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A small chill went down my spine when I read this headline.... Are they thinking of breaking alt-tab now??? I am relived to find no such indication in what I've read, but also disappointed that I apparently missed this call with MS engineers. I'd love the opportunity to tell them about now annoying the giant app preview thing is when using alt-tab, which is why I use https://winaero.com/ to make alt-tab behave like it did in the 90s, with just the icons of the software I have open, not a useless full-screen preview effect. Of course, "apps" just show a broken icon, for whatever reason, but that's fine, since I mostly use actual software, since my PC is not a phone.

This has been known since ~2016:
https://winaero.com/blog/fix-w...

TL;DR:
If a vendor wants to promote an app, then they pay Microsoft to push it to all Windows PCs.

I'll use Edge just as much as I'll use Windows 10 C. (It is C for C..p, isn't it? Oh, so it's S for S..t? OK.)

Then again I'm not in the target market since I destroy Metro (*, **, ***) on every box I own. I guess I keep the store around just because. If I wanted Metro on my server I'd ... well, I don't. Ever.

* one
** two
*** Anniversary Update EXCEPTIONS

Awesome! How can we turn off ALL data collection? Show us THAT link and we are golden...

Here is how you actually turn off Windows 10 Telemetry

Delta updates are suppose to be coming, maybe in March...

Seem like maybe launching Task scheduler and going to Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft & gt; Windows & gt; UpdateOrchestrator and then right click Reboot and choose Disable may do the trick. ... and if Microsoft ever tries to get it back again go to C:\Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator rename Reboot to Reboot.bak and make a folder called Reboot so no new Reboot file can be made ..

http://winaero.com/blog/how-to...

I don't want Cortana, I don't want internet searches from the desktop and I DO NOT WANT telemetry or my WiFi passwords shared etc. etc. etc. I'm not a node in Microsofts network I'm a private business.

If I can't turn this shit off and uninstall the crap I don't want then it's not getting installed.

You can. Shared WiFi passwords has been removed with the Anniversary update. The other stuff you want can be fixed with Winaero Tweaker, including shutting down Cortana (as opposed to simply hiding it). and Classic Shell makes live tiles go away. You can even restore the Windows 7 calculator from here if you hate the Metro version. These things do a pretty good job of reducing 10 down to the non-intrusive OS, shell and app platform that 7 was.

So there isn't a button, but at least there's a way!

You can get back the Windows 7 games pretty easily. The only thing preventing the same EXEs from working on 10 is an OS version check that was probably originally intended to keep people from running them on Vista or XP. WinAero has made a package of modified EXEs: http://winaero.com/blog/get-wi...

I took the plunge and upgraded my last and more important PC this weekend, 'cause I don't want to be on the hook to pay $199 for a new Pro license when something forces me off 7.

I swear I'm not a shill; I bitch regularly about Microsoft because my job forces me to bear with it. But I was pleasantly surprised how well the in-place upgrade went. Nothing broke, even my old copy of Office 2003 (from my cold, dead hands...) The only thing the upgrade removed without asking were a couple of 3d-party diagnostic utilities like speccy, which doesn't bother me in the slightest. Even Steam fired back up without a hitch.

Now, about that ugliness. You don't have Aero transparency or rounded edges, but with Classic Shell and WinAero Tweeker, you can do a lot to make 10 more livable. A right-click on the taskbar can make Cortana go away, and ClassicShell separates Windows programs from Metro Apps in separate sub-menus, so you never have to look at them if you don't want to. Also, you do NOT have to use a Microsoft/Outlook cloud account. With this kind of setup, it's pretty much the same Windows as before.

Finally, I haven't tried this yet, but there's Spybot Anti-Beacon to address the "phone-home" issues that might be nagging you.

So, here's an idea to grab Windows 10 while its still free with the least risk. Shop for an SSD upgrade, like a 1TB Samsung Evo because damn it's gotten cheap. Clone your precious Windows 7/8/8.1 drive to the new SSD, remove it, set it aside. Then, perform an in-place upgrade as described here on the clone. Try it out. Something go wrong? Hate it? Swap back your old drive; clone again, do what you like. Your old build is safe and sound.

But here's the thing: according to the article, you have effectively retrieved/reserved your free Windows 10 license to use... whenever. If you want to try again in a few months, you can take a blank SSD and download/build Windows 10 from scratch, Microsoft will recognize your PC signature (assuming you haven't changed you mobo) and license you (just skip the part where it asks for a key). In the mean time, however, your old Windows will still work for as long as you want to keep it.

There. Assuming Microsoft doesn't wimp out and extend the deadline, you've just pocketed a $150-200 license for free to use any time you want.

data about how you use Windows, such as how frequently or how long you use certain features or apps and which apps you use most often

One way to find out if these functions were intentionally meant to explicitly spy on userland programs would be to check whether it is enabled for executables contained within Windows 10. If it is in Win10 exes, and telemetry_main_invoke_trigger is truly useless, I wonder whether it will be removed in the future when Windows gets rebuilt with a newer compiler.

