Why you should NEVER use "Gaming ISOs" 

Solution: don't use gaming ISOs, use real Windows 11 or make your own debloated ISO with NTLite, MicroWin, etc

>remove Microsoft bloat >proceed to bundle your own bloat

disabling firewall is crazy

UACs being off increases performance and efficiency... Of the viruses

I'm glad this is about bootleg Windows installations and not about the PS2, PSP and GameCube games I download

Its unfortunate how most of bootleg ISOs end up being windows with extra bloat or malware

Debloating your OS is like removing junk from your house. Removing your anti-malware software is like removing the walls and roof of your house. Edit: the main point of the House analogy is that you do not have full control over malware getting onto your computer. A new vulnerability may be found, a worm may enter your network. These are not things you can prevent with “not downloading sketchy files”. To use the house analogy, it’s like removing your front door and saying “it’ll be fine unless you bring a criminal into your house on purpose.” As if a criminal cannot now just walk in on their own.

If anyone wants to have a "debloated" windows, just grab and ltsc iso and use something like chris titus' tool afterwards. Putting your trust into some random small group of people releasing "gaming" windows isos is, uh, not a great idea.

Reading through these comments it's clear the majority people have no idea what has an impact on performance and security. With that in mind it's no wonder there is a market for these "improved" Windows ISO's.

Basically don't use them unless the machine is completely offline at all times. You won't be able to run the majority of pc games, and even if you run emulators, you'd need to manually update every time if you want to emulate an old console I'd probably think of using these to run windows off a usb 2 drive and share ntfs drives on the local network

I Can’t wait for my cousin to ask for help installing “WINDOWS 11/10/9/7 EXTREME GAMING CUSTOM ISO UNLIMITED RAM 8k TEXTURES”. Idk how you choose these video ideas but too many have been relevant in my battle to teach him basic internet etiquette😂 Keep up the great work, I can’t believe it’s already almost 50k🎉🥳

Disabling the firewall for better performance would be like disabling all the locks on your car to make it go faster.

Firewalls are actually good for performance, so I don't get why they disable it. Windows Firewall has an algorithm to detect DDoS attacks and can in most cases prevent those just fine, aside that a Firewall can be really helpful in other security cases. Also my guess is, that UAC was disabled, was maybe because the ISO makers thought "UAC is probably annoying to gamers, let's just deactivate it". I do get that UAC is annoying, and I have it off myself, on one machine, but for the average uninformed user it's a much better idea to have it on.

Solution: Debloat your own Windows using specific tools, or use linux. Edit: People arguing in the reply section saying that linux is not that good for gaming. I haven't clarified enough, so what i meant to say is that if you tried using tools e.g. NTlite, and you're not satisfied, maybe switching to linux is the last option.

What Atlas does better than any gaming isos is that they give you the options if you want to disable the windows security measures or not

Very interesting channel you got there... Do you have a video maybe explaining how you got into understanding how to find viruses or where to start with understanding viruses.

I love using the de-bloated windows builds, Mainly Tiny10, in VMs cause it take me back to the times of XP "de-bloating" Simplifying an already simple OS, 0 unwanted services, fast boot on non-ssd drives. _Clean._ Used to capture before and after environment snapshots in those VMs to make portable apps I could run at school and share with the pals on NZB Matrix.

This video while technically accurate in its general description is clearly being misinterpreted by people in the comments. iso's like Ghost Spectre aren't malware or bloated, they actually do exactly what they say, the issue presented here is removing a bunch of security features and updates may lead to you being vulnerable to malware in the long run, however I'd argue that can be mitigated by using your own 3rd party solution that will be miles better than the default "windows security" anyway. Also, you are totally right about the performance difference being non-existent but I'd argue a lot of these so called "security features" and addons are more of an annoyance than anything and a lot of us want a simpler system where we actually can control what's happening. That's why I'd be tempted to use a custom iso, not for better performance but to have a closer to Windows 7 experience.

just some advice for people who dont know, HAVING RAM IN USE ISNT BAD, unused RAM is wasted RAM so if the system can cache stuff that you're likely to use then why not do that, the system will automatically free up more RAM for programs that actually need it, so basically having RAM in use is a direct upgrade, especially if you have 32GB+ where you're very unlikely to run out anyway

Windows defender caused major lag on my pc as it kept scanning trough my hard drives, so I removed it, now I just regularly scan my pc with multiple non-install anti-malware tools, never had an issue.

