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Windows PC preparation

This directory contains a personal, repeatable Windows 11 workstation setup. The scripts favor native installers managed by WinGet, keep user-scoped tools in the current user's profile, and stop on the first failed required step.

Requirements

  • 64-bit Windows 11 with Windows PowerShell 5.1.
  • WinGet from Microsoft App Installer, network access, and enough disk space for the selected applications, Visual Studio Build Tools, and Python packages.
  • An account that can approve one User Account Control prompt. Run the main entry point as the user who should own the Git, Rust, Conda, and alias setup.

Review the package list and applicable vendor licenses before running the full setup. The scripts are unattended where installers support it, but they do not bypass vendor license requirements.

Security model

  • WinGet calls use exact package IDs and explicit winget or msstore sources; Chocolatey font installs use the explicit public community source.
  • The documented Command Prompt commands use ExecutionPolicy Bypass only for the newly started Windows PowerShell process and its local script. They do not change the user's persistent execution policy.
  • Within the complete setup, the only direct executable download outside a package manager is Miniconda's official installer. Its Authenticode signature and Anaconda signer name are checked before execution, and its temporary installer is removed in a finally block.
  • Package managers still rely on their repositories and vendor installers. Keep WinGet, Windows, Defender, and the installed applications current.

Run the complete setup

From a normal (not elevated) PowerShell window:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
cd D:\GitHubSrc\pcprep\windows
.\prepare_new_box.ps1

Or, from a normal Command Prompt:

cd /d D:\GitHubSrc\pcprep\windows
powershell.exe -NoLogo -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File ".\prepare_new_box.ps1"

Add -Yes to either invocation to skip the confirmation prompt. Use -Help to show usage without starting any setup step.

The script requests elevation once for machine-scoped work. Do not start the whole setup as administrator unless necessary: Rustup, Miniconda, Git settings, and aliases are intended for the current user.

To supply Git identity without an interactive prompt:

$env:user_name = 'Your Name'
$env:user_email = 'you@example.com'
.\prepare_new_box.ps1 -Yes

In Command Prompt, use set "user_name=Your Name" and set "user_email=you@example.com" before the powershell.exe command.

What the setup does

The normal-user phase:

  1. Installs or updates Git, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub CLI with WinGet.
  2. Installs Codex CLI and Claude Code with WinGet unless a working command installed by another mechanism already exists.
  3. Requests one elevated child process for machine-scoped setup.
  4. Installs Rustup and selects the latest stable x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain.
  5. Compiles and runs a temporary Rust program to verify the MSVC linker and Windows SDK integration.
  6. Registers the adjacent aliases.doskey for Command Prompt and configures Git, File Explorer Gallery visibility, Miniconda, and Python packages.

The elevated phase:

  1. Reuses Chocolatey at %ProgramData%\chocolatey or installs it with WinGet when it is genuinely absent.
  2. Verifies a Visual Studio installation containing the x64/x86 MSVC compiler and linker plus a usable Windows SDK. If incomplete, it installs or modifies Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 with the Desktop development with C++ workload.
  3. Runs utilities.ps1.
  4. Exposes a conservative allowlist of advanced power settings. It changes only visibility attributes, not the active plan or any AC/DC values.

WinGet's install command is used intentionally: missing packages are installed, older packages are upgraded, and current packages are left alone.

Utility applications

utilities.ps1 installs these package IDs:

  • Hardware and diagnostics: HWiNFO, CrystalDiskInfo, GPU-Z, HeavyLoad, UltraSearch, and Sysinternals Suite.
  • Graphics and media: Paint.NET, Adobe Acrobat Reader, VLC, Foxit PDF Reader, GIMP, IrfanView, Inkscape, and Blender.
  • Developer and system tools: 7-Zip, Wget, Go, Rufus, Node.js LTS, CMake, and PuTTY.

To run only this utility installation, use an elevated PowerShell window:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
cd D:\GitHubSrc\pcprep\windows
.\utilities.ps1

Or use an elevated Command Prompt:

cd /d D:\GitHubSrc\pcprep\windows
powershell.exe -NoLogo -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File ".\utilities.ps1"

Blender uses the official Microsoft Store product 9PP3C07GTVRH. The regular WinGet community manifest currently downloads from download.blender.org, whose Cloudflare challenge rejects non-browser WinGet downloads on this network.

