[HN] Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For a certain kind of computer buyer, the first thing you always did with a new laptop or desktop from a company like Dell, HP, Acer, or Asus wasn't to open the box and start using it.

Computer manufacturers often distributed buggy, pointless, or redundant third-party software ("bloatware" or "crapware") to help subsidize the cost of the hardware.

This might pass some savings on to the user, but once they owned their computer, that software mainly existed to consume disk space and RAM, something that cheaper PCs could rarely afford to spare.

Computer manufacturers also installed all kinds of additional support software, registration screens, and other things that generally extended the setup process and junked up your Start menu and desktop.

The "out-of-box experience" (OOBE, in Microsoft parlance) for Windows 7 walked users through the process of creating a local user account, naming their computer, entering a product key, creating a "Homegroup" (a since-discontinued local file and media sharing mechanism), and determining how Windows Update worked.

Due to the Microsoft Store, you'll find several third-party apps taking up a ton of space in your Start menu by default, even if they aren't technically downloaded and installed until you run them for the first time.

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