We fixed Windows 10 - Microsoft will HATE this!

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 minutes ago, CerealOveride said:

 I did get the torrent link to work, so that's still working for the moment?

Please don't share it if people ask. 

[Granular]

So using Windows 10 is like using an Android phone now. You're either running 12 different kinds of spyware, or a cut down out-of-date re-package made by an anonymous hobbyist somewhere.

You're postponing a problem, not solving it. Windows and MacOS will only ever get worse.

[Sarra]

18 minutes ago, Granular said:

So using Windows 10 is like using an Android phone now. You're either running 12 different kinds of spyware, or a cut down out-of-date re-package made by an anonymous hobbyist somewhere.

You're postponing a problem, not solving it. Windows and MacOS will only ever get worse.

Yeah. This is the main reason I avoided going from Win 8.1 to Win 10.

 

Plus they skipped 9. That just means that it was so good, they couldn't release it...

[Cosmos1234]

If you want a spotlight like app for Windows, There is PowerToys by Microsoft on their Github page. I use it, and it is pretty amazing. 

[pythonmegapixel]

10 hours ago, zerosevenkay said:

Hey guys long story short don't trust any iso file on the internet there can be hidden malware with it. 

 

--snip--

 

I recommend everyone one of you that's  read through this or is interested in this topic or competitive gaming to look further into this community of tweaking and maybe give it a shot to expand your knowledge with windows and how terrbile it really is for hardcore gamers. Cheers.

lol that's the longest unpunctuated wall of text I've seen in a long time...

[Reawakening the Past]

15 hours ago, GabenJr said:

Windows 10 is known to come with a lot of telemetry and other “features” that reduce privacy in order to work as “software as a service”. Thankfully, there’s an effort to ameliorate this…

 

 

Check out Windows 10 Ameliorated: https://ameliorated.info/

RE: WINDOWS SEARCH

IMPORTANT!!!!

Hi Linus

I haven't used Windows Search in around 8 years.

There is a program called "Everything" by Voidtools (David Carpenter.) which is, once it has cataloged the files (a few seconds) on ALL connected hard drives and network connected drives, INSTANT.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Give him a plug if you like it!

 

Faster than Google. Because it runs in DOS I think not through the OS.

It is very usefully customisable. and can search by name, dates (access, created etc etc) file type, anything. You can save a backup of search results with all connected drives also, in case you want to see what you have which is not currently plugged in.

Windows search is SO slow. It is utterly trash compared to this.

I would say is has saved me at least weeks if not more of time since I use it.

The other program which has saved me zillions of hours is Process Lasso by Bitsum. Check it out. I can run as many processes as I like the the PC never crashes. It never makes anything slower. It just restrained processes which clog things up to slow them down a bit so that everything i want to run can run.

 

Just because of these two programs alone - I will never touch a mac.

 

Hope this helps!

[Kroon]

Personally a Linux user but sometimes I need to use Windows.  But then I make sure to use educational or medical licenses of  Windows 10 Workstation and make sure telemetry are disabled in the group policies.   EU (I'm in EU) laws prevent even crash logs to be sent back to Microsoft from medical or educational organisations. 

[PineyCreek]

I love how when I block all the different types of telemetry nothing in regards to Win10's Internet check to achievements in Windows Solitaire work.

 

Let them datamine or you don't get your tasty achievements.

 

Yes, thanks Windows, I totally don't have Internet access on this PC.  I'm listening to Bandcamp and browsing forums and studying AWS courses through sheer force of will.

[Radium_Angel]

9 hours ago, Hawx said:

This is just copypasta at this point, I've definitely seen it more than once. It's written as if there's no possible reason Microsoft might want to know how your system is operating. Microsoft is made up of thousands of engineers across hundreds of different teams. Each team wants to see diagnostic metrics over the piece of the pie they happen to own. The metrics are aggregated, anonymised and most of the original data deleted after 90 days. Unlike the Linux community, the average windows 10 user does not have the technical skillset or motivation to report to microsoft that an audio driver is throwing some errors somewhere in the kernel.

