Everyone who has ever run Windows knows it comes with a lot of “extras”; Extra applications, extra games, extra not necessarily wanted functions that chew up bandwidth and some that may be seen as privacy concerns. Several web sites and administrators have come up with piecemeal pokes and tweaks to rein in the bloat, and diminish the issues and one individual known as “Disassembler” compiled quite a few of these different solutions into a single script humorously known as the “Windows-Decrapifier”. The original project is hosted here.
While Windows-Decrapifier(WD) accomplishes a great many things, it has a few flaws;
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- WD has had little maintenance over the years and lacks several of the newer features in Windows 10 as well as those in Window 11.
- WD requires coding by remarking and removing remarks “#” for configuration but quite a bit of the code is cut from other scripts which cause a lack of uniformity and duplication in parts so editing can be difficult.
- The target demographic for WD is a home computer which includes many registry calls to HKEY_CURRENT_USER that would have to be run for every person that logs on to the system.
WD development needed to be split (forked) with a different focus. First and foremost; Cube Farm is intended for use in a professional office environment (aka a cube farm). The Cube Farm branch is intended for one-time runs on new, individual Windows systems and as such HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry calls have been replaced with Default User edits so that each new person logging in will receive the changes without re-running the script.
The code in Cube Farm has been cleaned up considerably and code has been standardized so editing can be done reasonably easy. Configuration of options is done by simply adding or removing the remark character # at the beginning of each line. A line that starts with # will not be executed. Once the proper configuration has been edited in, the modified script can be used to get a uniform experience to all machines it is used on.
NOTE: Many of the Windows alterations in Cube Farm can be difficult or problematic to reverse. It is highly suggested that you double check all settings in the script and use a test computer to insure none of the modifications will conflict with your environment.
New functionality, including several Windows 11 edits, have been added, some of these include;
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- HKEY_CURRENT_USER calls have been replaced with functions that edit the Default User so that every new user to login will get the modifications.
- Support labels so customers / users can easily see who to contact.
- Allow Windows 11 upgrade on unsupported hardware.
- Windows Firewall settings
- Focus on endpoint security
- Taskbar settings for Windows 11
The process is simple; download Cube Farm, edit the options to your environment, run in an administrative PowerShell session on new Windows installs. Make sure to test your edits before making them standard for all builds.