Fira Code and Cascadia Code are installed from Chocolatey's public community source because they are not present in the configured WinGet catalogs. If Chocolatey cannot be found, only those fonts are skipped.

Adobe and Foxit updater services are deliberately disabled immediately after their applications are installed. Rerun utilities.ps1 regularly so the PDF readers continue receiving security updates.

Some utilities have special behavior:

  • HWiNFO and GPU-Z can load signed hardware-access drivers while running. Avoid running multiple low-level sensor tools simultaneously.
  • HeavyLoad intentionally stresses CPU, GPU, memory, or storage. Monitor temperatures and stop it if the system becomes unstable.
  • Sysinternals Suite and GPU-Z may be installed portably and therefore might not appear as conventional entries in Installed apps.
  • Rufus is portable and does not install a background service.

No package in the active install list is known to be malicious. The exclusions are intentional:

  • HWMonitor duplicates HWiNFO. It also remains excluded after the April 2026 compromise of CPUID's download site; the authentic signed HWMonitor program itself was not the malware. See the Broadcom incident report.
  • TortoiseSVN and Evernote add persistent Explorer, startup, updater, or other background components that are not wanted on this setup.
  • VirtualBox installs kernel, USB, and network drivers; install it only when its virtual machines are actually needed.
  • ConEmu and Rapid Environment Editor duplicate current Windows functionality, Java 8 is a legacy runtime, and Windows already provides curl.exe.
  • Audacity, Notepad++, FreeCAD, and WinSCP remain optional rather than being silently installed on every PC.

Most WinGet MSI/EXE packages and Microsoft Store applications remain visible in Windows Settings under Apps > Installed apps and use their normal uninstallers. Chocolatey itself is directory-based, and portable applications are the main exceptions.

Rust and native build tools

install_rust_prerequisites.ps1 accepts any Visual Studio 2017-or-later edition that contains:

  • MSVC x64/x86 compiler tools (cl.exe)
  • the x64 MSVC linker (link.exe)
  • Windows SDK headers
  • x64 Windows API and Universal C Runtime import libraries

If those files are missing, the script installs Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 with Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools;includeRecommended, the current x64/x86 MSVC component, and Windows 11 SDK 26100. This follows the official Rust MSVC prerequisites and Microsoft Build Tools workload documentation.

configure_rust.ps1 then installs or synchronizes the stable x64 MSVC Rust toolchain, makes it the default, reports rustc and cargo versions, and performs a real compile/link/run smoke test. Temporary test files are removed in a finally block even when compilation fails.

Miniconda and Python packages

install_miniconda.ps1 installs the current official x64 Miniconda release in %USERPROFILE%\miniconda3. It verifies the installer's Authenticode signature, adds only condabin to the user PATH, initializes PowerShell integration, and accepts the Anaconda Terms of Service for the main, r, and msys2 default channels. Review Anaconda's legal terms before running it.

install_pip_packages.ps1 targets that installation's base environment directly; it does not depend on shell activation. It installs:

  • PyTorch and TorchVision (TorchAudio is explicitly removed)
  • Keras configured with the PyTorch backend and TensorBoard
  • nvitop, Rich, pytest, pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib, and Jupyter
  • Transformers, Datasets, Weights & Biases, Accelerate, Einops, Tokenizers, SentencePiece, and Lightning

The script selects the newest configured PyTorch CUDA wheel compatible with the driver-reported CUDA level, otherwise it uses the CPU wheel. It finishes with pip check, imports Keras/PyTorch/TorchVision, performs CPU tensor work, and—when expected—allocates and synchronizes a CUDA tensor.

TensorFlow is intentionally excluded to avoid conflicting dependency constraints in the shared base environment.

Power settings

enable_hidden_power.ps1 exposes only explicitly reviewed settings that exist on the current machine. Modern Standby-specific settings are skipped when S0 Low Power Idle is unavailable. It does not create or activate power plans.

Preview or reverse these visibility changes manually from an elevated PowerShell:

.\enable_hidden_power.ps1 -WhatIf
.\enable_hidden_power.ps1 -Undo

The processor performance boost-mode setting is part of this allowlist; the old standalone registry import was removed so all visibility changes share the same verification and undo behavior.

Command Prompt aliases

aliases.reg.bat configures the current user's Command Processor AutoRun value to load the aliases.doskey file beside the installer. New Command Prompt windows therefore see edits to that file without another installation step. If the repository is moved, rerun the installer from its new location.