You might think it's CP, but this is from my own research from being a sysadmin for the gov't.

If they (MS) want to know what's going on with my system, they can fucking ask, as opposed to taking it without my permission.

And considering MS fired their QA/QC staff, it's a damning indicator of just what they think of quality control, and the user experience.

 

No thanks. I flatly refuse to run win10. (I still run windows on my main system, Windows 8.1 industry embedded professional, and it's bloody fantastic) but I am actively exploring a switch to *nix full-time, but that's a discussion for another time. 

[Luscious]

Curious how this affects Windows 10 Pro for Workstation - would a user have more control and not need the mods they're showing here?

[Hawx]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

You might think it's CP, but this is from my own research from being a sysadmin for the gov't.

Your research clearly sucks then. Otherwise you would've quickly discovered that the triangle of "Microsoft's main revenue source", "Microsoft's product strategy", and "Microsoft's privacy policies" certainly doesn't equal some melodramatic grand conspiracy where Microsoft went out of their way to harvest your personal information. Microsoft is now a cloud services company, and Windows is nowhere near its main focus.

 

Microsoft actually goes to great lengths to scrub, anonymise and aggregate inbound data into non-identifiable sample points, and has internal teams dedicated to maintaining the privacy of its users. Again, it's not a magical black box where there's some bad actor at Microsoft going "yes please the data from Radium_Angel yum yum"

 

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

as opposed to taking it without my permission.

Legally you agreed when you installed the operating system.

 

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

they can fucking ask

Yeah sure mate, do you mind emailing me this data point: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004#microsoftwindowsinventorycoreinventorydevicepnpadd

It ensures that the windows update you're about to install doesn't brick your system due to an incompatible driver. Oh yeah, just email me this for every single update.

 

When the next feature update is available, be sure to email me the these checksums:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004#microsoftwindowsappraisergeneralchecksumtotalpicturecount

They make sure the update you're about to install isn't corrupted or malicious. 

 

What? You lied in the last telemetry email you sent us because you were lazy??? Now all of our data is useless! If only there were some way to make sure you weren't trying to send us garbage data:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004#telclientsyntheticheartbeat_5

 

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

And considering MS fired their QA/QC staff, it's a damning indicator of just what they think of quality control, and the user experience.

Whilst that firing sucked, QA/QC staff have their limits, especially with the billions of different hardware and software combinations out in the wild. You might remember there was a feature update (1809) a few years ago that resulted in data loss for a tiny percent of people. Microsoft used its migration telemetry that's designed to track data loss scenarios:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-windows-diagnostic-data-events-and-fields-2004#microsoftwindowsmigrationcoremigobjectcountdlusr

and combined it with the other telemetry points to figure out it was a problem with the Known Folder Redirection feature being enabled and old versions of OneDrive. It's unlikely this scenario would've been covered by manual internal testing, and diagnosing the problem would've been incredibly difficult without the ability to correlate system data.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

9 hours ago, CerealOveride said:

And It's gone.

 

Note: I did get the torrent link to work, so that's still working for the moment?

ISO Torrent listed on that telegram link 

[NumLock21]

13 hours ago, Phoned_ said:

All of LMG use pirated copies of windows. They made a vid explaining why

It’s not pirated, it’s just not activated and there is a difference. when your constantly changing hardware and reinstalling the os, activation can be a pain in the ass, and it has its limits before you have to call up ms, every time it needs to reactivate. Why bother calling them with the constant deactivation when the os is going to get wiped out. 

[Geekosaurus]

 

[Kroon]

1 hour ago, Luscious said:

Curious how this affects Windows 10 Pro for Workstation - would a user have more control and not need the mods they're showing here?

 

Depending on version of Workstation you have you can disable all telemetry in the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) under Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components->Data Collection and Preview Builds.  Under Allow Telemetry you activate the policy then set option value to 0.

