8 ms·

I'm no Windows fanboy but there's a lot of misinformation here. In the spirit of bullying the reader with a big list of points, here are some examples of incorr

I'm no Windows fanboy but there's a lot of misinformation here. In the spirit of bullying the reader with a big list of points, here are some examples of incorrect claims in TFA: 1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion. I assume that's what they mean by "keyboard scanning and voice recording" because I don't think there's anything else like that in the OS. It is possible to disable telemetry. In general Windows 10 does come with a ton of cruft but it can be disabled with e.g. https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script 2. Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue for awhile. Defrag runs as a scheduled task in all versions of Windows 10. 3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff. 4. Windows has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support of any operating system. It's not hard to find drivers as the article claims. 5. The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow, but task manager has a "Startup" tab now which tells you which startup items are consuming a lot of CPU at login. 6. The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue. I don't even have Windows Store installed as a Windows component, I have no idea what "Windows tips" even is, and my start menu is devoid of ads https://i.imgur.com/xy69BWe.png https://i.imgur.com/xy69BWe.png I think Windows is pretty bad and most users would probably be better off running Lubuntu or something, but there's no need to resort to exaggeration to make that case.

Silhouette 7y ago
It is possible to disable telemetry. Please go on. Having no officially supported way to completely turn off phoning home if we want to is one of our deal-breakers.
- itvision 7y ago
  Exactly. Lots of utilities which disable telemetry automatically are invasive as hell and sometimes break your Windows installation.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  Check out https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/blob/master/Win10.psm1#L17 https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/...
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Sure, but for professional use I'm not very interested in unsupported hacks that are liable to break things and/or be overridden and reverted by Microsoft in some future update. We deal with various kinds of sensitive and confidential information, and we have legal and contractual obligations to protect it, and so we need the ability to control where it goes on our terms. It's really as simple as that. If Microsoft won't give that to us, then we won't be Microsoft customers.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      If it's for professional use, then you can use the official non-hacky method of disabling telemetry with the group policy editor available in Win10 Enterprise, server, and education versions.
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        Only if you have those editions, though, which typically no small business or independent professional does (nor home users, obviously). Windows 10 Enterprise is, as far as I can see, essentially a different OS to Windows 10 Pro and the lower editions, presumably because Microsoft knows very well that its big corporate customers wouldn't stand for the kind of behaviour it's trying to inflict on everyone else but the big customers have enough money/lawyers/etc. to escape the trap. The big change from earlier versions is that there used to be a mid-range Pro edition that was aimed at the smaller-scale professional market, with some of the more advanced features and without some of the restrictions, but also without the emphasis on having to centrally manage everything the way a large organisation usually wants to. In contrast, with 10, the Pro edition appears to be as broken as the Home one for professional use. I'm not really sure who the intended target audience of Windows 10 Pro is or why it exists at all.
fenwick67 7y ago
> 1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion Uhh, you have to go into the registry to do this. Not really easy. It should be an option in the settings, not something I need to go under the hood to do. Also from the README for that script to disable telemetry: > Q: Can I run the script safely? > A: Definitely not
itvision 7y ago
I'm not a fanboy of any OS in existence but 1. Most tech-illiterate people are afraid of using regedit and/or GPO to disable Cortana so the point is valid. 2. Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks. 3. It's not an argument. 4. The article talks about laptops specifically and the issue is still there and it's huge even for Windows 10 which often installs Microsoft drivers which do _not_ work. 5. You must be joking about the startup tab of the task manager. Looks like you've never had this issue or you've only used SSDs in your life. Also discover Autoruns by Mark Russinovich. 6. The Windows Store app canNOT be disabled. Read carefully. Also after each major Windows update all apps are reinstalled. There's no exaggeration - the author is an IT specialist with a lot of experience.
- ebg13 7y ago
  > Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks Defrag on SSDs in Windows 10 runs Trim. And it does do that automatically on a schedule if you don't change anything. Actual defragmentation on an SSD is way less useful because SSDs don't have killer seek latencies like spinning rust plates did, and it would be small-scale harmful because of write wear. And your SSD's onboard controller would likely thwart your efforts anyway, because of wear leveling.
  - Retric 7y ago
    That’s 1/2 right SSD’s do have fragmentation issues, but it’s about IOPS not latency. http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-Fragmentation-Hurt-SSD-Performance-105652.aspx http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-F... TRIM is also important, but it’s a different issue.
    - Klinky 7y ago
      That article makes claims of 25% reduction in perf with no data to back it up, then mentions fragmention leads to system instability, requiring reboots... What? Again no data given to back up these claims. It's also SAN/Enterprise-centric. Even if you lost 25% perf, you're going from 200,000 IOPs/sec to 150,000 IOPs/sec. This is still plenty fast.
TwoNineFive 7y ago
