Respecting Choice, Star Wars, and Windows 11 (Premium)

In 1997, George Lucas released the Special Edition versions of the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD, declaring that they were definitive and would replace the originals. But even those who prefer those versions or later digital mulligans should be at least vaguely worried that Lucas, and now Disney, doesn’t offer a way to see Star Wars as it appeared on movie theater screens in 1977 in all its imperfect splendor.

Fans of this movie series have taken it upon themselves to “despecialize” them and release bootleg copies that come as close as possible to the original releases. One of the better examples of this work, called Project 4K, undertook expensive transfers of original 35 mm prints of the first movies, restoring them to what we experienced over 40 years ago. Without getting into the legalities of this and related work—there are almost too many projects like this to count—I appreciate the stance: It’s OK that Lucasfilm has updated these movies repeatedly, and some of the improvements it made are notably good or even necessary. But not allowing fans to also watch the originals is tantamount to the theft of our childhood and our memories.

What this comes down to, of course, is respecting choice.

And if that sounds familiar, it may be because it’s the same basic issue we face today in Windows 11. Each Windows version that preceded it introduced issues of its own. But the best versions of this product didn’t just respect customer choice, they were literally designed to meet our needs and respond to our feedback. Windows 11 serves a different master, Microsoft’s broader corporate strategies, which include tracking user activities and selling that information to data brokers as part of an effort to wring as much recurring revenue per user as possible.

Respect is a two-way street, of course. And to be clear, I respect Microsoft’s need to monetize the Windows user base. This is a market in which most customers “buy” Windows as part of a new PC purchase only once every several years. And the upsell opportunities—the software giant offers subscriptions like Microsoft 365, OneDrive storage, Ad-free Outlook, Xbox Game Pass, and Copilot Pro—are a win-win in the sense that they can be desirable to customers while providing Microsoft with a much-needed bump to its monthly per-user revenues.

Put another way, these upsells respect the traditional supplier/customer dynamic. They represent choices in which you explicitly decide to spend money to receive some service. Or not. Microsoft is right to offer these choices, just as we are right to accept or ignore them.

Unfortunately, Microsoft also crosses that line and engages in behaviors that do not respect our choices. In addition to the forced telemetry tracking and preinstalled, sponsored crapware, Windows 11 attempts to guide customers into configurations that are detrimental to them, albeit under the guise of being pro-customer. These behaviors include dark patterns, misleading and deceptive language, and routine harassment through pop-ups and full-screen ads, banner notifications, and post-update displays that appear in Settings, Microsoft Edge, the Start menu, and elsewhere in Windows 11. They rankle because they’re annoying, and because subverting them is next to impossible. And I suspect many users just give in and accept Microsoft’s invasive recommendations so they can get on with their lives.

The levers we can pull to mitigate these behaviors are many, but incomplete, individual options scattered throughout Settings, often purposefully obtuse and difficult to find. And we can’t disable every annoyance. Instead, this system is designed to harass at every opportunity, to explicitly disrespect the choices you made, as with forced Microsoft Edge usage, and, in some cases, silently ignore those choices, as when OneDrive finally just enables Folder Backup without informing you after you’ve said no to this option several times.

And it runs deeper than that. Windows 11 exhibits subtler behaviors that, while not truly evil, likely go unnoticed by most. For example, Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge both support settings sync functionality so that when you use either on other PCs or devices, it will apply your customized configuration there. But anyone who uses these products knows that this functionality is incomplete, that only some settings are applied on subsequent devices. That is by design, and it’s instructive to consider which settings changes Microsoft respects by applying them for you, and those it does not, by ignoring the changes you made before.

The default search engine in Microsoft Edge is an obvious example of a setting that does not sync between your devices. Each time you bring up a new instance of Edge, on desktop or mobile, the search engine is configured to Bing. And that majority of people who choose otherwise knows that they are immediately reminded of this fact the first time they search. And when Bing pops up then, those who prefer otherwise—a vast majority—open Edge settings and try to figure out where this option can be changed. It’s purposefully well-hidden.

Third-party web browsers sometimes behave similarly with certain options, but they’re generally better in this regard. For example, Brave of course makes its own search engine the default in its browser. But in addition to letting you change that setting, it also respects your choice by syncing it to future installations of the app. I configure DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in all browsers, and this isn’t something I need to think about or change when I bring Brave up on new devices. (Brave also doesn’t hide the search engine option like Edge does.)

