Why YSK:

If you have to (or choose to) use Windows for any reason, choosing a "European Economic Area" (EEA) country during setup significantly reduces the amount of annoyances, including but not limited to:

• Fewer ads
• Uninstalling Edge, Bing, etc.
• Disabling web & store results in search
• Prevent Microsoft apps from defaulting to opening links in Edge despite it not being the default browser

and probably more. The officially supported process (.pdf) is to "[select] any of the following countries or regions during device setup: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, French Guiana, Germany, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Martinique, Mayotte, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Reunion, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland."

Note: The above list excludes the UK

Also YSK:

While Microsoft really doesn't like you changing this location after setup, you can still do it using the following method (trigger warning, Reddit source):

This way involves doing stuff that is all officially supported - we will temporarily turn off the User Choice Device Protection service, reboot, make our changes and turn it back on.

Run PowerShell as admin.

Paste the following into PowerShell - this will neuter that pesky service (for now)

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UCPD” -Name “Start” -Value 4 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

Reboot your computer. When it comes back up, open PowerShell as admin again. Paste this in

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Control Panel\DeviceRegion" -Name "DeviceRegion" -Value 0x0000044

If you are not shown an error, everything went well. You can confirm by checking Device Setup Region in Settings - Time and Language - Language & Region

Finally, re-enable the User Choice Protection Driver service

New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UCPD” -Name “Start” -Value 1 -PropertyType DWORD -Force

All done!

Above instructions change the location to Ireland (0x0000044), but you can choose any of the above "EEA" countries, or revert back to your home country using the codes here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/table-of-geographical-locations

Stumbled across this process trying to kill the Windows Store search on my (unfortunately necessary) Windows install, thought I'd share.

This does not impact your language, time zone, keyboard, or any other settings on your computer. It just tells MSFT to get fucked by EU regulations.

Yes, Linux is better, use it if you can. If you can't, set your shitty Windows system to EU mode for a tiny bit of peace of mind.