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Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

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Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#221
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the PC market shrinking? Do you mean that new shipments are declining? Because this is not the same thing AT ALL.

Total "PC" units are shrinking, and Windows PC sales are shrinking compared to Mac computer sales, and phones are exploding compared to PCs. What comparison could you make where Windows PC sales are "up"?

>Total "PC" units are shrinking

source? Total units sold are shrinking (or steady, depending on your definition of PC and who's numbers you are using), but total units in operation is much closer to describing Microsofts market and hard to measure.

>Windows PC sales are shrinking compared to Mac computer sales

Macs are personal computers in every sense except marketing speak. The competitor selling better isn't a sign of the market shrinking.

>and phones are exploding compared to PCs

And in the summer desk fans sell better than hair driers. Phones are not in the same market as PCs.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#222
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "getting the GPU to work" mean you can give your Windows VM exclusive rights to the ports on the back of that graphics card as well? That would be amazing. I'd love to, say, run a Hackintosh setup with Windows 10 in a VM that could fully utilize it's own GPU + external ports -- this way I could use a modern VR setup (Oculus or Vive) without having to use Windows full time!

In fact, that's the only way to do it. This VFIO/IOMMU setup virtualizes the PCI-E port itself. It routes the PCI-E port that the graphics card is plugged into to the VM. So the VM has exclusive and direct access to that PCI-E port. Therefore, the GPU, the ports on it, everything hooked up to that PCI-E port belongs to the VM. Most importantly, this also means the GPU's SMBus for temperature monitoring is also routed…

I can't believe I've never heard of this before. I'm honestly astonished! Thanks for your reply, I can't wait to try this.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#223
post #115

With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver. It was good timing, then, that I watched the "7 Gamers 1 CPU" video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming. Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don't I can spin up a VM. But there's the caveat that is as o…

Is there a write-up on this that you can recommend?

The Arch docs are super helpful on this, even if you're not running Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-media hoarder, I am fine with this. The major benefit of owning music was that you could consume it easily on-demand. Since streaming services have expanded their libraries, delivery channels, and made songs available offline, there are less competitive benefits to actually owning a digital copy.

As a still-music-hoarder, I tried Spotify Premium for a while, but decided I didn't want to pay for it - I spent about the same cost monthly in new music, but if I stopped paying, I'd still have free access to all that music with no ads, and be able to play it all on any device with or without an internet connection (e.g. the old iPod connected to my car stereo). Streaming is certainly convenient, but they make it ve…

That's weird, because the variety of new music I listen to each month greatly exceeds the $10 price tag to own it, by magnitudes. Even if you pirated, the time spent each month finding, managing, and evaluating torrents is worth $10.

With the money saved you could always just purchase the songs if the service stopped.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Microsoft Office one is far worse than this example. I actually had Office installed and was STILL seeing those annoying as heck notifications. That was just blatant and annoying advertising. All this is, is you're opting to receive dynamic lock screen images that rotate constantly, Microsoft threw in a few ads. It isn't ideal but you you get something in return (a constantly changing set of lock screen images fr…

This behavior is caused by a preinstalled modern app called "Get Office", which you can find in your Start Menu's All Apps list. Along with it's brethren "Get Skype", right click and uninstall both. The fact that these apps are unable to tell that you already "Got Skype" and "Got Office" is definitely irritating.

Sandboxing. The apps would probably need permission to read your licences from AD to "get it".

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#226

With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver. It was good timing, then, that I watched the "7 Gamers 1 CPU" video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming. Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don't I can spin up a VM. But there's the caveat that is as o…

I've done this too! I was able to do it with my AMD FX-8350 and GA-990FX-UD3, as they both support IOMMU. Passing through my R9 390 to the Windows guest, and the only issue I've encountered the whole time was having to disable hardware acceleration for flash videos.

The whole KVM/Qemu ecosystem is great.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#227

With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver. It was good timing, then, that I watched the "7 Gamers 1 CPU" video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming. Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don't I can spin up a VM. But there's the caveat that is as o…

It would be amazing if you could write a separate post with further details. I think many people here would love to know more.

There are many guides about this, just search for something like "VGA PCI Passthrough"

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=VGA+PCI+Passthrough...

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#228
post #165
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of a performance hit do you get running a VM with vtx and vtd versus running windows bare metal? Is it as simple as it seems? I'd love to switch over to a VM for windows games backed by vtx and vtd, but I've been worried that it'd be waay more work.

I tried this a while back. My results can be seen at http://miffe.org/bench/ The largest problem is that the NVIDIA driver refuses to work when it detects that it's in a VM. The workaround is to hide the VM status for the guest os, by using -cpu host,kvm=off and disabling the tweaks that makes windows work better (hv_time,hv_relaxed,hv_vapic).

A better workaround would be to buy AMD GPUs.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with jumping aboard the hate train for things like the Office ads but this seems like a pretty non-issue and I agree with you. Just like the Google Play widget or notifications for the App Store on iOS; Windows is doing the same-thing but with a lock screen background. I'm not sure if this is a default (I thought it wasn't; it certainly wasn't when I bought a Surface a couple of weeks ago). If this is a defa…

I look at it as a part of a larger arc of issues. Windows is going fremium. I feel like advertisements as a direct component of an operating system have crossed a line. This is like when Ubuntu started advertising amazon products in their launch bar. It crossed a line.

Well there is some truth to the pervasiveness of Windows 10 that at times makes it feel like it may be toeing the line with freemium (I'm looking at you Microsoft bundled games though that technically happened with Windows 8). I'm not really convinced this is it though. I mean do you have an issue with the Play Store widget or the iOS notifications of new apps? Seems like the same thing to me except less interaction with the Microsoft one.

Granted, as I said before, this wasn't a default on my Surface but if it was then that's not cool and they should change it. But as far as its existence goes? I don't see it as an issue. Honestly if it let me filter to a crazy degree I would love cool images for some of my favorite or upcoming games. I could be in the minority with that last point I'll admit :)

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#230

What the fuck ? You choose to let Microsoft show you whatever they want on the login screen and complain their show you an ad ? Seriously ? Disable the spotlight crap and be on your merry way. Or install Ubuntu and watch Amazon ads :D

Ubuntu has removed the Amazon ads with newer versions.
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