JorgeA

I tried it on my Win10 test system. It seems to have worked fine without any issues, but then I didn't perform comparative monitoring/testing of outgoing connections before and after installing it. --JorgeA

Nice find, jaclaz. This is the best Windows 10-related news I've seen in a long time. You can bet your bottom dollar/euro/franc/rupee/pound/peso that Microsoft's army of lawyers would have fought this if they thought they could win. By "winning" I mean not just the case itself in a court of law, but also in the court of public opinion. They probably made a strategic decision to settle, in the hope that the news would be reported quietly and go away quickly, as compared to the months of bad publicity that an actual trial would have involved. Because no matter how they try to justify performing the updowngrade, it simply looks bad. Even if they argue the legal point that "you must have agreed to the EULA at some point, don't you read these things?", it teaches the public-- that Microsoft is not trustworthy and that they do need to read the EULAs carefully. Those of us who read this forum may know that, but up until now the broader public hasn't been awakened to it, and minimizing news of this sort helps to keep it that way. Spread the news far and wide -- maybe it'll encourage other victims of MSFT's Win10 pushiness to follow suit (so to speak). --JorgeA

I tried to duplicate the procedure that Dedoimedo used to create a new user account, down to making it a local account. I did not get any of the bloatware that he reported. Instead, I got a fairly standard Win10 account, with some oddities. Most of the default settings were in place, including allowing zillions of apps to access the camera and microphone; and the Start Menu had all those tiles in it. OneDrive was back, compared to the main account where I had disabled it. The Windows Store icon was back on the Taskbar and the IE icon that I'd placed there in the original account was not. The Taskbar itself was at the default fat width. However, some things surprisingly made it over to the new account from the original one. Classic Shell was installed (although the custom Win7-style Start Button was not), as were EMET and Firefox. Bottom line: I'm not sure why Dedoimedo would get third-party bloatware on a newly created (secondary) Win10 user account, unless the programs already existed (factory-installed or manually installed) on the original Win10 account. OTOH this could all be some sort of randomization strategy to keep the skeptics off-balance, along the same lines of what we've speculated with respect to some Win7 users getting suddenly downgraded to Windows 10 despite their Windows Update settings while others remain unscathed. --JorgeA

Huh, pretty cool. I went looking for LG models in the U.S. that would have that "Time Machine" feature. While I found references to its existence in India, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and even Pakistan, the feature sadly doesn't seem to be available in the U.S. Probably it's Hollywood we should be "thanking" for that omission. So I'll have to stick with Windows Media Center. --JorgeA

This caught my eye. Are you saying that your LG TV has built-in DVR functionality? Which model is it? --JorgeA

Steve Gibson weighs in on Windows generally and Windows 10 specifically : --JorgeA

He says he encountered the bloatware in the new user account that he created on his existing Win10 system in order to see what a reader had reported about having trouble creating additional users after the reader upgraded from Windows 8.1: FWIW, he goes on to describe the process he went through to create a new account: If I get the chance to, I may try this procedure and see if the same thing happens on my machine. Or maybe somebody else will beat me to the punch. --JorgeA

Have you put into writing the procedure that you use to create that thumb drive with Windows drivers? I assume you get the drivers from the manufacturers? This is interesting and readers in a similar situation may wish to do what you did. --JorgeA

The fad for ignoring user's clearly stated preferences is spreading: Why can't 'no' just mean 'no' when it comes to free software? A good question: --JorgeA

Dedoimedo found that setting up a new user account in Windows 10 downloaded crapware onto his PC: Windows 10 user management - Account Savant Just as PC manufacturers get paid a small fee by software vendors to put their programs on newly built computers, I wonder if MSFT gets paid for adding all this stuff to people's already existing Win10 installations. --JorgeA

They're like The Terminator -- laser-focused on their objective and totally unconcerned with the destruction they wreak in the process. --JorgeA

In a recent episode of What the Tech, Paul Thurrott lays hard into Microsoft for what he calls its "dishonest" practices pushing Windows 10 on users. The discussion then ranges out into the apparent inability of some folks to understand that their own experience with Windows 10 is not necessarily what others are experiencing with Windows 10. [emphasis in original] --JorgeA

The trouble is, gathering and reporting on the news requires having people who do it for a living. It takes time to develop not only a website, but also the knowledge of the industry and (crucially) the variety of sources who'll share what they know, on and off the record. A reporter needs to know both what to ask and whom to ask it of. Developing this knowledge, these contacts and these skills is a job. And that requires having a source of income deriving from that work in order to justify continuing to do it. The newspapers and news magazines are in a deepening crisis because readers have flocked to the Web for their news and fewer of them are paying for print editions. If news organizations can't find a way to make a living from what they put out on the Web, then they will go the way of the farrier and the player-piano roll maker. The same goes for tech news sites. We can't reasonably expect someone to spend their days and nights benchmarking hardware or pumping people for information at zero pay: were they foolish enough to persist in such a project, they would soon starve to death. I can hear the cynical cracks already: so what, we're being fed B.S. anyway, who believes them in any case, etc. etc. That's all well and good, but imagine how abysmal our ignorance would truly be if we had to rely for our news on the tweets and press releases of companies and politicians. --JorgeA

