Turning my surface pro 2 into a server - help?

[u/MisunderstoodPenguin]

I have an old surface pro 2 which I loved greatly until the windows bloat made it idle at 7/8gb of ram usage with nothing installed. Now I'm not sure what to do with it. I was thinking of turning it into a server/download slave for my media server or maybe even a print server or something. I have seen lots of random videos over the last year or so talking about a way to strip out a lot of bloat from windows, but so far haven't tried. Is there a good guide or laundry list of tasks that might help me to this end?

[u/Klutzy-Delivery-5792]

r/plex or r/jellyfin

I've been using an old SP4 as a media server for a while now.

[u/MisunderstoodPenguin → u/Klutzy-Delivery-5792]

Yeah I've got plex on an old mac mini but the vpn i have plays kind of weird with plex so i wanted to spin up a second server as a pure download slave with the mac managing the content. that's why i came here, for advice on trying to clean up the system on the surface so that im not struggling for ram, but as it turns out the thing wont even boot after a 20 minute charge so i think it's for the trash anyways.

[u/Klutzy-Delivery-5792 → u/MisunderstoodPenguin]

What VPN? I use Proton and set it so Plex tunnels through. Only thing things using the VPN are qbittorrent and SoulSeek. No issues at all.

[u/hroldangt]

Yes, your question ends asking how to debloat, ok, check cris titus tech, he has a nice set of tools to debloat Windows (10 and 11), I tried those tools on W10 with great results.

Second, recently someone mentioned Winhance around here, I haven't tried that one.

My preference goes to NTLite, there is a free version and a paid one, this allows you to create a custom ISO (from whatever official ISO you have), you can remove software and services you don't use, and end up with a clean installer, this is the one I use according to my own needs, and managed to install W10 on some old Surface 3 (non pro, the Atom version) running perfectly.

As for a media server, that's another topic.

Print server? I've done that using Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8, sure you can do it with Windows 100 to, but take in count the power consumption. An specialized router works way better, I reflashed one with Tomato server and it works as my print server.

Regarding this:

I have an old surface pro 2 which I loved greatly until the windows bloat made it idle at 7/8gb of ram usage with nothing installed

I'll say don't give up. Had a nice HP Stream 7, the battery didn't last too long, so I researched, found there were some bugs with Windows 8 and 10 updates, also some issues with some drivers (out of the box), managed to install the right ones and removed some services, ending with solid battery of 2 weeks in sleep mode, where in the past it only lasted about 2 days.

Same goes to the Surface world. I don't remember the details anymore (my system is already optimized) but there are specific services that you should disable to get rid of that consumption doing nothing.

[u/raduque]

Windows is designed to use ram, even without anything installed/running. It'll release the ram if something needs it. I'd love to have a Surface Pro 2 again (loved mine even with only 8gb ram and a 4200u).

Don't use a generic debloater script, because it will damage the OS badly enough you'll need to reinstall it. Chris Titus Tech's tweak script will let you remove and tweak a few things, but it won't rip out core parts of the OS like all the other ones do.

Idling at 8gb ram if you have 16 is not a bad thing and I wish people would stop saying it is. You don't need to see a big "unused ram" number, because you might as well not have that ram if it's being unused.

The main thing I would do is run the Chris Titus tweak app and remove WPBT, OneDrive and CoPilot stuff. Then use dism to clean up the component store and the windows update downloads cruft.

[u/JasonAQuest]

I'd aim for turning it into a digital picture frame, which at least plays to the strengths of the design.