71–80 of 207 posts
I switched to dual booting Linux mint and Windows 10 on my home desktop. Work laptop has been linux only for years. I've only used windows a couple of times, because these days I'm mostly just using a browser. By the time you've "reclaimed" Windows 10, there'll be an update that undoes your work, so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Nearly all of these "clean up" scripts are a horrendous idea to run on your machine, I see right at the top that this script disables SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned. It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completel…
Well, the "Smart" screen says that WinMerge and KDiff3 are malwares. Naturally I trust both of them more than so called SmartScreen because unlike Smartscreen, I can inspect their code. Yes, the binaries can contain malware, but the first principles tell me that trustability score is inverse of what is being reported by MS. Naturally I have disabled Smartscreen and Windows defender and admin rights alerts and bajilio…
Nearly all of these "clean up" scripts are a horrendous idea to run on your machine, I see right at the top that this script disables SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned. It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completel…
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Sadly, this is an expected consequence of the aggressive monetization, telemetry, and other tracking that ships with the OS. When you make it hard to trust the system, people will look at any component that seems unnecessary. They might not know what it is, but they don't trust it anymore. So it might as well get disabled. You know, to be safe. But at the end of the day I suppose it's only a small percent of users, i…
This class of user has always been doing such silly things long before "monetization". There were plenty of guides for Windows XP and Vista claiming to "increase performance" by disabling things like the indexer (fun fact, that will TANK your performance in a variety of areas), the Cryptographic services, and more. They never had any trust to violate, only a strange (and completely incorrect) sense that they knew mor…
It is insane to me that a 2432 line script is required to achieve this.
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macOS has a lot of this too. It’s weird Apple seems to get a pass but Microsoft gets attacked. (Ads in start is a huge problem though).
... I don't think MacOS has _any_ of this? Besides Siri and telemetry, but it asks you on installation if you want to enable those.
Really the only thing different is Apple has made it seem beneficial to users where Microsoft just comes off spammy.
If you have access to it, through partner or MSDN or corporate licensing or otherwise, it is really worth installing the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB/LTSC versions. It has most of the annoying things that plague consumer versions of Windows 10 stripped out, and it gets a very different cadence of updates, restricted to security and quality fixes. No Cortana, no Edge installed by default, no built-in Store universal app…
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> Well, the "Smart" screen says that WinMerge and KDiff3 are malwares. I've got WinMerge installed on my machines and I've never had that issue. Are you sure you're using trusted sources?
I got Winmerge binary directly from GitHub repo. As trusted as it gets, short of compiling myself.
> I got Winmerge binary directly from GitHub repo. As trusted as it gets, short of compiling myself.
So, you don't actually know what code you're running and that binary actually could be malware.
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... I don't think MacOS has _any_ of this? Besides Siri and telemetry, but it asks you on installation if you want to enable those.
Siri/spotlight does web searches, maps are included, location tracking baked in under the disguise of find-my (Microsoft also has a find-my alternative), there is an advertiser id built into mac too https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidenti... Really the only thing different is Apple has made it seem beneficial to users where Microsoft just comes off spammy.