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I would like to completely reinstall (including repartitioning) a Lenovo G70-35 laptop for a family member. The laptop is freshly bought, and all the superfluous stuff should go. I admit that I am more of a Windows7 (and Unix) guy myself, my own boxes are streamlined installations and do more or less what I want them to, not what they want. I did install Win10 a few times in the past to upgrade some older Windows keys, but didn't touch it since then. That in mind:

  • I recovered the Win10 license of the laptop using one of those tools that de-base64 the registry. I assume there is no trouble whatsoever reinstalling using a CD/DVD created with the MS Media Creation Tool and that key, right? That said, I guess it won't prompt me for the license key anyways as it's stored in the UEFI BIOS?
  • Is anything from the Lenovo software on that laptop of any essential use? I.e., is there anything that cannot easily be replaced and that is really needed to use the laptop? Their support site seems to have a rather complete collection of drivers. I don't need anything else of what I saw, e.g. backups will be done some other way anyways.
  • Is there any particular reason why I would create some kind of Lenovo recovery media (if that is possible, I didn't check into it so far) to restore the Laptop to factory settings (including redoing the partitioning scheme it comes with, which includes several invisible/recovery partitions)? I am 100% sure that neither I nor the user of the laptop have any interest whatsoever in the Lenovo addons.
  • The user of the laptop is nontechnical and not interested in anything except the actual software he uses. Is there anything I can do during installation to reduce any nagging or intrusive behaviour of the OS? I don't want Cortana to pop up, apps to advertise themselves, and so on.
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Provided that you are installing the same version of Windows (i.e. Lenovo's OEM Windows 10 Home to a generic Windows 10 Home) there shouldn't be any issues with activation or licensing during installation.

You have certainly done best practice by pulling the license key. My recommendation is to download all of the drivers in advance and selectively install them on the fresh Windows installation, since some of the drivers may reapply bloatware to the machine.

Due to the nature of warranties, I strongly recommend creating the Lenovo backup/rescue media. You may be savvy enough to do most repairs to the machine's hardware by yourself, but in any case, if you have to make a warranty claim against this machine, Lenovo may require the "original" OS to be installed. My coworker was recently denied a warranty claim by Acer due to the installation of Linux on the machine. Save yourself a potential headache and keep the original OS rescue media as a last resort.

In my experience, the best way to have a clean Windows 10 experience is to make use of the great PowerShell scripts from Technet and other Microsoft sites. These can uninstall 100% of the Microsoft "app" experience, rip out the annoying features of the Windows 10 shell, and provide faster, less-distracting computing. Here is a generic list of steps. More available from TechNet.

Cortana can be disabled as well but this generally breaks the Windows start menu Search function and I advise against it if the end user relies on this feature. I have only seen a smooth Cortana-less experience work on Windows 10 N/KN Enterprise Edition. In the past, I've used this tutorial from SuperUser

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If you do a clean install of W10, everything should probably work OK.

Try this. Remove your old OS drive (just in case) and install an experimental OS of your choice onto a cheap (~<=>$65) SSD replacement. Repeat the install (if necessary) until your are happy.

When you fall in love with the results, Toss your old spinning HD.

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