Nearly all of these "clean up" scripts are a horrendous idea to run on your machine, I see right at the top that this script disables SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned.
It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completely superfluous, like disabling "3D Objects" which has already been disabled in the latest Windows version
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the "Smart" screen says that WinMerge and KDiff3 are malwares.
Naturally I trust both of them more than so called SmartScreen because unlike Smartscreen, I can inspect their code. Yes, the binaries can contain malware, but the first principles tell me that trustability score is inverse of what is being reported by MS.
Naturally I have disabled Smartscreen and Windows defender and admin rights alerts and bajilion things that internet gurus will tell me not to because I don't know what's good for me. Needless to say, my PC runs faster, calmer and is actually malware free because I don't run unauditable things like Smartscreen on it.
Edit: I get WinMerge binary from GitHub repo, and KDiff3 from official website. As trusted as it can get, short of compiling myself.
This is a work machine so I can't control most of Windows behavior. Personal machine runs NixOS for 90% tasks + Windows dual boot for games without connecting to network because I can't be bothered with disabling Smartscreen and defender every other week.
Smartscreen does not tell you that WinMerge is malware. It correctly tells you that the freshly compiled build from GitHub is not a commonly used software which makes it more likely to be dangerous. How is that a bad feature to have?
That is fine but probably not good for most users. It is easy to tell it not to filter those apps. You can make exceptions. Just shutting it off totally is like changing a router to allow all ports and traffic in because it blocked a port you were using vs making a firewall rule.
Like I found that SmartScreen and defender blocked my ethminer but that is in general pretty smart because it is common to have it unwittingly installed, and I simply said it is OK to run.
For WinMerge it should be noted that some web-sites out-there offer winmerge binaries for download and I bet that some of them are bundled with spyware (they are not affiliated with the official version, but even my tech-savvy friend was about to download winmerge the other day from a non official source, I noticed him that he should use winmerge.org).
I haven't used Windows for a long time but a look at the script makes me think people wouldn't be resorting to such measures if Microsoft wasn't including stupid crap in their operating system.
> Disabling Telemetry breaks Windows updates
> Automatic web searches in start menu
> Application suggestions are silently installed (wat?)
> Allow MS to collect activity history
> Location tracking
> Map updates (who the fuck uses maps on a PC?)
> Tailored experiences (apparently spamming ads on a desktop OS is an experience)
> Advertising ID
> Cortana
This is just from skimming the list for 5 minutes. Not even sure what else is in there.
Just as the note from the author says: Never run scripts without reading and understanding what they do.
This is an outdated fork of a configurable script that I use to do initial config of my windows 10 machines. But I've created my own config saying which functions to run and which not to run based on reading what each function actually does. I'm an IT pro, I knew how to do most of these tweaks in windows settings or group policy, but it's still easier to just run a script than to perform hundreds of clicks, especially when the settings get reorganized in every other windows update.
And as this is HN, I expect lots of people here being IT pros, so I would correct you here: Don't run this stuff if you don't understand what it does.
Just not this stuff, any stuff without review. A lot of Windows advice has sadly always been the equivalent of curl | sudo bash - and the culture proliferates this practice. But it also highlights that Windows 10 is unusable without Group Policy, which is an almost sane interface for Windows "tweaks". Windows editions without full group policy support are essentially garbage.
To me, I'd never run someone's prefab cleanup script, but I find this script really nice because it's documented, categorized, and there's a lot of useful PowerShell in here, if you're looking for specific things. There's plenty of commands in here I use, and plenty I'd like to... along with quite a few I definitely would not.
They're not a horrendous idea. This is forked off of the script that I've been using for years. All of the settings it touches are very clear since each change it makes is configured right up front.
I purposely disable SmartScreen because I don't need information about applications I'm running shipped off to Microsoft. Setting the current network to private is handy after a first-time install since Windows often doesn't prompt and defaults to public.
I mean, sure, SmartScreen is an important security service that should not be disabled if you're OK with hashes of every executable you run being transmitted to Microsoft.
Totally agree with this. I’ve not seen one of these things that isn’t seriously dangerous to run.
As with all these things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, apparently by tinfoil hatted nut jobs who don’t understand the problem domain well enough to be making decisions for people who know even less than they do.
This criticism is a bit unfair. It's a gist on github, which you are supposed to read and understand as the author states in his opening disclaimer. The statement for enabling SmartScreen is also included.
And no, your machine gets not owned when you disable SmartScreen - there are other protective measures you can take.
