I don't keep a list of what I tend to do to Win10 installs, but honestly it's not much. It tends to run well on my hardware (although I keep pretty beefy hardware). Off of the top of my head (a couple already mentioned by BH above):
- Disable Cortana
- Disable system sounds
- Turn notification area to "show all icons" so I can keep visual tabs on what's running in the background
- Based on notification area icons, set things to not start with Windows, uninstall things if necessary
- Go to Task Manager, Startup tab and uncheck anything remaining that I don't want to run every time Windows boots up
- Set Task Manager to start with Windows, start minimized. I like to keep tabs on overall system load, and TM has gotten really good in Win10
- Take a look at power options to make sure things like going to sleep, turning off display are set appropriately, and that there aren't any limits put on CPU as long as I'm on AC power (which is always since I use a desktop)
I think that's it. Hardware has gotten good enough recently that the laundry list of all of the nit-picky things for XP and Win7 aren't really necessary to running Win10 smoothly, unless you're on some pretty old hardware.
If you actually run into issues with audio glitches when recording or playing back, make sure your interface's drivers are up to date, that your ASIO buffer is set to an appropriate size, and make sure you don't have any hungry processes running in the background. Oh, and right-click on the Windows button, hover over "shut down or sign out" and make sure there aren't any pending updates awaiting a reboot for installation. Win10 does get weird when its in that state.
I think that the big sticking point for most people is the Win10 updates, and the fear of them blowing things up. MS is softening on their stance of "update or else..." but we haven't seen much change yet. I let updates install whenever they want, and I don't tend to have issues with them. The big "feature" updates that have been coming 2x per year are the ones most likely to upset your system, so maybe pay attention to when those are rolling out and suspend updates until you get an idea of how they're being received the world over.
If you're still having issues, download LatencyMon, let it run for a while, and see if it sniffs out any problematic drivers, etc that need to be updated or rolled back. It's probably a good idea to update your motherboard's BIOS at least once in its lifetime, as well as updating chipset drivers, USB controller drivers, WiFi or Ethernet device drivers...although that can be intimidating to the uninitiated since those updates rely on knowing exact model numbers and revisions of said devices.
Anyways, that's my take on it. I feel like I have a pretty good relationship with Win10. If you're really adamant about stripping Win10 down to bare bones, you can try the various debloater scripts that are floating around the net. I haven't researched these much, but here's an example anyways:
Debloat Windows 10 in 2021 – Chris Titus Tech