What the whole simple main problem is: you don’t know what any old joey has done to the OS to debloat it…

I’m not happy with MS and don’t defend them, but Windows 11’s bloat is easily managed with local group policy, PowerShell and sysinternals. It ships in this state because MS knows that low-hanging fruit (ie Home users) won’t bother removing features.

To be fair this "margin of error" becomes a really noticable boost in performance on low end machines

Use AtlasOS or ReviOS which are AME wizard based, they both allow you to keep defender and updates. They are literally just debloat scripts because they don’t distribute isos.

ISOs on the internet are a "use at your own risk" type deal and those that publish them should make that fact more clear. If you want to use a debloated ISO you need to know what you're getting into. There are examples of small form ISOs that are 100% software compatible but the general "gaming os" developer is going to ignore it for a smaller ISO size. They turn off stupid things as well. As someone who debloats their own system, It's much more effective to learn how to debloat your own ISO and make the system uniquely yours but if you're unable to do that then use a debloat script, 100% agree.

gaming

As a Linux gammer I didn't know this was a thing and find it funny, because without "debloating" most Linux distro are way more lightweight then any of these debloated windows ISOs (and even non native games run better under Linux on my system then on Windows). Now to be fair it's not for everyone, but if your at the point of installing hacked windows 11 maybe just try Pop_os. Which does actually provide security, unlike the modified Windows 11.

I was never a fan of these debloated ISOs because they always remove way too much stuff, to the point that important functions that many people use are just plain missing, and you can't get them back without completely reinstalling Windows. If you want debloated Windows, do it yourself, there are tools for it and you have control over what gets removed and what doesn't, so you can keep features that are important to you.

I have win 10 the ghostspectre version, not because of the alleged performance boost (there is, but it's negligible), but rather for convenience - the ghost toolbox comes in handy. Everything useless is already disabled. That said, lots of services/policies are disabled by default so if one doesn't know what to look for when some specific hardware isn't working, it's definitely less hassle installing ms version.

from what i can tell there are good reasons to get rid of onedrive because at some point it has redirected the locations of all the folders it syncs by default, so anything installing in to those locations or any files moved there will actually be moved to onedrive instead. just for soley that reason i have entirely removed it and reverted that change, i want my folders to be very much where they say they are and not some fuckery to trick me in to accidentally using a software that does the same thign as what im already using.

A few years ago I used a Windows 10 ISO that was said to be "for games" and that it was actually faster, but I realized that UAC, AntiMalware and Firewall were disabled. I didn't care about that at first, but when I suddenly started having my google, gaming and Microsoft accounts being hacked, I immediately uninstalled it and always used the antivirus, and to this day my passwords have been leaked and some accounts are still trying to be hacked. I never complained about having low FPS on Windows again.

I wonder why GhostSpectre had jetbrains toolbox installed (or well, it looks like the jetbrains toolbox icon)

I do debloat any Windows PC I get using open source software but ISOs are a security nightmare lol. Great video though man! I thought it was up to par with one with 250k+ views.

What about the kind of debloating that isn't an iso? Playbooks using something called Ameliorated. I've seen that and theoretically it's just a script you run on stock windows which wouldn't be as bad as a full on iso, but I'm not sure whether it's trustworthy or not.

What Linux distro you use? Also they disable UAC to auto-execute their scripts without needing the user to accept the prompt

What security features are commonly removed? I know some custom ISOs remove windows defender but are there other security features that get removed or disabled?