> It's not hard to disable Cortana Wrong. For people who disabled Cortana, it kept re-enabling itself automatically after updates. I think that problem is mostly gone now, but it was definitely an issue all the way up till earlier this year. > Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue The article has one tiny line-item about fragmentation and it was about architecture. I agree that it's not an issue for most people, but OP is making a comment about a design problem. You are mis-representing the argument by talking past it. > I like UAC That's a personal preference, and that's fine. I have mixed feelings about UAC. > Windows (10) has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support Again you might be talking past the issue. When Windows 10 first came out there were a TON of devices, including very popular printers and scanners, which had no support. It was a huge problem as the large number of news articles on the subject would indicate. It's mostly a non-issue now, but there are some devices that are still not supported. I consult for a cancer treatment facility and they have some not-terribly-obscure equipment that still doesn't have Windows 10 support. I agree that things have changed, but when the author wrote this, it was true. He should probably update the site. > The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow The tool you mention is typical Microsoft. It blames the 3rd party and doesn't provide any info on Microsoft-internals stuff, which is where the problem is most of the time. > The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to get a start menu without all the tips and ads without using a 3rd party Windows-10-decrapifyer/debloater kind of thing. And if that wasn't bad enough: https://mspoweruser.com/ads-in-windows-10-mail-and-calendar-app/ https://mspoweruser.com/ads-in-windows-10-mail-and-calendar-... https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/17/2249238/microsoft-starts-showing-non-removable-ads-in-windows-10-mail-calendar-apps https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/17/2249238/microsoft-s...
- Tomte 7y ago
  > To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to get a start menu without all the tips and ads without using a 3rd party Windows-10-decrapifyer/debloater kind of thing. I wonder how I did that. I never install regcleaners or similar tools. I disabled some setting and manually right-clicked and deleted a handful of tiles in the start menu. That was many Windows 10 updates ago. I have never seen anything in my Start menu that I didn't expect to be there since.
ChrisSD 7y ago
I agree with much of what you say but I wanted to clarify one point. > 3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff. The UAC is about persuading legitimate developers to do the right thing. In that respect it has been successful. Many developers have learned they should not be annoying users with the admin dialog unless they really do need enhanced privileges. The UAC has no other benefit. It's not a security barrier (malware can bypass it, or get the user to). If you're running on an admin account you are admin and all win32 programs running on your desktop have admin rights. They just need an elevated token to make use of them which, as I said, is easy enough to gain. The exception is if programs create their own sandbox to run sub-processes with limited rights. UWP is an attempt to sandbox applications by default and thus allow the user to be admin without programs being admin by default. However its uptake has been slow. In short, it's not the UAC that's the issue. It's Windows permission model. Microsoft is aware of this and is attempting change.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  I've always been skeptical of the Windows security model as a user but I didn't think it was that porous. Thanks for setting me straight. I found these articles explaining why it's so bad: https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-1.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a... https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-2.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a... https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-3.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a...
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    For enhanced security you can run as a "standard user" then switch users whenever you need to run something with admin privileges. And by switch users I mean literally go through the login screen to change desktop to an admin user. Obviously this isn't ideal. I've been using this set up for awhile and mostly I can live with it but installing/updating programs is a pain. Especially if they bizarrely don't expect to be installed from a different account then the one that runs them (games can be particularly bad about this, even modern ones). Of course there's a lot a malicious application can do even with standard user privileges (e.g. it has access to all your files and the internet). It's easier to get rid of though.
Buge 7y ago
1. Forcing people to use registry edit hacks is not an acceptable UI. There's no guarantee that those registry hacks won't stop working tomorrow. There needs to a real documented way to do it. I have Windows 10 Pro. I used to disable Windows search doing web search with the Policy Editor (forcing me to do that was already boarderline unacceptable). Now that has stopped working, and even though I enable/disable many things in the Policy Editor, web search still happens. I will be switching to Linux.
- theArdvart45 7y ago
  I found more Search GPO settings in the User Configuration to finally disable the web search. No more "Control Panel" Bing web searches for me!
franga2000 7y ago
In regards to no. 3: I recently set up a new Win 10 laptop and was super impressed by the automagical driver installation. A few days later I went on a work trip to somewhere where internet connectivity is a luxury and discovered basically all of the drivers were crap. Intel iGPU drivers didn't support QuickSync, trackpad scrolling worked in only half of my applications, the NVIDIA GPU was burning battery on idle and instead of even just using it in standard HID mode, it made my MX Master mouse switch over control of advanced features to the software, while not actually installing said software and opting to rather pop up a big ugly green dialog every 5 mintues, prompting me to install Logitech's garbage software utility.

