4 ms·
Some of it is legit I suppose but a lot of it reads like snake oil. Also I'm not sure "Securing" Windows 10 is accurate here as we'll see shortly. It seems to
by ryuuchin 10y ago
Some of it is legit I suppose but a lot of it reads like snake oil. Also I'm not sure "Securing" Windows 10 is accurate here as we'll see shortly. It seems to really mostly be about "Optimization and Privacy" in Windows 10. I'm mostly ok with the privacy portion or at least the attempt to do so but I would be cautious of any "Optimization" since care must be taken to not be doing more harm than good[1].
> You will be prompted by a User Account Control warning. Click 'change User Account Control settings', reduce the slider to 'never notify', and click 'OK' to apply the changes.
Securing Windows 10 would involve setting it to always notify. Also it should recommend running as a standard user and having an admin account be separate. I'm not sure I can take this very seriously as a security guide.
I wouldn't recommend messing too heavily with services aside from disabling the ONE telemetry service. Most things which aren't used won't be running anyway.
> If you have a desktop computer, you will want to change the power settings to 'High performance'
Not sure about this one... Modern processors (and Windows 10 itself) are pretty good at it and I've yet to have any issues with it running at balanced. If you want to disable the HDD power off feature that's fine but you can do that just fine in the default Balanced profile. I think this "tweak" is mostly snake oil.
Please take "guides" like this with a grain of salt as messing around too heavily may wind up doing more harm than good. Remember that more often than not, no you don't know better than the people who made the operating system. I think the privacy stuff comes from the right place but the rest of it sounds like mostly snake oil and this is definitely not a security guide so tread carefully.
tl;dr It's mostly snake oil and certainly not a security guide.
[1] Disabling the page file is an often cited example which almost certainly does more harm than good.
- windowsworkstoo 10y agoYep, as legit as "registry cleaners". Some of those services that are disabled will break 3rd party software in subtle and unexpected ways. Though my favourite was turning sounds off for a modest performance gain. Clearly a meme guide "curated" by people with a very shallow understanding of Windows
- Chlorus 10y agoMy favorite: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=4833 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=... People had written guides advocating for turning off certain 3D effects, which itself would turn off hardware acceleration and slow down rendering.
- cm2187 10y agoThe people who built the system set hiding extensions of known file types a default. So virus.pdf.exe will show up as virus.pdf. I know better than them that this is a completely moronic decision.
- ryuuchin 10y agoIndeed. Perhaps I should've been more specific in my wording of it but I was more referring to the snake oil claims with respect to performance tweaks and to a lesser extent privacy tweaks as well. A number of privacy "tweaks" will wind up breaking third party software. You're very much correct in that the option you're talking about is important for security. At the end of the day though it is still simply a cosmetic issue albeit with security consequences. I agree with what you're saying though. It is really stupid that it still defaults to not showing extensions.