The two main issues behind the philosophy these Gaming ISOs seem to have are: 1. If anything effects performance, their solution is just to remove it entirely rather than tweaking the program to not effect performance. Sure some services that run on windows by default a lotta people likely aren't gonna need or utilize, but why remove Windows Defender? While it is true that Windows Defender can effect performance, that's mainly because of real time protection. Why don't these ISOs just disable real time protection and set defender to scan occasionally (once every few days or a week)? What if someone wanted to scan a file they downloaded, or got suspicious and wanted to see if they got infected? They would have to either rely on Virus Total, which won't work offline, and use a third party anti-virus, which would probably use more resources than Defender, even with real time protection disabled. It's also possible to tell Windows Update to delay updates, only install security updates, and not be invasive about restarting the computer to update it. But no, they just disabled the whole thing. Hope you're not using WiFi since a critical vulnerability recently was found, which these ISOs won't let you update to fix it. 2. If anything gets in the way and takes time from the user, even if it's a security related, they disable it. The only benefits for disabling the firewall are no firewall pop ups for opening games that use the internet for the first time, and users wouldn't have to deal with having to mess with the firewall if it's blocking a connection, such as hosting a server. But is it really worth the degrade of security to remove a pop up that only appears once per program accessing the network and only takes two clicks to remove, and to remove firewall blocking shenanigans that only really apply to older games and programs (and that's if they even happen)? No, not really. Better to educate people how the firewall works rather than just disabling a big security feature. And what's the point of disabling UAC? Is a pop up for warning the user that a program wants more access to the computer really that impactful on time and "performance?" Or are these developers still salty over Windows Vista introducing the feature like they're stuck with a Windows XP mindset? Bonus: Why use Windows 11? I know Windows 10 isn't gonna be supported soon, but it's not like these Gaming ISOs are gonna be able to update either. Windows 10 hasn't had a feature update since 2022, so might as well keep using it since there's less of a chance of there being an update later down the line that would break the Gaming ISOs that the devs would have to fix to include it in the next ISO release, compared to Windows 11's yearly feature updates. Windows 10 being older also means more people understand it than Windows 11, so it's easier to develop for it.

One important note is that disabling automatic sample submission in Windows Defender can *dramatically* reduce its effectiveness. Almost a 30% reduction in detection rate, by at least some tests.

I really enjoy your content :) thank you

25k Member count on that discord... imagine the ISO botnet

windows 10 LTSC never let me down -official, from MS -long support period -no bs apps -no ms store (but you can get it back with some commands, never needed it) -nothing broken

It fun how they tweak stuff, which doesn't need tweaking at all. Disabling WIndows Defender+Mitigations is a black flag. The firewall being disabled was a literal joke. They thought, if they set the network connection to "Public"; it will do what it says, but this actually requires an active firewall. They left the barn unlocked. lmao.

the discord purchase stuff blew my brain with how ridiculous this stuff is! who is buying this crapware🤣

Pay attention to the 1% and 0.1% lows because those differences can often be much more noticeable and indicative of how the experience varies To be fair, you can represent the whole thing with 1 or 2 stats but latency and framerates are part of the perceived performance picture

If you want to debloat Windows there are good tools like NTlite,that has the possibility to use presets, or other tools like MSMG Toolkit and MicroWin, or maybe use the LTSC version of Windows. Custom ISOs can have keyloggers or hidden malware.

This is what happens when people don't adapt. What they are saying made a lot of sense in the 1980s, 1990s, and even in the 2000s. I remember back in the Windows Vista days, with 2GB ram machines running on hard drives, every little bit helped when a random read call from a windows processes could add 100ms of latency to the hard drive in random reads. But, nowadays, when the whole game is basically cached in ram and people have NVME SSDs, all of this is utterly pointless.

Make your own ISO, I'll daily drive it

It sucks that people don't debloat stuff themselves

Atlas??? Atlas Earth?? I just bought more land in the metaverse?

Just use LTSC.

Man this is a really good vid!!

7:32 if you are running a CNC offline, you should be using RT Linux or QNX or Windows CE or something like that.

I think one exception is there, Debloated Windows *BUT only if you debloat the iso yourself*

Just switch to Window Iot Ltsc Enterprise best debloated version of windows from Microsoft themselves.

I do a lot of programming that involves a lot of data, commonly in a bunch of files. Whenever I have to run something that walks through a directory with tens of thousands of files I always have to disable defender or else it takes so much longer. A side note I guess there is one exception where defender affects gaming, that is with streaming assets and games that use a lot of small files and for whatever damn reason let resource loads hold up the system. My friend use to use these ISOs and all they did was make it impossible to install any software because no .net or c redistributables were automatically obtained.

