I manage an aging fleet of Windows 11 PCs through Intune and am wondering whether there are any nonessential features worth disabling to improve performance or reduce support issues. I'm thinking about things like window shadows, animation and snap effects, preinstalled apps, and other built-in Windows components. What do you typically remove or turn off, and what changes are actually worth the effort?
5 Answers
Removing unnecessary consumer apps, such as Xbox-related packages or unwanted bundled software, can be reasonable if you test it thoroughly and have a clear support reason. I’d avoid aggressive debloat tools, deleting system services, or removing built-in apps indiscriminately. Monthly Windows changes can turn unsupported tweaks into broken taskbars, icons, or enrollment problems. Keep customizations documented, limited, and easy to reverse.
If the fleet feels slow, investigate the software you’re deploying before touching Windows’ visual settings. Multiple endpoint security, inventory, backup, vulnerability-management, and management agents can all scan the same files and consume significant CPU, memory, and disk. Check their resource usage, exclusions, scan schedules, scripts, and remediation tasks. That’s much more likely to matter than removing window effects.
Cloud desktops made this especially obvious for us: a small configuration ran well until all the security and management tools installed, after which it became nearly unusable. The agents and available CPU and memory mattered far more than the Windows interface settings.
Disabling animations, shadows, or other visual effects probably won’t produce a measurable performance improvement on hardware capable of running Windows 11. Those tweaks are more about personal preference than fleet optimization, and they can create support issues when users dislike the changes. I’d leave the interface mostly vanilla and focus on clean images, SSDs, adequate RAM, and regular hardware refreshes.
The practical baseline is a clean Windows installation with no unnecessary vendor bloat, an SSD, at least 8 GB of RAM, and hardware that meets the supported requirements. If machines still struggle after checking endpoint agents and automation, the real fix is a RAM or storage upgrade, replacement hardware, or a better allocation of resources. Don’t expect disabling shadows or animations to rescue an outdated fleet.
One targeted setting some administrators disable is Fast Startup, depending on their shutdown, patching, and troubleshooting requirements. Beyond that, I’d only disable something when there’s a documented security, reliability, or business reason. Performance changes should be measured before and after rather than assumed to help.
I’ve learned to avoid pushing personal preferences across an organization. One setting may suit most users but create extra groups, exceptions, and tickets for everyone else.