You know it from Windows 11. If you reinstall Windows 11 and you're done, the start menu opens and you're immediately overwhelmed by pinned apps and advertising apps that still have to be installed with a click. But that seems to be over. The start menu is “Empty”.
Apopex came looking for help (or rather was amazed) in our forum and wanted to know if it is normal that nothing is pinned in the start menu except Edge, Settings and Explorer after a new installation. Of course that piqued our interest. So we started the experiment. DK2000 created a stick with the MediaCreationTool. Currently the 26100.2033. I installed the current Pro 26100.2605 from Birkuli and under the hood its Windows 11 24H2 Zero ISO.
The result was amazing. When installing the Pro online with a Microsoft account and rejecting the sync functions, the start menu actually started empty. The apps themselves are still listed under “All”. including solitaire. But not an advertising app that has to be installed from the store after one click.
DK2000 has installed the 24H2 Home and even there no advertising apps, or bloatware, as some call it, are installed. Home also finally starts with a clean start menu.
Windows 11 24H2 installed offline
Windows 11 24H2 Pro with online connection
The offline installation of Under the Hood is interesting. Since the defaults for the start menu still contain the placeholders, these can still be seen as long as there is no internet connection. If you then connect to the Internet, these advertising apps are downloaded and displayed as placeholders. But the placeholders now simply disappear and the start menu is empty except for the three normal entries.
We haven't been able to find out since when Microsoft has been doing it this way. About two weeks ago I had an installation of 23H2 and the start menu was still “full”, as was usual.
Thanks for the help and pictures.
