Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10 Anniversary Update To Roll Out On August 2
Windows 10's first major update -- dubbed Anniversary Update -- will be released to users on August 2, according to a blog post published by Microsoft (Archive link). The company presumably posted the blog post ahead of the original publication plans, and as a result, quickly pulled the story. Windows 10 Anniversary Update will bring with it a number of major changes including extensions to Edge, and improvements to Cortana and Hello biometric feature. It will also mark the end of the one-year free Windows 10 update offer for Windows 7 and Windows 8.x users.
I performed this procedure on an old Win7 netbook, and it worked out fine. Good way to take an objective look at Win10 without endangering your Win7 installation with a possibly irreversible update process.
Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background.
Yes and no. Yes, there absolutely is a process called Cortana running in the background. But its not still listening to your microphone, etc. Its providing backend services for stuff like location services.
What's in a name?
In theory Microsoft should have broken the functionality into two separate modules. "Cortana Personal Assistant" and "Cortana Services". Where the former is JUST the voice-mic-UI stuff; and the latter does all the other stuff -- the search functionality, location services, and provides the hooks that other apps connect to to add their "cortana" functionality, should you ever turn Cortana back on. ... of course people like your self would still freak about "Cortana Services" running even after the "Cortana Personal Assistant" went away so instead of calling it "Cortana Services" it should be called "wcmi_support" or something suitably innocuous. Then when you looked at the process list, nothing would be *called* cortana and you'd now be happy.
Although nothing changed at all except the name of a process.
Sometimes I think Microsoft should rename the Task Scheduler from "Schedule" to "Clippy" and "svchost" to "systemd" just for the fireworks display.