Table of contents:
1. Preamble 1
2. Preamble 2
3. Getting on with the incomplete (see Preamble 2 for explanation) check-list
4. Instructions
Preamble 1
Someone asked me what can be done to make a fresh Windows 10 installation run more decently, and so here's a list of what can be done to make Windows 10 a more usable, peaceful, reliable, compatible, private, and controllable environment.
The premise of these instructio
As shown in a link at the bottom of this page, Microsoft's own reporting shows that Microsoft is recording data from over 3,100 individual data-points in Windows 10 Home and Pro, even when data-harvesting is set to its absolute minimum configuration.
It is notable that Microsoft was an eager participant in the US government's illegal PRISM spying program, and voluntarily gave its users' and customers' data to the US government without informing their users it was doing so. Certainly,
A highly important aspect of owning property, such as your computer hardware, the data on it as well as any data it generates, your Windows operating system, and other software you've purchased, is exclusively being the person that has the authority to make decisions over it, and being able to make the decisions that you know are the best for your situation.
As the European Union and Australia's top courts have ruled, and as even the US Supreme Court has indirectly supported, you own
My experience while dual-booting both Windows 7 and Windows 10 is that more games run on Windows 7, and games run better on Windows 7.
1. Windows 10 has DirectX 12, but Windows 7 has Vulkan, which does the same thing as DirectX 12. And Vulkan seems to be the favourite between the two by current developers, due to its cross-platform abilities and open-source nature. The only games that you'll miss out on by not having Windows 10 and DirectX12 are Microsoft exclusive games (as Microsof
After I used Windows 10 as my primary OS for many months, I realised that I wouldn't miss anything about it if I went back to Windows 7. And since I found that everything was more difficult, more frustrating, more ugly, and more time-consuming on Windows 10, I went back to Windows 7 as my primary OS. Windows 10 made the detail of just having an OS a chore and liability all on its own, whereas Windows 7 is just passively there, like an OS should be, and just works for whatever I decide to do, wit
If you installed Windows 7 using either a DVD, or an earlier ISO image of the Windows 7 installer, you might find yourself waiting for a long time searching for updates to Windows 7, after the installation has completed, and you've run Windows Update. I don't know how typical this issue is, but there seems to be a significant number who experience Windows Update searching seemingly indefinitely without finding, or starting to install updates. Sometimes just waiting long enough is the solution, b
During summer 2015, Microsoft started heavily back-adding telemetry to Windows 7 via various updates. In this post is a link for a fully-updated June 2015 ISO of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 that pre-dates that telemetry back-adding by Microsoft, as well as resources for creating your own custom Windows 7 installer ISO that only has the updates that you wish to have. At the bottom of this post is an archive containing all security-only updates released from October 2016 - October 2017.
To i
If you are aware of updated information regarding telemetry and data collection in Windows 7 / 8 / 10, or know improved methods to disable it, please share it.
For Windows 10
General Privacy Guide's for Windows 10 version 1803 and 1809
This guide includes instructions on how to disable or remove various invasive or unwanted aspects of Windows 10. Some of what the guide includes instructions for:
- Basic Windows 10 set-up choices
- How t
See the more comprehensive detailing of this subject in this newer blog post:
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Software intellectual property is licensed and not sold, but software licenses and the instances of software they represent are sold and become the property of whoever buys them.
While purchasing a software license does not give the purchaser ownership of the intellectual property of that software, a software