(Like other browsers, Brave doesn’t sync certain company-centric features, like the appearance of the Brave Rewards, VPN, and Sidebar toolbar buttons. This is its version of upsell, essentially, what it can do to try and monetize users. Which is what makes Brave’s respecting of your search engine choice so interesting, frankly.)

The purposefully selective settings sync functionality we see in Edge is even worse in Windows 11, of course. Not just because of the many settings that sync ignores, but because, as noted, these settings are scattered, difficult to find, and incomplete in nature. To address this, I’ve long documented a set of what I think of as “post-install tasks” that users should engage in immediately after installing Windows, and evolved it over the years. You can find the latest version of this list in the Windows 11 Version 23H2 Personalization First Steps chapter of the Windows 11 Field Guide. Suffice to say, it’s been widely copied and republished in slightly altered form by others.

That’s flattering. But I’ve come to realize that just documenting where you can find and change all these options isn’t ideal, as the list of changes we should all make immediately in Windows 11 is long and ever-growing, and making these changes can be time-consuming. I suspect most people just ignore most of this or only make a few changes upfront and then wait for the annoyances to appear. Full disclosure, I often do the latter, and I find myself playing a game of whack-a-mole in which I respond to aggressions, like a “Suggested” banner notification or a OneDrive request to enable Folder Backup, as they appear. The notification, in whatever form, is the inspiration to disable that thing, where possible.

This is dumb, obviously, a recipe for being annoyed regularly. But in my case, it’s also semi-pragmatic in the sense that I need to experience what others experience so that I can document the problems in the first place and, hopefully, any workarounds or fixes. If I configure Windows 11 the way I want it, I can’t fulfill my role as the canary in this proverbial coal mine. I wouldn’t understand what Microsoft’s customers were experiencing, and I would turn into one of those “I don’t see this, so it must not be happening” rationalizers.

I can’t do that, obviously. But with the weight of these incursions growing, I’ve begun exploring third-party tools, some professional and some amateurish, some paid and some free, to help me automate configuration changes that arguably should sync when you sign in to Windows. And while it’s always dicey to recommend such things, it’s clearly getting to the point where doing so has become necessary. Tiny11 Builder falls into this category, though that particular tool does its magic only when you first install Windows 11, and it requires a bit of work on the user’s part.

I will continue evaluating Tiny11 Builder as it evolves, and I do find it quite useful as a starting point. But I also want to find utilities—or scripts, or whatever—that can address these issues post factum, after you’re already using Windows 11, are unsure of specific configurations, and would like to clean it up. This seems like the more common need.

And I have a few early recommendations.

I recently came across a tool called OFGB (Oh Frick Go Back) that approaches this configuration change problem with a minimal UI and feature-set. You just select which harassments to disable from a short list and then get on with your life. It proactively disables the top annoyances that I typically disable one at a time as they appear, plus a few others.

OFGB appears to work, but it’s unclear (to me) whether Windows 11 will silently revert some of these settings in the future, perhaps after cumulative update or feature update installs. So it’s possible that we’d need to run this utility manually from time-to-time. I will try to establish whether that’s the case and, if so, what a reasonable schedule might look like.

From a trust perspective, OFGB will set off the SmartScreen protections in Windows and/or your web browser because the download EXEs are unknown to SmartScreen and thus considered suspicious. OFGB’s authors make the source code to the utility available for those who would like to examine and verify what it does and then compile the app for themselves. Basically, it configures specific Registry keys, as promised. And while I don’t see any risk to using this utility, you should judge that risk independently.

I shy away from extensive Windows “tweak” utilities for the reasons cited above, but surely some are inoffensive and useful. And on that note, I’ve been looking at one called WinToys that could be of interest, in part because it’s available in the Microsoft Store, and in part because it collects all those scattered settings I mentioned above into a single, cohesive UI. It also lets you access options that Windows 11 doesn’t surface natively, like telemetry tracking, and provides a few unique features like a download button for the Spotlight desktop image of the day.

WinToys looks good, but as with OFGB, I will need some time to determine its long-term efficacy. For now, I’ll just say it’s worth looking at and that I will be using it myself.

I’m obviously interested in any scripts, registry files, or utilities that you use to combat the enshittification in Windows 11, too. And I expect to expand this tool belt of utilities, as I did earlier with last year’s digital decluttering work. We’re in this together, a rebel alliance fighting an empire, and while I’ve ignored this type of thing for perhaps too long, I’m ready now. So please let me know if you have any recommendations.

Oh, and go watch a Star Wars movie and celebrate the day properly. I recommend the original, in whatever form you may own and prefer. It’s your choice.