Silhouette 7y ago

It is possible to disable telemetry. Please go on. Having no officially supported way to completely turn off phoning home if we want to is one of our deal-breakers.

itvision 7y ago
Exactly. Lots of utilities which disable telemetry automatically are invasive as hell and sometimes break your Windows installation.
brianpgordon 7y ago
Check out https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/blob/master/Win10.psm1#L17 https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/...
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Sure, but for professional use I'm not very interested in unsupported hacks that are liable to break things and/or be overridden and reverted by Microsoft in some future update. We deal with various kinds of sensitive and confidential information, and we have legal and contractual obligations to protect it, and so we need the ability to control where it goes on our terms. It's really as simple as that. If Microsoft won't give that to us, then we won't be Microsoft customers.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    If it's for professional use, then you can use the official non-hacky method of disabling telemetry with the group policy editor available in Win10 Enterprise, server, and education versions.
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      Only if you have those editions, though, which typically no small business or independent professional does (nor home users, obviously). Windows 10 Enterprise is, as far as I can see, essentially a different OS to Windows 10 Pro and the lower editions, presumably because Microsoft knows very well that its big corporate customers wouldn't stand for the kind of behaviour it's trying to inflict on everyone else but the big customers have enough money/lawyers/etc. to escape the trap. The big change from earlier versions is that there used to be a mid-range Pro edition that was aimed at the smaller-scale professional market, with some of the more advanced features and without some of the restrictions, but also without the emphasis on having to centrally manage everything the way a large organisation usually wants to. In contrast, with 10, the Pro edition appears to be as broken as the Home one for professional use. I'm not really sure who the intended target audience of Windows 10 Pro is or why it exists at all.

fenwick67 7y ago

> 1. It's not hard to disable Cortana and internet-assisted start menu search completion Uhh, you have to go into the registry to do this. Not really easy. It should be an option in the settings, not something I need to go under the hood to do. Also from the README for that script to disable telemetry: > Q: Can I run the script safely? > A: Definitely not

itvision 7y ago

I'm not a fanboy of any OS in existence but 1. Most tech-illiterate people are afraid of using regedit and/or GPO to disable Cortana so the point is valid. 2. Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks. 3. It's not an argument. 4. The article talks about laptops specifically and the issue is still there and it's huge even for Windows 10 which often installs Microsoft drivers which do _not_ work. 5. You must be joking about the startup tab of the task manager. Looks like you've never had this issue or you've only used SSDs in your life. Also discover Autoruns by Mark Russinovich. 6. The Windows Store app canNOT be disabled. Read carefully. Also after each major Windows update all apps are reinstalled. There's no exaggeration - the author is an IT specialist with a lot of experience.

ebg13 7y ago
> Disk fragmentation has become an even bigger issue since Windows 10 doesn't defragment SSD disks Defrag on SSDs in Windows 10 runs Trim. And it does do that automatically on a schedule if you don't change anything. Actual defragmentation on an SSD is way less useful because SSDs don't have killer seek latencies like spinning rust plates did, and it would be small-scale harmful because of write wear. And your SSD's onboard controller would likely thwart your efforts anyway, because of wear leveling.
- Retric 7y ago
  That’s 1/2 right SSD’s do have fragmentation issues, but it’s about IOPS not latency. http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-Fragmentation-Hurt-SSD-Performance-105652.aspx http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Trends-and-Applications/Does-F... TRIM is also important, but it’s a different issue.
  - Klinky 7y ago
    That article makes claims of 25% reduction in perf with no data to back it up, then mentions fragmention leads to system instability, requiring reboots... What? Again no data given to back up these claims. It's also SAN/Enterprise-centric. Even if you lost 25% perf, you're going from 200,000 IOPs/sec to 150,000 IOPs/sec. This is still plenty fast.