If Web users are not willing to enter into periodic (e.g., annual) subscriptions to support the websites they visit; and if they are not going to provide micro-payments for when they do visit websites; and if in addition they block the ads that the websites display in order to defray their costs -- then how are websites going to stay afloat long-term? --JorgeA

That's a very good question, the answer to which I wish I knew. It doesn't speak very well for the marketing strategy (or for the UWP apps) if people are enticed this way to try them but then never go back to them. BTW I suspect that microtransactions are the way that the Web ultimately will solve the issue of how to support websites. Instead of subscribing for $25 a year or whatever to a news site, and instead of putting up with obnoxious ads, maybe the solution lies in a workable system for paying pennies or even fractions of a penny for each time you read an article. --JorgeA

It's undeniably true that getting to run Windows 10 the way that XP, Vista, or 7 run is a lot of work -- see the enormous effort that NoelC has put into tamping down the Win10 telemetry. And in the end you still end up with a number of drawbacks, including the Settings app that spaces out the category labels as if screen real estate were cheap. Other than simply accepting whatever the Lords of Microsoft choose to dispense to us peasants, there are three different ways we can approach the situation: Hang on to a previous version of Windows and fortify it against emerging threats as well as we can for as long as we can; Migrate to a different OS family altogether; Mitigate the unacceptable aspects of Windows 10 as best we can. In this thread we've covered all three strategies. Use of the Windows Update MiniTool would fall under #3. A user adopting that approach would install Classic Shell and Aero Glass; disable or uninstall UWP apps; implement NoelC's advice regarding firewalls and the hosts file; and now (possibly) use the WUMT, all in the attempt to preserve as much as possible the Windows experience as we know it. And there has been considerable interest in this third approach, as the success of Classic Shell and the length of the Aero Glass threads here on MSFN attest. Microsoft could probably destroy #3 anytime they wanted by removing from Windows the bits that make those mitigations possible, and then those who went that route would have some hard choices to make. But in the meantime, #3 is one way to try to make staying in your home tolerable enough without digging a moat or going into exile. --JorgeA

[emphasis added] Fantastic observations! --JorgeA

From a vigorous Win10 defender, an interesting tidbit about the perceived value of mobile apps -- and, by extension, about the value of the whole Windows 10 model. Discussion starts at 30:42: --JorgeA

Funny you should mention that, your post came in while I was composing my comment to Glenn9999 about the need to keep Windows Update disabled. If the idea is to better control Win10 patching, why wouldn't you want to keep that service disabled except for when you (and not Win10) are good and ready to see what's available? --JorgeA P.S. I'm not sure about the Home edition, but in Win10 Pro you can set it to notify without automatically installing the patches (yet). So, thinking more about it (it's been several weeks since I've booted up my copy of Win10 ), in theory maybe you could leave WU enabled, and then when the OS tells you there's something available, you could run the MiniTool (or possibly Glenn's tool) and select the updates you want.

That sounds interesting, I wasn't aware of it! For Win10 purposes, the key is whether the tool can be utilized by the user to pick and choose the updates he will put on his machine. Also, the user would need to keep the Windows Update service disabled at all times other than when using the tool, so that Win10 couldn't find and install the patches itself. --JorgeA

It's curious that it would be changing or even trying to view the privacy settings that would cause the Settings app to crash... --JorgeA

How about this... [source] --JorgeA

I saw a doctor yesterday and noticed that they were using Windows 10. At the end of my visit, I asked how he liked it. He said that he kept getting notices to upgrade to Windows 10 over and over and over again, and that he kept hitting "no" every time. And then one morning he came into the office and he couldn't use his PC for hours because it was installing Windows 10. --JorgeA

The mystery of the missing "never check for updates" option in Windows Update appears to have been solved. The person reporting this remembered that he had used a program called Windows Update MiniTool. He writes, There seems to be general agreement that this tool is the cause of the missing option, although further testing might be necessary. Early versions of the WUMT are acknowledged to "lock" the Update settings (see here). "JT" reports that he was using version 12.05.2016 of the program, yet the locking of Updates settings was supposedly already fixed in version 25.12.2015. At any rate, though, the program is described as: ...so it's not entirely clear what was going on with JT's computer. All that said, this WUMT could turn out to be quite a development for Win10 users: [source] I have not tried out this program, but from the looks of it it would seem that the program makes it possible for Windows 10 users to pick and choose the Windows Updates they want to install, rather than having to accept them and all as a bundle. That could potentially take care of one of the "Big Three" issues with Win10 (UI, telemetry, forced updates). --JorgeA

Do you mean that when you would go into the Settings app and tried to view or change the privacy settings there, the Settings app would crash? --JorgeA