Nearly all of these "clean up" scripts are a horrendous idea to run on your machine, I see right at the top that this script disables SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned.

It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completely superfluous, like disabling "3D Objects" which has already been disabled in the latest Windows version

Just don't run this stuff.

Your comment is absolute nonsense.

You can't say anything like that without context.

SmartScreen and defender are the first things to go on my machine as they slow down computer at least by the factor of 2, if not more.

People on HN generally don't need babysitting!. Know where you are.

You complain about nonsense and than go forward and spread some on your own. You saying that SmartScreen and Defender slows down a Windows machine by a factor of 2 just makes you a nonsense clown.

Yes, I was wrong - its not by a factor of 2, more like a factor or 3 to 5. The best way to make your computer age 10 years in a second is to enable ANY antivirus. There are so many places that you can check that out if you didn't experience it, or u need me to LMGTFY ?

So you decide to double down on your wrongness? Windows Defender has a marginal impact on performance, such that for most users and most tasks it's not even perceptible.

> need me to LMGTFY

You've provided zero evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on you.

Here is 1 for you:

> As far as I can tell, as long as Windows Defender (and presumably other A/V scanners) are running, there's no way to make the Windows I/O APIs consistently fast.

https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/

This is really even a common knowledge - if you did ANY IT work, you should already know it. I can't count the number of times when server wasn't working correctly when it turns out it just has Defender on.

Yes, PC desktops commonly run AV which can impact certain common subsystems in their routine operations. This is true on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. This is perfectly reasonable for the 99% of PC users that are not programmers and power users.

> it just has Defender on

It's unfortunate Defender would come pre-installed even on Server.

You are hilarious.

It's a good post, but it doesn't substantiate your hyperbole.

Yeah, because I am not babysitter. You should do your homework :) I am glad when people hint me good info.

I do have ample personal experience - when government web server was randomly dropping from 2k req/s to 2 req/s we disabled defender and from there we had continuous 2k req/s. I have seen this literary hundreds of times. Not sure why people install AV on servers but its common in banks and similar. On home computers its even worst. I witnessed new laptop computer with 2 AVs - defender + something vendor installed like mcafe. It was so slow that while typing letters appeared 1/s.

AVs inject themselves on number of places and do all kind of "funky" stuff. All power users should disable that junk. You have other means to protect yourself. If you are grandma, sure, go for it, but grandma will not run "Reclaim Windows10" from github gist, no ?

Context is everything. It certainly doesn't justify above comment claiming "DO NOT DO THIS!!!" on HN. Its utter nonsense. We are here to talk about hacking things by definition. Power users customize their OS, not the other way around. Its pity that MS doesn't provide minimal OS (like Linux OS's usually do) but the first thing I do is not run single script like Reclaim, but dozen of such scripts and my healthy nervous system thanks me all the time because benefits are huge and minuses are minor and fixable.

If anything, we need more projects like that, more polished, more documented, more maintained. My personal fav so far is [1]

[1]: https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10