NoelC

Aero Glass for Win 8+ normally pops up a dialog with a Machine Code and puts a watermark on your desktop if you have not donated and received a "thank you" key. If you have a donation.key in place it will not put up anything at all. And it does not contain any adware. If you've infected your system with something you've downloaded from a, shall we say questionable web site, that's not the fault of Aero Glass for Win 8+. -Noel

Keep at it, a consistent blue Aero Glass-based theme doable with some effort. -Noel

So what? As long as a different Microsoft operating system remains in use Microsoft still wins. If they don't get you today, they'll get you next month, or next year. Such is the dynamic. I find it better to know the enemy and to be able to infiltrate than to run and hide and be ignorant. And it's not like I'm sending them any money or data with which they can make money. How many folks ended up with a bone stock Windows 8 or 7 or Vista or XP? It really only matters what it can be molded into, not what it is. If I weren't doing it, I wouldn't have the hands-down, no-holds-barred, best OS I've ever run on my desktop right now. It just doesn't happen to be based on Win 10. Yet. Jaclaz your logic is that if we all simply demanded better, and didn't settle one bit that they'd be forced to do better. What makes you think they actually can? I believe Win 10 is the best anyone could possibly do with today's "engineers". -Noel

I kind of promised the W10EpicFail site that my thread on the Re-Tweaker script would be an exclusive there. Feel free to close this thread if you like. I will consider whether to go non-exclusive. -Noel

That's entirely possible, and yes, I agree - worse. However, what other people do with random keystrokes and mouse clicks on their computers is anyone's guess. It's difficult to take too seriously an "I don't know how or when this happened" kind of report. Did a prompt pop up after an application installation by that user stating "you have new applications that can open web pages" and the user, who was typing an eMail, just blindly hit return? Who knows? I know *I* would make careful note of whatever had been done on the system between the time I saw expected behavior and changed behavior. I would know if updates had been installed, the system had been rebooted, something unexpected popped-up on the screen. And I know I don't have malware. But then details matter to me more than some. There's a reason I expunge all the Apps from my system and disable many of the jobs that seek to manage Apps. I have yet to see *my* Win 10 test systems spontaneously change anything except during an in-place upgrade. Not surprisingly, the fewer mysterious jobs you allow to run, the less mystery there is. It is just a Windows system after all under the covers. Hack away the tangle of vines holding up all the garbage Microsoft has hung all over it and amazingly it starts to behave well. All that being said... I don't think people should have to resort to coding and buying 3rd party firewall software to protect themselves from the whims of the company that provided their operating system! It's just all wrong. We don't need a free OS for the masses. We need a MORE EXPENSIVE operating system software from a company that cares MORE about what we need, and is willing to put in the WORK to provide it. -Noel

Not new news. We saw a reversion of a great many things - including privacy settings - with the 10586 in-place upgrade. I've been doing detailed testing on in-place upgrades with build 14267 on top of 10586. All the removed Apps come back.All the disabled or deleted scheduled tasks come back.All the disabled services get re-enabled.Telemetry settings get turned back on (which may be expected, since 14267 IS an insider build).Many registry settings get overwritten, such as tweaks to the desktop environment.Microsoft quite clearly is sending the message "You will NOT have it your way; you will have it OUR way and you will like it!" It is why I'm developing a re-tweaker script to help me get my system back to the way I want it quickly after these upgrade cluster jobs. Though I do write comments in my scripts, it currently has 1437 lines in it! It's not trivial!! -Noel

As long as you don't develop Apps yourself, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft Location Simulator Sensor Driver is useless. I can only guess that there are processes in place to restore the Apps back to the system as quickly as they are removed, and I haven't done enough to thwart that process. Thus the speed of execution is probably a factor; I have SSD storage (even my VMs run from an array of SSDs), so disk-based operations complete very quickly. Perhaps if they were to take longer I'd see the situation here where the Apps just come back as well. Since quite a few services and scheduled tasks are disabled, maybe the App removal would stick if you run the script a second time? Have you tried it? -Noel

