the stupid tiling thing that shows up on the top of the display. The new tabbed file explorer has really grown on me, and while I still think losing the ribbon menu was a massive loss, otherwise the addition of tabs makes it almost worth it. I also really like the icon design that default programs of Windows has. Windows sucks ass, but I guess for now, this LTSC build is an okay compromise.

page updates

  1. do y’all remember the one time Linus Tech Tips was like “hey this cool custom ISO is awesome and you should use it!” and then in classic LTT fashion, I think they were like “oh yea by the way this changes a lot of Windows tools that breaks a bunch of stuff and it also removes Windows Defender”. Yeah don’t run these fuck ass modified ISOs lmao.↩︎

  2. you can make the argument that the NSA or some other three letter organization has a master key to unlock anything bitlocker, but I think the point you start to worry about something like this, you might as well abandon all tech and move to a tech-free cabin 500 km in the woods.↩︎

  3. not really “one click to install”, you still need to be at the desk to accept the shitbillion UAC prompts, but still better than hunting down like 30 exe files.↩︎

  4. This is based off what i can find: this, this and this. I also should mention that these forum posts talk about this happening on Intel network cards, which is what I am running at this time (with the tplink Archer T5E).↩︎