TwoNineFive 7y ago

> It's not hard to disable Cortana Wrong. For people who disabled Cortana, it kept re-enabling itself automatically after updates. I think that problem is mostly gone now, but it was definitely an issue all the way up till earlier this year. > Disk fragmentation hasn't been an issue The article has one tiny line-item about fragmentation and it was about architecture. I agree that it's not an issue for most people, but OP is making a comment about a design problem. You are mis-representing the argument by talking past it. > I like UAC That's a personal preference, and that's fine. I have mixed feelings about UAC. > Windows (10) has arguably the best plug-and-play driver support Again you might be talking past the issue. When Windows 10 first came out there were a TON of devices, including very popular printers and scanners, which had no support. It was a huge problem as the large number of news articles on the subject would indicate. It's mostly a non-issue now, but there are some devices that are still not supported. I consult for a cancer treatment facility and they have some not-terribly-obscure equipment that still doesn't have Windows 10 support. I agree that things have changed, but when the author wrote this, it was true. He should probably update the site. > The article claims that it's difficult to figure out why your startup is so slow The tool you mention is typical Microsoft. It blames the 3rd party and doesn't provide any info on Microsoft-internals stuff, which is where the problem is most of the time. > The article claims that you can't disable Windows Store apps, Windows tips, and ads in the start menu. That's untrue To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to get a start menu without all the tips and ads without using a 3rd party Windows-10-decrapifyer/debloater kind of thing. And if that wasn't bad enough: https://mspoweruser.com/ads-in-windows-10-mail-and-calendar-app/ https://mspoweruser.com/ads-in-windows-10-mail-and-calendar-... https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/17/2249238/microsoft-starts-showing-non-removable-ads-in-windows-10-mail-calendar-apps https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/17/2249238/microsoft-s...

Tomte 7y ago
> To the best of my knowledge, it's impossible to get a start menu without all the tips and ads without using a 3rd party Windows-10-decrapifyer/debloater kind of thing. I wonder how I did that. I never install regcleaners or similar tools. I disabled some setting and manually right-clicked and deleted a handful of tiles in the start menu. That was many Windows 10 updates ago. I have never seen anything in my Start menu that I didn't expect to be there since.

ChrisSD 7y ago

I agree with much of what you say but I wanted to clarify one point. > 3. I like UAC. The article claims that giving users a dialog box to permit admin access is good for malware, but the alternative is taking admin away from users altogether on their own computers. I don't think this is an acceptable tradeoff. The UAC is about persuading legitimate developers to do the right thing. In that respect it has been successful. Many developers have learned they should not be annoying users with the admin dialog unless they really do need enhanced privileges. The UAC has no other benefit. It's not a security barrier (malware can bypass it, or get the user to). If you're running on an admin account you are admin and all win32 programs running on your desktop have admin rights. They just need an elevated token to make use of them which, as I said, is easy enough to gain. The exception is if programs create their own sandbox to run sub-processes with limited rights. UWP is an attempt to sandbox applications by default and thus allow the user to be admin without programs being admin by default. However its uptake has been slow. In short, it's not the UAC that's the issue. It's Windows permission model. Microsoft is aware of this and is attempting change.

brianpgordon 7y ago
I've always been skeptical of the Windows security model as a user but I didn't think it was that porous. Thanks for setting me straight. I found these articles explaining why it's so bad: https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-1.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a... https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-2.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a... https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-around-uac-part-3.html https://tyranidslair.blogspot.com/2017/05/reading-your-way-a...
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  For enhanced security you can run as a "standard user" then switch users whenever you need to run something with admin privileges. And by switch users I mean literally go through the login screen to change desktop to an admin user. Obviously this isn't ideal. I've been using this set up for awhile and mostly I can live with it but installing/updating programs is a pain. Especially if they bizarrely don't expect to be installed from a different account then the one that runs them (games can be particularly bad about this, even modern ones). Of course there's a lot a malicious application can do even with standard user privileges (e.g. it has access to all your files and the internet). It's easier to get rid of though.

Buge 7y ago

1. Forcing people to use registry edit hacks is not an acceptable UI. There's no guarantee that those registry hacks won't stop working tomorrow. There needs to a real documented way to do it. I have Windows 10 Pro. I used to disable Windows search doing web search with the Policy Editor (forcing me to do that was already boarderline unacceptable). Now that has stopped working, and even though I enable/disable many things in the Policy Editor, web search still happens. I will be switching to Linux.

theArdvart45 7y ago
I found more Search GPO settings in the User Configuration to finally disable the web search. No more "Control Panel" Bing web searches for me!

franga2000 7y ago

In regards to no. 3: I recently set up a new Win 10 laptop and was super impressed by the automagical driver installation. A few days later I went on a work trip to somewhere where internet connectivity is a luxury and discovered basically all of the drivers were crap. Intel iGPU drivers didn't support QuickSync, trackpad scrolling worked in only half of my applications, the NVIDIA GPU was burning battery on idle and instead of even just using it in standard HID mode, it made my MX Master mouse switch over control of advanced features to the software, while not actually installing said software and opting to rather pop up a big ugly green dialog every 5 mintues, prompting me to install Logitech's garbage software utility.