Is there reliable documentation anywhere of what the various telemetry settings in Win10 actually do? I.e. with proof rather than sycophantic "only what's needed to improve customer experience!" or paranoid "everything on your PC is uploaded to M$+NSA!"

I've switched off all the settings in Privacy panel, disabled Cortana, disabled the telemetry service, don't have Wifi (desktop), set Feedback to Never, don't use a Live account for login, don't use Onedrive, and turned off peer to peer Windows updates. What else?

Unless you removed Cortana by the roots (and even then, what's to keep MS from silently putting it back after an update?), I'm betting that cortana.exe is still running. Microsoft swears that the .exe isn't doing anything, and you can trust them on this, right?

You also can't turn off 'diagnostic and usage data' without either being an enterprise customer or editing the registry, which no user should ever have to do (nor would most users know how to do). What exactly is sent back? Who knows? What's the retention policy? No clue. How good is the supposed anonymization? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe there are good reasons to leave that on, maybe someone has good reasons to turn that off, but that's the computer owner's choice, not Microsoft's.

See also: AdvertisingID, automatically installing apps for you in your start menu, no way to opt out of updates, uninstalling software it doesn't like as part of its own updates, and so on and so on.

> Or, you can change a registry setting, disable a couple of services, and be done with it.

> http://winaero.com/blog/how-to...

Ah, I see you are playing one of my favorite forum games- you are trying to tell people how to disable the Microsoft spying!

You have missed TONS of thing, even with that link. I will list just one thing that the thing doesn't do: it doesn't turn off the "Customer Experience Improvement Program", which is normally disabled under task scheduler. This continues to leak tons of data if not disabled.

In practice, the steps to getting Windows 10 to a state that is assumed to be not talky, are massive and generally incomplete. I could list many many more things that the winaero link doesn't deal with, and if you just scroll down to the comments section you'll see people listing massive strings of commands that MIGHT make the OS do what they want.

If Linux had anything like this, you'd be laughing your ass off. Because it's Windows and you're some AC Windows fanfuck, you bury your head in the sand.

The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones ... for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.

No, wait: I like Window 8. and I really, really like the interface formally known as Metro (ie, Metro.)

I like to see the visuals of virtual blood as it splashes across the screen as all of the Metro apps scream in digital silence and die. (ie, you can ignore the errors.) And then I install a real start menu and I'm good to go! Steps:

1: REMOVE Metro. (not disable, not hide; DIE.)

1: See here.

Run PowerShell as Administrator.

Show all
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers

Kill currently-installed Metro apps for your ID.
Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage

Kill Metro STAGED apps (Still gven to new users.)
Get-AppXProvisionedPackage -online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -online

The only thing left is the Microsoft store itself, and all of the apps are online, so you can reinstall any Metro apps you miss having.

2: REMOVE SilverLight from the WSUS update list (Ditto.)

See here Basically run:

reg delete HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Silverlight /f
reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\D7314F9862C648A4DB8BE2A5B47BE100 /f
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\D7314F9862C648A4DB8BE2A5B47BE100 /f
reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{283C8576-0726-4DBC-9609-3F855162009A} /f
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\install.exe /f
reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl /f
reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl.5.1 /f
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{89F4137D-6C26-4A84-BDB8-2E5A4BB71E00} /f
rmdir /s /q "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight"
rmdir /s /q "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight"

3: Add a replacement start menu.

I like this one, but there are others that are free, and still others that are cheap.

4: And the final touch for those who just blindly follow along: Speed up your system by:

Starting a CMD as administrator and run:
rmdir /s /q %SystemDrive%\

...becuase if you're stupid enough to run random commands without knowing what they do, this will learn you better. ;-)

Bringing back an actual Start menu is an important part of what needs to be fixed, but it's not the only thing. Windows 8, with its solid color design, looks flat and ugly compared to Windows 7 with Aero. Even if they plan to stick with the more spartan look, they should at least bring back frame translucency. (There is an add-on for Windows 8 that can do this, but it's still in beta and requires installation by hacking AppInit_DLL.) And the centered window titles are even more annoying. From Windows 95 onward, the title has always been left-justified. That's where my eyes are used to looking for it, and have been for nearly 20 years. Windows 8 moved it to the center because some graphics designer thought it looks cool, but this completely breaks my eye-tracking, wasting a few seconds here and there while I go hunting for the title that's not where my muscle memory says it should be. I don't care if they expose this in the UI, but there should at least be a registry key to fix that.

How to remove all bundled Modern apps from your user account in Windows 8 in link form for the copy-paste impaired.

Thank you. I've been meaning to do this on a new base image.