> service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned.
SmartScreen sends all your file hashes and unique computer info to Microsoft. If you're not stepping into weird links and running weird executables it's really not doing much for you.
Could not disagree more, SmartScreen is a horrendous idea.
You should only be installing verified trusted apps you can verify the sources or hash for, farming this out to a third party, even if its MS, is a great way to open yourself up to watering hole attacks.
Furthermore, you are encouraging poor user behaviour with "oh man this app said my app is good" and then ending up with all manner of poorly vetted bloatware, not to mention antitrust and legal issues.
Really it should be possible to completely remove and/or replace this whole component.
As for network, why aren't running from behind a properly secured connection? That's just bad practice. If you want to connect from a coffeeshop or whatever, set your firewall to block everything by default.
Thanks for the info; I've been concerned enough about Windows 10 telemetry (etc.) to avoid it, and when I saw this script I thought "ohhh maybe I can just do this?"--so you saved me.
Do you have a rec or a resource? I haven't looked seriously at this so if it's just like "google it" mea culpa, but it seems like there's a lot of misinformation and what not out there. I saw "O&O ShutUp10" in a sibling thread?
I think I would think about specific Windows Telemetry that you want to disable and more importantly, why (i.e. "What's the Threat Model around Microsoft knowing this"). Because the vast majority of the telemetry collected by Windows is simply to make Windows work better - things like "Upgrade failed because $REASON" or "$DRIVER is causing performance problems".
You can see a lot of the kinds of telemetry that Windows is interested in if you go to Event Viewer => Application Logs => Microsoft => Windows, if you read it you see that it's like, Google Lighthouse style stuff, to make Windows faster and more reliable
Use these scripts to figure out the kinds of things you don't want to run, then make really targeted "Disable This" choices
The thing is this script is not only about telemetry, but also about disabling some annoyances that are especially annoying in server or workstation environment.
I don't think there's an up to date resource describing all these tweaks. My recommendations:
- Use the original script, it's slightly more up to date, last update was in november 2020: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
- Read it's library of tweaks, especially the notes about potential unwanted side effects in comments. If you don't understand what each feature does, google it. The tweaks are grouped.
- Don't enable any tweak where you don't understand what it does, especially in the security and network tweaks categories.
I use O&O ShutUp10 and it is much more approachable. Rather than immediately enabling and blocking settings, ShutUp10 gives you recommendations and you can reasearch individual settings you aren't sure of.
I agree. If you want a stripped down Windows use Windows 10 LTSC. It's everything anyone wants from Windows without any of the cruft. I'm a Linux person but when I installed LTSC for my wife all her complaints about sudden reboots and other unwanted behavior evaporated.
Makes you wonder why they bother with any other Windows.
most of these things also look for registry file entries that point to non existing files and they have no regards for parametric entries (i.e. c:\users\{current}\blah) so they wreak havoc on your installed services and applications.
You complain about nonsense and than go forward and spread some on your own. You saying that SmartScreen and Defender slows down a Windows machine by a factor of 2 just makes you a nonsense clown.
I’ve read some criticism towards this script and/or these kind of scripts in the comments. The criticism should instead be directed towards Microsoft, which decided to treat their customers (even alleged „Pro“ customers!) like babies and force useless bloatware, ads, telemetry and the absolute worst update system of any OS ever upon their users, thus making these kind of scripts necessary to begin with.
> The criticism should instead be directed towards Microsoft,
Totally agree that MS deserves criticism as you correctly point out. However, criticism towards the script and similar is equally valid (and important).
Yes you’re right of course, I should’ve phrased it differently. I didn’t see any criticism geared towards MS, so it kind of felt like shooting the messenger.
Generally, I don't think Windows 10's telemetry features are privacy-violating. Most of the telemetry (especially if you choose the "required only" option in setup) is just for crashes and basic usage data (they won't use it for advertising for example, like Google or Facebook); that said, I use pi-hole as my DNS which blocks a lot of the Microsoft URLs used by telemetry.
However, my biggest issue is simply bloat. With every major update on Windows 10 we get more and more crap running on the OS. A fresh install of Windows 10 21H1 uses 3Gb+ of RAM and that is insane. There are things like "YourPhone" which is an app that starts at boot and cannot be uninstalled which is supposed to help integrate your Android phone - I have an iPhone and couldn't use it even if I wanted to, but I still pay 4Mb of RAM for having it running. I can probably disable half the services that are set to start automatically and still have a working OS.
