My experience testing multiple tools on VMs (mostly recommendations from reddit), eventually deciding on one that seemed to work as advertised and installing it

My experience testing multiple tools on VMs (mostly recommendations from reddit), eventually deciding on one that seemed to work as advertised and installing it on my primary PC, says definitely not. Initially I saw a drastic reduction in outgoing traffic to MS/akadns, but after a couple months it ramped back up again... as someone else mentioned above, a lot of telemetry tools are reactivated/reinstalled via Windows Updates. I seemed to have completely nuked SMB in the process as well. I never saw any outbound traffic to microsft.com, I wonder if it's because they are using the German version?