the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it's true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft's problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

[–] meathorse@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's right! I remember those signed drivers where also why early XP (pre SP2) had a bad rep. Not as bad as ME but users were swearing on the graves of dead relatives they would never give up W98 or W2k. Without new or signed drivers, a lot of hardware struggled but by the time SP2 rolled out, hardware vendors had mostly caught up and the OS had matured.

Vista had similar issues (so, so many issues with Vista) with it's security changes which made life difficult for badly written/insecure software (wanting admin rights to run or write access to system folders/reg keys). Those changes in Vista paved the way for Win7 to be so much better at launch since most software had caught up by then.

I think the issue with disabling components is 90% how users remove them. Pulling them out via "official" methods hasn't ever caused me issues - DISM is really handy - particularly for permanently removing the default apps. Those deeply connected functions can be a pain!

[–] SpaceXplorer_8042@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I have only used DISM (I think) for chkdsk. What else can you really do with it? I don't even know what to search tbh, so pardon me if it's just a quick search away

[–] meathorse@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Quite a few things - mostly used it for capturing images, loading drivers and updates into images but can also be used to pull apps out of the image too.

For a live windows install there are PowerShell commands to do this

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/add-or-remove-packages-offline-using-dism?view=windows-11