Tried using something like winreducer to actually strip out the binaries instead of just turning stuff off via registry, but it's tedious; nowadays I just do a regular install then go into task scheduler and remove 1/2 of the needless crap then manually disable 1/4th of the services and use some PowerShell scripts for removing un-removable apps.
I miss the good-old days of Windows 2000 where we booted the OS with < 90Mb RAM and a couple dozen processes.
Windows 2000 was bloatware compared to NT4, which ran comfortably in 32 MB of RAM and had basically no limits on 128 MB. (All of office, photoshop and visual basic multi tasking at the same time smoothly.)
I don’t understand why modern OS’s need multiple gigabytes of RAM just to boot. I get that they do more than NT4 and windows 2000 did, but still, why isn’t a gigabyte enough? I would like to read an OS engineer’s take on it.
I started using Windows in the 3.x days, and the amount of crap I have to "fix" every time I make a new install increases with each successive version... and to think I used to be mildly annoyed at having to enable file extensions and showing full paths back in the 9x/2k days.
It is interesting to think how the incentives grew to make developers create applications which are more attention grabbing with time.
In the msdos days, an app was installed to a directory.
In the win 3.x days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group OR shortcut on the desktop.
In the win95 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group AND shortcut on the desktop.
In the win98 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop and quicklaunch bar.
In the win98se days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar and systemtray when run.
In the winme days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar and systemtray when the system started.
In the winxp days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started and changed your default homepage.
In the winvista days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage and added toolbars on ie.
In the win7 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage, added toolbars on ie and showed ads when run.
In the win8 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage, added toolbars on ie and showed ads when the system starts.
In the win10 days, an app is installed to a directory, creates a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changes your default homepage, adds toolbars on ie/edge, shows ads when the system starts and constantly tries to convince you to use this program or install others.
I actually don't know if ie/edge still have default homepage or toolbars, but you get the idea.
To be fair, you sometimes had to open the machines and fiddle with irq's and other things I already forgot about.
I remember one machine, where I couldn't get sound blaster mouse, printer and modem to work at the same time.
I do agree that nowadays software companies expect to just own you if you use their products. The sad part is that what Microsoft is doing is "normal" or even minimal compared to what Apple or Google are doing. And it's getting worse all the time.
Fortunately Linux desktop is good enough this days for most tasks.
Who cares about operating systems any more? That seems like a solved problem and frankly all the major ones are fine these days.
Computers are chosen based on applications. If you want to play games, you are probably buying a Windows PC. Developing iOS apps? You want a Mac. If you just need a browser, then a Chrome Book or iPad is probably a good choice. I'd bet a lot of people here use three or more operating systems every day on different computers doing different things.
No Windows version since XP has been fine. They varied from utterly unusable crap to barely tolerable. I honestly never understood why people use Windows, is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? I still have a small Win partition installed for rare Win-only things and every single time I interact with Win 10 I remember how utterly broken it is. Like the moment you boot, you're bombarded with crap that has flashy colors, animation some even sound too. It feels like that one Futurama episode about AOL.
This is a great tool, but remember to re-run it periodically (especially after updates) as Windows 10 will "helpfully" re-enable stuff you have disabled.
I switched to dual booting Linux mint and Windows 10 on my home desktop. Work laptop has been linux only for years. I've only used windows a couple of times, because these days I'm mostly just using a browser.
By the time you've "reclaimed" Windows 10, there'll be an update that undoes your work, so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
If you have access to it, through partner or MSDN or corporate licensing or otherwise, it is really worth installing the Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB/LTSC versions.
It has most of the annoying things that plague consumer versions of Windows 10 stripped out, and it gets a very different cadence of updates, restricted to security and quality fixes. No Cortana, no Edge installed by default, no built-in Store universal apps.
It's rock solid; I have never gotten a bad update pushed to any of my boxes running LTSC over the past five years. If you want a Windows workstation that just works, and will continue to work without fiddling, this is it.
Are you sure this is a good thing? As much as I don't like Edge, aren't the alternatives either IE or no browser? It's not like they'll ship Firefox preinstalled instead.
The LTSC images are based off of Windows 10 when they were still shipping non-Chromium Edge as the default browser in the consumer versions, so not having that around is a plus.
Readit News
It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completely superfluous, like disabling "3D Objects" which has already been disabled in the latest Windows version
Just don't run this stuff.
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.
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.
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.
