Link Shell Extension makes creating symbolic links and folder junctions very easy.Notepad Replacer lets you replace the Windows Notepad with whatever text editor of your choosing.O&O RegEditor is far better than the built-in regedit.For someone who uses Process Explorer on a regular basis, this is helpful. Windows System Control Center brings all the NirSoft and Sysinternals software together and keeps it updated.Setting your connection to a metered one (start menu > Network Status > Change Connection Properties) can supposedly indefinitely delay Windows Updates, though I've not tested this extensively.If you don't want this, look for Optimize Drives under Administrative Tools in the start menu. Windows 10 automatically defrags hard drives (or does TRIM, which is a sort of non-destructive defrag, on SSDs) every week.Ultimate Windows Tweaker and Winaero Tweaker both make lots of options available.Finally, I came across this Reddit post explaining how to block it with the built-in firewall. The usual GPE and regedit tricks didn't work for me. Disabling the web-search in the start menu proved to be pretty tricky, though.If you do like the new start menu, TileIconifier can turn icons into nice-looking tiles.If you don't like the new start menu, there's plenty of software to put it back, such as Open-Shell and StartIsBack (paid).If you're stuck using it, you can enable it with this batch file. Windows 10 Home only: GPE is disabled by default.There's a number of privacy tools out there.You'll likely need to run it after every big update. This is a PowerShell script that removes a lot of the crap. Unfortunately, it'll come back after an update, which leads to. If you haven't installed it yet (or plan to reinstall), MSMG Toolkit or NTLite can both be used to make custom (aka no-bloatware) images.Here's a few things I've found that will make it better. Out of the box, Windows 10 kind of stinks, and on newer processors you're kind of stuck with it (unless you switch to Linux).

Unchecky windows 10