Very good explanation on what these "de-bloated iso's" actually does to your system and how bad it actually is using one if you now so "dare" to do so witch you should not do in any world!

I really feel like the big "tech" channels should have the hosts required to go through basic cybersecurity trainings. Such trainings are now enforced in public sectors and many corporations, and yet many "tech influencers" still even fall for malware exe files in email attachments. Many people get tech info from them, and if they could help spread the words, I'd bet many issues would be resolved much sooner. I do debloat Windows since Windows 10 came around, and my main focus is literally for security. My system runs smoother than blank Windows 10 official ISO installation while having even more strict security-related policies enabled and extra firewall block entries. Just get rid of non-security bloat add-ons on your own that grind harddrives or connect to the internet in the background without users' consent. These are the culprits for wasting resources, not security features or updates.

You can actually ungroup icons on Windows 11 with one of the newer versions, forget which but they added it maybe a year ago? UAC being disabled and firewall is probably because they add user input, which is _extremely stupid viewpoint_ but it is technically making things faster.

I always disable Defender. I download from trusted sources and Windows defender doesn't do shit against zero days.

love how nobody is questioning the name “GHOST SPECTRE” 😭 yes i would definitely install an operating system on my computer that is named after a dangerous security vulnerability and looks like those bootleg OSes i used to install when i was like 8 and didn’t know better lol

Removing Edge breaks a lot of unexpected things. In my case I couldn't run games from MS store

I sadly use a debloated ISO, because i accidentally wiped my drive, and my wifi was very slow to download actual windows 11, so i installed the debloated ISO because it was smaller in size. I regret it ever since, but due to my bad internet connection its very hard to reinstall, and 50% of the apps i use dont even work.

Damn music is still back

I remember looking into Atlas OS forever ago and the second I saw it disabled UAC and specter/meltdown mitigations I instantly turned tail and ran. Sure, I'm a technical user and far less likely to download a virus by mistake but everyone makes mistakes eventually and viruses often get hidden in plain sight.

I tested on my old pentium laptop that turning off UAC indeed speed up things especially those with your background gets darken. I'm not sure with the firewall part tho

It is not really a big problem but in ctt tool I don't like that it is not clearly stated that the main thing that removes telemetry (OO) is not open source. When I am downloading open source tool I expect that this tool doesn't run any external non open source software without warning

Also with these debloated versions of Windows with certain features disabled another thing is that even single player games will have issues if they use any of the features that are disabled. Also with more modern CPUs like 10th and 11th gen Intel for example they perform better with the Specter and Meltdown mitigations enabled vs older CPUs like the i7 7700K. Heck if the disabled features prevents a game from launching the Anti-cheats are the least of your worries because they are useless if the game fails to launch.

The only one I'd consider maybe is ReviOS, as you first install windows normally then run a AME Wizard playbook which is fully open source.

removing random services is such a great idea clearly

Tiny11 is actually not too bad: they have a builder which means you can see into everything its doing. I only use it on my secondary laptop due to improved battery life. On my desktop I use LTSC Windows 10. I've used Tiny 11 for a while now, Defender is fully working as well as updates, so I don't have any reason to believe its dangerous. It doesn't screw about with the UAC/Firewall either

-bloatware -telemetry -background processes Once you get installing and using windows that stuff will add up

Can you find a way to isolate the tweaks from chris titus tech because I wanna make it more auto so to speak but its embedded with all the other code.

I see potential Eric, I appreciate the work you have put in. But i just found it hard to watch. No structure, no immediate proof or sources of claims, opening questions instead of closing them.

bro bought a new ssd 💀

I wonder how bad would be to use a "gaming windows iso" in a vm. I play cod using gpu passthrough in a kvm and considered using atlas os etc to improve latency. Looking glass is that good so I need none of that but still...

I've had terrible experiences with custom ISOs and debloating scripts on Windows. Inevitably down the line something you didn't expect breaks and you try to troubleshoot and you find out some seemingly unrelated service that you disabled 2 years ago is linked to something that is now expected to work but doesn't so your OS is broken with no repair except reinstalling. And god forbid if any debloat iso/script user decides to subscribe to PC Game Pass, you'll have the time of your life getting that to work.