Naturally I trust both of them more than so called SmartScreen because unlike Smartscreen, I can inspect their code. Yes, the binaries can contain malware, but the first principles tell me that trustability score is inverse of what is being reported by MS.
Naturally I have disabled Smartscreen and Windows defender and admin rights alerts and bajilion things that internet gurus will tell me not to because I don't know what's good for me. Needless to say, my PC runs faster, calmer and is actually malware free because I don't run unauditable things like Smartscreen on it.
Edit: I get WinMerge binary from GitHub repo, and KDiff3 from official website. As trusted as it can get, short of compiling myself.
This is a work machine so I can't control most of Windows behavior. Personal machine runs NixOS for 90% tasks + Windows dual boot for games without connecting to network because I can't be bothered with disabling Smartscreen and defender every other week.
I've got WinMerge installed on my machines and I've never had that issue. Are you sure you're using trusted sources?
Like I found that SmartScreen and defender blocked my ethminer but that is in general pretty smart because it is common to have it unwittingly installed, and I simply said it is OK to run.
> Disabling Telemetry breaks Windows updates
> Automatic web searches in start menu
> Application suggestions are silently installed (wat?)
> Allow MS to collect activity history
> Location tracking
> Map updates (who the fuck uses maps on a PC?)
> Tailored experiences (apparently spamming ads on a desktop OS is an experience)
> Advertising ID
> Cortana
This is just from skimming the list for 5 minutes. Not even sure what else is in there.
Who doesn't?
This is an outdated fork of a configurable script that I use to do initial config of my windows 10 machines. But I've created my own config saying which functions to run and which not to run based on reading what each function actually does. I'm an IT pro, I knew how to do most of these tweaks in windows settings or group policy, but it's still easier to just run a script than to perform hundreds of clicks, especially when the settings get reorganized in every other windows update.
And as this is HN, I expect lots of people here being IT pros, so I would correct you here: Don't run this stuff if you don't understand what it does.
I purposely disable SmartScreen because I don't need information about applications I'm running shipped off to Microsoft. Setting the current network to private is handy after a first-time install since Windows often doesn't prompt and defaults to public.
As with all these things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, apparently by tinfoil hatted nut jobs who don’t understand the problem domain well enough to be making decisions for people who know even less than they do.
> SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned
It's not hard for people, especially ones who read HN, to be perfectly safe with SmartScreen disabled.
SmartScreen sends all your file hashes and unique computer info to Microsoft. If you're not stepping into weird links and running weird executables it's really not doing much for you.
You should only be installing verified trusted apps you can verify the sources or hash for, farming this out to a third party, even if its MS, is a great way to open yourself up to watering hole attacks.
Furthermore, you are encouraging poor user behaviour with "oh man this app said my app is good" and then ending up with all manner of poorly vetted bloatware, not to mention antitrust and legal issues.
Really it should be possible to completely remove and/or replace this whole component.
As for network, why aren't running from behind a properly secured connection? That's just bad practice. If you want to connect from a coffeeshop or whatever, set your firewall to block everything by default.
Do you have a rec or a resource? I haven't looked seriously at this so if it's just like "google it" mea culpa, but it seems like there's a lot of misinformation and what not out there. I saw "O&O ShutUp10" in a sibling thread?
You can see a lot of the kinds of telemetry that Windows is interested in if you go to Event Viewer => Application Logs => Microsoft => Windows, if you read it you see that it's like, Google Lighthouse style stuff, to make Windows faster and more reliable
Use these scripts to figure out the kinds of things you don't want to run, then make really targeted "Disable This" choices
I don't think there's an up to date resource describing all these tweaks. My recommendations:
- Use the original script, it's slightly more up to date, last update was in november 2020: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script - Read it's library of tweaks, especially the notes about potential unwanted side effects in comments. If you don't understand what each feature does, google it. The tweaks are grouped. - Don't enable any tweak where you don't understand what it does, especially in the security and network tweaks categories.
Dead Comment
Makes you wonder why they bother with any other Windows.
You can't say anything like that without context.
SmartScreen and defender are the first things to go on my machine as they slow down computer at least by the factor of 2, if not more.
People on HN generally don't need babysitting!. Know where you are.
Fortunately you can just disable it from the settings though.
you can get slim builds with chrome ready to go already, builds with all these cleanup scripts configured, and more
sadly, they also know people in a rush are looking for this or prefer it, and they install backdoors or ways to steal your crypto on them and stuff
I wouldn't even trust the scripts itself at this point, so I'm another for just don't run this stuff
The scripts (they are mostly forks of https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script) are nicely written toggles for registry values or GPO, that you can read and selectively all. Nothing scary.
