By: Josiah Huckins - 7/24/2025
minute read
Every new PC or Mac has a honeymoon period where everything performs so well.
My journey with Windows 11 started this way, I built a new desktop which at the time of writing is certainly a processing power house (specs include a Ryzen 7 CPU, a hefty 48GB of RAM and a 3080Ti GPU). However, here after just 8 months time I have to say the Win 11 trip has not been without many headaches.Apart from a custom start menu, Steam and a few other game launchers, I've run a mostly vanilla installation. I did make one registry modification to remove folder previews (and the only reason I did that was because of horrid latency in using Explorer out-of-the-box).
Most of my data is on an external drive or NAS and I've stayed current with published OS updates.
Now, I like to consider myself a power user. I know my way around msconfig, control panel, gpedit.msc, msinfo32, etc. I've written various powershell scripts and batch files to administer Windows. Working in IT, I've pushed out installations using DISM and other administrative tools. The point being, I'm no noob when it comes to Windows.
That being said, if carefully tuned I should expect a stable and fast experience.
This...was not the case.
Instead, over time even basic functions have become slow or error prone, namely opening folders, copying or moving items around (>= 50MB in size on average), start menu entries not rendering consistently and multiple games stuttering.
Can't Switch
You might be thinking, if Windows 11 isn't working for me, why don't I just switch to OSX or Linux. That's a fair point. For one, Steam gaming in Bazzite is a great experience with support for an ever growing list of titles. However, not all games are supported.More important than that though, for my desktop I have apps I depend on which were only developed for the Windows platform. (I do run OSX and Linux on other devices where possible.)
So I need Windows 11, but it's steadily becoming less usable. What to do?
My new semiannual process.
I wanted to go back to the honeymoon. So I put together a plan for doing this in the least painful way I could think of.The main goal was to make data and app restoration as clean as possible, just reset, run a batch script and you're done!
I've broken down the process into the following steps.
Step 1: - Ensure all data that must be retained is backed up to on an external drive, NAS or cloud service.
You should really be doing this regardless of whether you're resetting Windows. If you're not backing up your important data, please do it before going any further (with...anything).
Step 2: - Inventory any system customizations, including registry edits, trust store certificates and drivers.
Step 3: - Inventory installed applications.
Step 4: - Prepare a post-install script to apply customizations from step 2 (see below), and automate installation of ALL apps and settings from step 3.
Step 5: - Run the Reset PC option under the System > Recovery section of the Settings app, selecting the remove all data option when doing so.
Step 6: -
This is possible with your own DNS server! Improve ease of use, integrity and allow for more options in access control. In this quick post, I'll walk through setting one up.
DNS Server Options
There are actually many options for this, including dynamic DNS services like NoIP. If you have access to Windows Server, you can configure resolvers ready to handle heavy query volumes.Your router very likely has its own built in DNS and/or DDNS server that you could use. This is what I was using for some time, but with a router hardware upgrade, the firmware I normally flash (to add dnsmasq support) is not yet available. I started looking for alternatives.
A lightweight, self-hostable option is CoreDNS. CoreDNS is written in Go, it's fast and best of all, free!
This file enables the DNSSEC plugin. After all of the above, navigate to the dns-server directory in a terminal and run docker compose up -d. This will build and start your new DNS service!