Crazy to think people will download any "gaming" ISO

I use FoxOs 10 strictly for League of Legends on a sectioned off vlan. From my tests between stock 11/10 debloated it came out on top in latency/fps by a large margin.

I love how there's so much Windows fanboys in the comments rambling about how they disabled defender and firewall and nothing happened and for you to quit your bullshit. People just don't know what they're saying.

so he basically had a skill issue and a zoomer take over custom builds of windows? i'm using spectre for almost 3 years by now, and never had an issue, as long as you keep your virus definitions up to date with microsoft server and not some scammy custo kms you're good EDIT: debloat is not all about fps, sometimes you just need to cut 200 processes down to 80, and stop microsoft spying on your minecraft gameplay by removing all the crap they install and run in the background. but you should never remove defender and updates. (in your example, you went with superlite but didn't chose the defender aswell. I find compact + DEF to be the cleanest of all other custom builds)

I think Eric's favourite anime is Serial Experiments Lain. Just a hunch...

UAC is NOT a secure feature. UAC bypasses are not considered security bugs by Microsoft. The only secure approach is to stop using administrator accounts. Using an administrator account on Windows is like using the root account on Linux.

snappy driver installer is safe (in my experience), however the one shipped with the fox iso is snappy driver installer origin, a known fork which contains malware

I wonder how the standard MicroWin install performs

that's not an iso issue, it's an user issue. i disable all this crap, never use anti virus, never had a problem so long as i don't put other people's flash drives on my pc. that said, i never installed a custom iso. i'd rather debloat myself. and well, since late last year, linux has taken over as my main OS.

This is the trouble with gaming iso's: 1. Security and privacy risks 1A. Malware injection 1B. Unintended consequences 2. Performance and functionality issues. 2a. Unoptimized performance 2b. Missing features 2c. compatibility issues 3. Stability and bug concerns. 3a. unforseen bugs. 3b. unreliable tweaks. 4. Legality and ISO support. 4a. Legality 4b. Lack of support from iso creator. What to use: Windows 11 LTSC edition

All I did was install W11 with the English (World) option, bypass entering a microsoft account with Rufus and running some tweaks from Chris Titus' tool. Now it runs fine on the 4gb laptop I'm having to use atm.

If you want a lightweight version of Windows 10 or Windows 11 without bloatware, just use the LTSC version of Windows 10 or 11 from Microsoft. Good luck getting a license though.

I could've sworn you were Matt Parker.

Pretty ironic they chose the name of an exploit for their infinitely more exploitable OS.

If you want a lightweight windows ISO, LTSC is definitely the way to go.

Is open shell safe ? im just more worried if updates could brick the taskbar or worse breaking the system thats why im asking if its safe

These ISO's are not for average user. You MUST know what you're doing. I've been using Ghost 11 for almost half a year now and didn't get any issues so far. You should manually install gpu drivers. It did connect to the internet for me but it may not be the case for others so you also probably need drivers for that too. For the animations, it's just disabled in the settings. I got the one without defender for special purposes but if someone wants to play games, they should install with defender. You should be aware of the risks and not be stupid.

Eric do u know that u can use the original Win 11 iso and use an unattended. xml file to debloat it

Last time i did this, the ghost spe... Win 10. The first boot it work but the second boot, deleted itself

Me refusing to install any Software Updates and disabling any Antivirus because i dont give a a sh*t about my Windows Install, there is no sensitive or critical data on my Win Install (My Main OS is Archlinux)

Im only using tiny10 for some VMs on my server for storage efficiency. On every normal computer i just install stock windows 11 without the ads

I ve been using "gaming os" w/o defender, updates for 5 years and UAC on Admin account, scanning time to time with malwarebytes for 5 years and havent got any system infection. It all depends how stupid the user is.

eric what linux distro do you use? i use arch btw

The only thing I do is to completely fuck up windows update and windows defender so they don't annoy me and depleating my data plan or removing shit I don't want to remove. That's all I do and it works and never had any issues or viruses