Totally agree that MS deserves criticism as you correctly point out. However, criticism towards the script and similar is equally valid (and important).
But even if the house is made of poo, shooting holes in the wall is not the way to fix it.
There really aren’t any winning moves other than not to play at all. Which may be an insane self sacrificing position.
However, my biggest issue is simply bloat. With every major update on Windows 10 we get more and more crap running on the OS. A fresh install of Windows 10 21H1 uses 3Gb+ of RAM and that is insane. There are things like "YourPhone" which is an app that starts at boot and cannot be uninstalled which is supposed to help integrate your Android phone - I have an iPhone and couldn't use it even if I wanted to, but I still pay 4Mb of RAM for having it running. I can probably disable half the services that are set to start automatically and still have a working OS.
Tried using something like winreducer to actually strip out the binaries instead of just turning stuff off via registry, but it's tedious; nowadays I just do a regular install then go into task scheduler and remove 1/2 of the needless crap then manually disable 1/4th of the services and use some PowerShell scripts for removing un-removable apps.
I miss the good-old days of Windows 2000 where we booted the OS with < 90Mb RAM and a couple dozen processes.
I don’t understand why modern OS’s need multiple gigabytes of RAM just to boot. I get that they do more than NT4 and windows 2000 did, but still, why isn’t a gigabyte enough? I would like to read an OS engineer’s take on it.
You need 3GB RAM to open some web pages in your browser nowadays and that's insane.
In the msdos days, an app was installed to a directory.
In the win 3.x days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group OR shortcut on the desktop.
In the win95 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group AND shortcut on the desktop.
In the win98 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop and quicklaunch bar.
In the win98se days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar and systemtray when run.
In the winme days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar and systemtray when the system started.
In the winxp days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started and changed your default homepage.
In the winvista days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage and added toolbars on ie.
In the win7 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage, added toolbars on ie and showed ads when run.
In the win8 days, an app was installed to a directory, created a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changed your default homepage, added toolbars on ie and showed ads when the system starts.
In the win10 days, an app is installed to a directory, creates a program group, shortcut on the desktop, quicklaunch bar, systemtray when the system started, changes your default homepage, adds toolbars on ie/edge, shows ads when the system starts and constantly tries to convince you to use this program or install others.
I actually don't know if ie/edge still have default homepage or toolbars, but you get the idea.
I remember one machine, where I couldn't get sound blaster mouse, printer and modem to work at the same time.
I do agree that nowadays software companies expect to just own you if you use their products. The sad part is that what Microsoft is doing is "normal" or even minimal compared to what Apple or Google are doing. And it's getting worse all the time.
Fortunately Linux desktop is good enough this days for most tasks.
Aren't people tired of fighting with their own computers? I abandoned Windows, installed Linux and can't be happier now.
Computers are chosen based on applications. If you want to play games, you are probably buying a Windows PC. Developing iOS apps? You want a Mac. If you just need a browser, then a Chrome Book or iPad is probably a good choice. I'd bet a lot of people here use three or more operating systems every day on different computers doing different things.
No Windows version since XP has been fine. They varied from utterly unusable crap to barely tolerable. I honestly never understood why people use Windows, is there an argument other than "I'm used to it"? I still have a small Win partition installed for rare Win-only things and every single time I interact with Win 10 I remember how utterly broken it is. Like the moment you boot, you're bombarded with crap that has flashy colors, animation some even sound too. It feels like that one Futurama episode about AOL.
I think the very point of this thread is that is not the case and many users are very unhappy with Windows telemetry.
It's unconscionable to suggest that one needs multiple computers for various purposes when they are all general purpose computers on the inside.
Dead Comment
By the time you've "reclaimed" Windows 10, there'll be an update that undoes your work, so it doesn't seem worth the effort.
Dead Comment
It has most of the annoying things that plague consumer versions of Windows 10 stripped out, and it gets a very different cadence of updates, restricted to security and quality fixes. No Cortana, no Edge installed by default, no built-in Store universal apps.
It's rock solid; I have never gotten a bad update pushed to any of my boxes running LTSC over the past five years. If you want a Windows workstation that just works, and will continue to work without fiddling, this is it.
Are you sure this is a good thing? As much as I don't like Edge, aren't the alternatives either IE or no browser? It's not like they'll ship Firefox preinstalled instead.