[Kroon]

26 minutes ago, Geekosaurus said:

*snip*

 

What a horrible idea!  You should never trust an ISO, so far he is right.  But trust a software to modify an ISO is just as bad!  You have no clue what that program add that you can see.  You might as well use the ISO, no difference.

 

Making the changes yourself is the only safe way.

[pythonmegapixel]

7 minutes ago, Kroon said:

Making the changes yourself is the only safe way.

Just to clarify: it's only safe if you absolutely know what you're doing... if you don't, or if you are following some random online guide, then you risk introducing bugs and holes.

[Kroon]

1 hour ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Just to clarify: it's only safe if you absolutely know what you're doing... if you don't, or if you are following some random online guide, then you risk introducing bugs and holes.

You are 100% correct.  To anyone that want to try anything like this I would recommend using VM and take one step at the time to learn more. 

[Radium_Angel]

5 hours ago, Hawx said:

install doesn't brick your system

You mean like what has happened in the past several updates?

https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/microsoft-explains-why-windows-10s-october-2018-update-was-deleting-peoples-files/

https://www.laptopmag.com/news/windows-10-update-now-bricking-pcs-what-to-do#:~:text=To do this%2C go to,find KB4541335 and uninstall it.

 

I think you get my point.

Also, to not clutter up this thread, take it up in PM

[indrora]

6 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

And considering MS fired their QA/QC staff, it's a damning indicator of just what they think of quality control, and the user experience.

After working in The Biz for a while, I have some knowledge of why.

Any organization inside a software development house will function like a bureaucracy, as any organization will eventually fall into this despite hopes for pseudoanarchy. In the case of QA, they're often left to their own devices. This "just... tell us what's wrong" approach means that there's a disconnect between developers and testers.

 

From my understanding, Microsoft started encouraging developers inside to test releases through some form of internal "insiders program". We know that this sort of thing exists because of folks like Jen Gentleman talking about, but also things like BuildFeed (RIP) where we saw a lot of internal branches; it's now well documented over on wikipedia. This also means that broader bugs in Windows are caught by the developers before more users see it.

What this means is that Microsoft has shifted how they test Windows. Why? Strangely, because having independent QA teams leads to a horrible pattern called Tester-Driven Development. Having a QA team that exists only for QA means that development focus shifts constantly to their beck and call. This also means that advancement within the QA team is almost entirely driven by your ability to spit out bugs for developers to fix... even if those bugs are meaningless or really caused by a deeper problem. This causes a lot of surface level problems to get patched over (we've seen some of those throughout Windows' development history) and doesn't give developers enough time to go back and find root causes.

 

Now, that's not to say that bugs don't happen, but here's what it takes for a bug to make it out:

• it has to make it past the development team that is actively working on it (ballpark 20-30 people)
• It has to make it past the "canary" channel (nightly builds, probably 200-300 people)
• It has to make it past the "Selfhost" channel (builds that have been approved by those 200-300 people)
• It has to make it past the "Dev" channel, the first time it's seen outside of Microsoft. (likely 3-4k people)
• It has to make it past the "Microsoft" channel, where it's rolled out across workstations inside Micorosoft (50-100k at minimum)
• It has to make it past the "Beta" channel, the first time most consumer Insiders get to see it. This is the most unstable channel that is publicly available to users. (Ballpark 5 million people)
• It has to make it past the "Release Preview" channel, the last channel before it goes live to the rest of the world (ballpark 3-4 million people)

If you're curious how many people it takes inside Microsoft to get a thing out the door, the blog posts How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb by Eric Lippert, a developer on windows, and Thinking through a feature by Raymond Chen, one of the oldest developers in Windows. Both of these are probably some of the best looks into what it takes to get a change into Windows; change "Feature" to "Bugfix" and the logic still holds the same.

 

And yet bugs still exist in Windows. So, how bad of a bug does it need to be in order to not get squashed?

Let's assume that a developer is worth, ballpark, $100/hr and it'll take 5-6 developers to get it fixed, tested, and reviewed before it goes to Canary. That's between $500-800 per hour of development time, give or take. with a typical bug fix taking between 100-200 hours worth of time to properly diagnose and triage. That's $500,000-$1,600,000 in developer time for a single bug. That's not including the time of the PM, god help you if there's localization problems, etc.

