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iTunes is a necessary evil if you have an iOS device. The thing I dislike most is that the installer doesn’t give you much control over the changes made to your Windows system. Over on ZDnet, Ed Bott wrote a great unofficial guide to installing iTunes 10 without bloatware. Go there if you want to know all of the details involved with iTunes and its various pieces. What I present below are just the steps to get things up and running.

Get things ready:

1. Go download 7-Zip. You need it for this and it is, in my opinion, much better than the zip program that comes standard with Windows.
2. Install 7-zip.
3. Download the latest iTunes installer
4. Right click on the iTunes installer and move your mouse up to the 7-zip menu and over to click on ‘Extract to ItunesSetup\’  This will extract all the files to a subdirectory of the current one.
5. Move your mouse over the folder icon for your new ItunesSetup folder hold down your shift key and click “Open command window here” (again, that is shift+click)

Now it gets a little tricky depending on what you need and devices you have.

Everyone install this:

In the command window you just opened, type and run each of these commands in order:

• AppleApplicationSupport.msi /passive
• Quicktime.msi /passive
• iTunes.msi /passive (on a 64-bit Windows system, use iTunes64.msi /passive)

Only if your share your iTunes library on your network:

• Bonjour.msi /passive

Note: If you aren’t sharing music you don’t need Bonjour and I’d skip it.

Owners of an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone install:

• AppleMobileDeviceSupport.msi /passive (on x64 installations, use AppleMobileDeviceSupport64.msi /passive)

Should you install the Apple Software Update? I say no. When it is time to update, just download the new installer and go through the the brief steps above.

That’s it. Now you have only what is necessary on your computer to interact with your Apple iOS device and nothing more. Even if you end up installing it all, at least you know what was installed rather than being blinded by the Apple installer.