4 ms·

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

by tux3 5y ago

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, isn't it? I'm sure the aggressive push for automatic updates — replacing the "Cancel" button by "Maybe Later", and the "Maybe Later" by "You have 2 minutes" — has worked miracles. So I think we can expect more of this in the future, and the scripts will get even more paranoid in response. What an antagonistic situation.

nojito 5y ago
No this is a consequence of horrendous fear mongering in the tech community. Privacy scripts are a very common attack vector due to their popularity these days. Not to mention that the benefits of these “tweaks” is negligible at best.
swiley 5y ago
I've noticed this on iOS too. There are scams out there that encourage users to install root CA certs in order to jailbreak or get access to non-AppStore apps (this used to be required by one method.) I don't know what happened to the idea of user friendly software respecting the intentions of a user. Modern OSes really are effectively just well funded socially acceptable malware.
slver 5y ago
Look Windows has couple of odd settings, but the defaults are just fine. Some people will find reasons to tweak even if there's nothing to tweak. Been there in my teen years, but I grew up.
Arainach 5y ago
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 more than the engineers who built the OS in the first place.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Dell Optimizer tweaks some stuff in OS. Worst of all: it does not even ask whether I want it, it just does it automatically.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  In Vista RTM and sp1 turning off indexer was a great solution. It was monster on the drive and memory (5-10 min startups on computers that should be up in 30-60 seconds and were after you turned things like that off). They fixed it in sp2. Superfetch was just as bad as well as the windows defender. Most of that was fixed in win7. I now let all 3 of those services run. The issues were fixed... The problem is these 'solutions' never go away. They are never revisited. So people just keep applying them because 15 years ago they had an issue with them.
  - rasz 5y ago
    but why would you let indexer run at all when Everything (https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com) runs faster, is more accurate, and is a small standalone executable?
    - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      In general I do not like Microsoft's integrated indexer because I noticed it really slowed down performance, and seemed to hog memory. Appreciate the utility you pointed out, will happily look into it.
    - abrookewood 5y ago
      Please try Everything if you have never tried it before. It is BLAZINGLY fast. From memory it runs off the File Allocation Table to achieve its speed.
      - 112233 5y ago
        Looks like it still needs to build index of file names for searching. If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)

by tux3 5y ago

nojito 5y ago

No this is a consequence of horrendous fear mongering in the tech community. Privacy scripts are a very common attack vector due to their popularity these days. Not to mention that the benefits of these “tweaks” is negligible at best.

swiley 5y ago

I've noticed this on iOS too. There are scams out there that encourage users to install root CA certs in order to jailbreak or get access to non-AppStore apps (this used to be required by one method.) I don't know what happened to the idea of user friendly software respecting the intentions of a user. Modern OSes really are effectively just well funded socially acceptable malware.

slver 5y ago

Look Windows has couple of odd settings, but the defaults are just fine. Some people will find reasons to tweak even if there's nothing to tweak. Been there in my teen years, but I grew up.

Arainach 5y ago

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 more than the engineers who built the OS in the first place.

vbezhenar 5y ago
Dell Optimizer tweaks some stuff in OS. Worst of all: it does not even ask whether I want it, it just does it automatically.
sumtechguy 5y ago
In Vista RTM and sp1 turning off indexer was a great solution. It was monster on the drive and memory (5-10 min startups on computers that should be up in 30-60 seconds and were after you turned things like that off). They fixed it in sp2. Superfetch was just as bad as well as the windows defender. Most of that was fixed in win7. I now let all 3 of those services run. The issues were fixed... The problem is these 'solutions' never go away. They are never revisited. So people just keep applying them because 15 years ago they had an issue with them.
- rasz 5y ago
  but why would you let indexer run at all when Everything (https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com) runs faster, is more accurate, and is a small standalone executable?
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    In general I do not like Microsoft's integrated indexer because I noticed it really slowed down performance, and seemed to hog memory. Appreciate the utility you pointed out, will happily look into it.
  - abrookewood 5y ago
    Please try Everything if you have never tried it before. It is BLAZINGLY fast. From memory it runs off the File Allocation Table to achieve its speed.
    - 112233 5y ago
      Looks like it still needs to build index of file names for searching. If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)