Now, how many users does that bug affect? Let's assume there are 800 million Windows users at any one given time (since that's the last number we've gotten out of Windows.) 100,000 people at a time is only shy of 0.125% of users. That's such a small fraction of people that it isn't worth time (shy of someone getting a real bug up their ass) to go fix it. it's spending $1million on a thing that affects 0.125% of the population when that same $1m (or, likely, $2-3million) could be spent dealing with a bug that affects 1,000,000 users (12.5%).

The other issue is that to fix a bug, they have to find out if it's any number of categories. These are all real situations that I know have caused intermittent bugs:

• is it a bad version of the nVidia graphics driver that only gets shipped to users running older Quadro cards?
• is it a CPU instruction that isn't being interpreted correctly and as a result something gets shoved to an off-by-1 error?
• is it a race condition caused by high speed networks being just right that a coil of 100ft of cat5 sitting under someone's desk causes two threads to lose the race at the wrong time?
• Is it caused by a buggy USB3 controller that was only used by one vendor for one generation of machine before the controller was updated due to a bug in the actual silicon, and thus it only occurs on that one specific generation of HP Elitebooks?
• is it caused by lower quality HDMI cables getting interference during display EDID reading that causes the display to do something weird because windows trusted the EDID values a little too much?
• Is it a configuration that was otherwise uncommon but promoted on some blog as a "really cool trick" and now causes people to lose their data because someone tried to be clever?

Lastly, the developers often go in blind trying to figure out what's going on. They get a vague "when I click the start button 1,000 times, the 1001th time it doesn't render right." There could be any NUMBER of things that happen between 1,000 clicks of the start menu: drivers can be updated, services stopped and restated, is this one single sitting, did the monitor turn off, is there actually a monitor or is this over RDP, etc. etc. etc.

 

Winding back, QA inside Microsoft was, likely, not actually all that useful and getting in the way of shipping actual fixes.

[Master Delta Chief]

Can't exactly blame people for wanting to have a minimized version of W10 considering the problems it has in general in terms of performance as of late. The Microsoft Store is one prime example of a software being buggy and having terrible performance. I just wish with all the backlash MS gets for that, it signals them to actually do something about it. 

[thewelshbrummie]

On 9/5/2020 at 12:58 PM, SolarNova said:

Currently using an old version of W7, pre W10 spyware update, and pre specter/meltdown 'nerf'.

...which, if that system is in any way connected to the Internet or to any device that connects to the Internet, makes you no better than all of the anti-vaxers out there. Avoiding vaccines is no dfferent to running an Internet connected computer that is unsupported (especially one that isn't fully patched), running an OS that has gone 8 months since support ended and your selfishness in doing so risks other computers connected to the Internet from possible infection. You're doing the equivalent of going into a grocery store without a facemask and arguing that you havre the right to do so despite any local rules that say otherwise.

 

The point is that you accepting the risk for you own use is irrelevant, when you're decisions automatically risks other computers from possible infection.

19 hours ago, Kroon said:

But then I make sure to use educational or medical licenses of  Windows 10 Workstation and make sure telemetry are disabled in the group policies.   EU (I'm in EU) laws prevent even crash logs to be sent back to Microsoft from medical or educational organisations. 

Unless you actually work in either industry then using those licences is probably a violation of the EULA.

[sanya567xxx]

32 minutes ago, thewelshbrummie said:

unsupported

what you on about? it literally says how to do the mods on 1903

[Kroon]

2 hours ago, thewelshbrummie said:

Unless you actually work in either industry then using those licences is probably a violation of the EULA.

 

Since they don't have my signature, physical or digital that contract is not valid, at least not within EU.  

[SolarNova]

8 hours ago, thewelshbrummie said:

your selfishness

The somewhat amusing part about that argument , in any topic of discussion, is the irony of the statement not being seen by those who state it