Just wondering if anyone has tried to do a bare-bones Windows 10 install with NTLite for their DAW PC and what their results were.
 
If works as promised you should be able to safely remove all bloatware, not load any un-needed services, delete all unused drivers... etc.
 
Theoretically it should create a lean, mean DAW machine.

Theoretically, but in reality, it may not make as much difference as it did in the days of XP. Computer hardware now days tends to have plenty of power available for multitasking and better management for dynamic optimisations etc. If you are noticing really bad performance at the moment it might be worth a try. But then it would be better to hunt down and fix the cause of the performance bottleneck.
 
It would be interesting to see if someone with a well performing, fairly modern computer could get very noticeable improvements by running a stripped out Windows 10 install, but the process of doing all that might not prove to be worthwhile.
 
I guess it comes down to, why do you want to do this?

Every little bit of extra CPU cycles and RAM help and by removing all the bloatware and un-used drivers it can free up a LOT of space on your SSD.
 

Yes sure, but I wonder how much real value you would get for your efforts. I mean, removing bloatware may free up a few GB, but if you have a 250GB SSD and are not filling it up with junk, then you should already have a lot of free space and a few extra Gigs is not going to be a major advantage. 
 
The same thing goes for CPU and RAM. If you have 16GB or more modern, fast RAM, that's enough for a mega sampling system. I managed with a couple of Kb in an Akai sampler in the 90's and now I have 16GB and can't envisage a real-world situation where I would run out. With CPU, Windows should already be giving your DAW maximum CPU performance if you have it set up right. Any extra RAM or CPU you may recover would probably be hardly noticeable.
 
Maybe you should just give it a go and let up know how it goes. Do some benchmarking before and after to see what real value you get from it.

OK well your input is valuable but back on point still wondering if anyone has tried it or something similar...

With modern disks, what is installed is not a big problem.
 
The real problem with modern OSes (except Linux) is what OS can decide to run unattended. I mean the TaskManager and Services. Tasks and Services can be disabled, but I have not found a good tool for "one button" disable/enable everything (not essential for the DAW).
 
Services are not so bad (as long as updates and security scans are disables), but the Task Manager drives me crazy. It wants to run 100s (!) of tasks, some can be seen as "planned" but most are triggered by "idle" or something different. I would like to just kill the task manager, but Win10 fights against that operation and I have not found a workaround (yet).
 
Many tasks are quite resource hungry (disk checks, telemetry, etc.). On my notebook such tasks periodically produce "clicks and pops" with low ASIO buffer. Latency checker does not report and bad driver, RME does not report dropped packets and overall system load is small. But still happens. Till now with "online" only, but I can imagine that can happened in offline environment as well.

MakerDP
OK well your input is valuable but back on point still wondering if anyone has tried it or something similar...

I guess not. So why not give it a whirl and see what results you get, then report it in this thread? My comments weren't meant to offend you. They are just based on what I have read elsewhere. I used to run a stripped XP back in those days. That made a difference as did the stripped Win 98 before that. But having researched this myself, it seems that since Win 7 there is little benefit due to the hardware vs OS power ratio as I was trying to explain i.e. you now get way more hardware power to OS consumption than was the case back with XP and before. I thought this was the kind of feedback you were looking for?