The AutoRun value is replaced, not merged with an unrelated existing AutoRun command. Before the first replacement, the script exports the existing Command Processor key to %LOCALAPPDATA%\pcprep\command-processor-before-pcprep.reg. Review the existing value before running if another program manages it; the backup is preserved on later runs rather than being overwritten. Setup stops without changing the registry if an existing key cannot be backed up.

After writing the registry value, the installer starts a clean child Command Prompt and verifies that every alias name in aliases.doskey was loaded. If verification fails, it restores the Command Processor settings captured at the start of that run. DOSKEY aliases apply only to Command Prompt; start a new Command Prompt window or tab after installation. cmd.exe /d intentionally disables AutoRun and therefore does not load these aliases.

This registration check does not execute macros because several aliases perform destructive or externally visible work. PowerShell-backed aliases use braced variables such as ${LASTEXITCODE} so DOSKEY cannot reinterpret $L, $T, or other $ control sequences before PowerShell receives the command.

Several aliases are intentionally powerful and should be used carefully:

  • grevertall discards local changes and untracked files, then resets to origin/master.
  • gclean runs git clean -fdx and deletes ignored as well as untracked files.
  • gcommit stages all repository changes and commits them; checkin also pushes the resulting commit.
  • gtag creates an annotated tag and pushes all local tags. gdeletebranch and gdelbra delete a branch from origin before deleting it locally.
  • mirfiles uses robocopy /MIR; files absent from the source can be deleted from the destination.
  • mvx and smv remove source files after successful Robocopy transfers.
  • removepass interactively rewrites selected SSH private-key passphrases.
  • nvreset attempts to reset NVIDIA GPU 0 and can interrupt GPU work.
  • claudeyolo forwards additional arguments to Claude, bypasses permission checks, and enables Remote Control. codexyolo starts Codex in YOLO mode. Both intentionally bypass normal permission and approval safeguards.
  • claudeyolo passes an explicit empty value as --remote-control= before forwarded arguments. Without the equals sign, Claude can consume the first positional argument as the optional Remote Control session name.
  • claudeupdate runs Claude Code's documented claude update command. codexupdate reruns OpenAI's documented standalone Windows installer to update the Codex CLI.
  • skillall cancels all of the current user's Slurm jobs after confirmation.

Alternative names such as gcln/gclean, cpx/cpz/copynewfiles, and tmuxx/start-tmux are retained intentionally for command-line muscle memory. Their command definitions are duplicated because DOSKEY does not reliably perform recursive macro expansion when one macro merely names another.

Git configuration

gitconfig.bat changes the current user's global Git configuration. It preserves an existing name and email, or reads user_name and user_email environment variables before prompting. It configures LF commits with checkout-as-is behavior (core.autocrlf=input and core.eol=lf), VS Code as the editor and diff/merge tool, and rebasing for git pull.

The script also rewrites GitHub HTTPS repository URLs to SSH through a global url.*.insteadOf rule. Make sure GitHub SSH authentication is configured, or remove that rule if HTTPS credentials are preferred.

Failure behavior and troubleshooting

  • Required failures stop the complete setup and identify the failed phase.
  • The scripts do not provide transactional rollback. Successfully completed earlier steps remain installed and can be safely rechecked by rerunning setup.
  • Close every Windows Terminal window and open a new one after completion. A running terminal process retains the PATH that existed when it started.
  • WinGet logs are under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.DesktopAppInstaller_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\DiagOutputDir.
  • A reboot may be required after Visual Studio Build Tools or Chocolatey reports a reboot-required result.

File layout

  • prepare_new_box.ps1: orchestration, elevation, package setup, and errors.
  • utilities.ps1: data-driven application and service configuration.
  • install_choco.bat: standalone Chocolatey bootstrap using Chocolatey's published install command. The complete setup does not call it; it installs Chocolatey through WinGet instead. Run the standalone file only from an elevated Command Prompt, and review Chocolatey's downloaded script first.
  • install_rust_prerequisites.ps1 and configure_rust.ps1: Rust/MSVC setup.
  • install_miniconda.ps1 and install_pip_packages.ps1: Python environment.
  • enable_hidden_power.ps1: reviewed power-setting visibility allowlist.
  • aliases.reg.bat, aliases.doskey, gitconfig.bat, and hide_gallery.bat: per-user shell, Git, and File Explorer configuration.