I don't know. All the systems I maintain have had this set up ahead of time, so I've not explored that angle. And I haven't had that many failures. -Noel

Something I always do to every system I have to ensure that if something goes wrong and there's a remnant of the bootup process in place, I'll be able to take control and use WinRE or whatever... I enable the boot menu. Though shown above for Win 8, this same tweak works on Win 10. This shows every time... -Noel

Given the interesting things shown in the screen grab there (e.g., "Configure fake WSUS server"), I wonder what level of granularity is shown for updates - i.e., whether they still show up as big cumulative updates, or this tool has found a back door and can break them down to individual patches (and if so, is there documentation?). If after having gone through all that, you still just see one big update available (plus maybe a few drivers), then I'm having trouble seeing an advantage over just using Microsoft software to do the job (i.e., the Windows Update Hiding Tool). In any case, it's good that many folks are stepping up to make such software available. The problem for users becomes more and more one of "Which of the many available privacy enhancers should I run?" and "Do they interact?" There are worse problems to have. Edit: I did some testing on a throwaway VM... It didn't detect any updates (nor even try to contact any servers as far as I could see). It appears to be VERY much prototype-level software at this point. -Noel

In the next rendition I think I'll make disabling the Windows Firewall service a separate item. -Noel

Well, since it's Win 10 you're talking about the system updates are cumulative - meaning pretty much all or nothing (excluding the drivers). Generally speaking, I say "if it works don't fix it" regarding drivers, but there are reasons to make exceptions, especially if your hardware is cutting edge and you get new games. I'd definitely suggest reading this site (and especially pay attention to his "MS-DEFCON" level) before deciding to go ahead with any Windows Updates: http://www.askwoody.com/ Some key things to keep in mind: You can run the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) and set the Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update - Configure Automatic Updates policy entry to Disabled. This will cause Windows to wait for you to press a button before updating. If you Disable the Windows Update service (e.g., via Services.msc or an SC command), you are further assuring that Windows will not update on its own. The Windows Update Hiding tool (KB3073930) can be used to check for available updates without giving the go ahead to install them.Knowing this, a strategy to consider might be: Set your system's policy to require your approval before installing updates, but beyond that also leave the Windows Update service (wuauserv) configured to Disabled. Windows Defender will do its own updates if you do this. Then occasionally, only when you're ready to deal with the potential problems an update might bring, you can set the service to Manual, start it, then immediately set it back to Disabled. The service will keep running, but will not start itself again until you initiate it. Once wuauserv has been started, first use the Windows Update Hiding tool (KB3073930) to check for the available updates. This will tell you about any available cumulative updates and also hardware driver updates and allow you to hide them if you've read about problems. Research them. Then, assuming you've reviewed the list and are ready to actually install the updates, initiate the actual Windows Update via the Settings > Update & Security > [ Check for updates ] button. Do the reboot if needed (they usually seem to), and do your testing. If something goes wrong, you can uninstall the update via the View installed updates control panel entry. Maybe you'll want to hide it next time. Note that this is NOT a "set it and forget it" strategy. If you don't do anything, Windows won't update. You have to be willing to occasionally reconfigure the Windows Update service and initiate the check for updates. But it puts you in as much control as is possible with Windows 10. -Noel

Sphinx uses the Base Filtering Engine (Windows Filtering Platform) so the rules-management service doesn't need to run. Yes, that's a bit confusing and it took me a while after installing Sphinx WxFC to realize that BOTH services were controlling the Base Filtering Engine (and thus still allowing things through that shouldn't have been). -Noel

Thing is, Windows 7 wasn't just a hodgepodge of thrown together stuff. It had been refined to be able to do things like give you options if you got into a bind. Remember the horror of the first systems that wouldn't boot you into DOS? Whatever would we do if something went wrong? In the almost 2 decades between that and 2009 a great deal of effort went into seeing to it that we could do at least something if everything wasn't hunky dory. I've restored systems via the WinRE environment. It's hardly ever needed, but when you need the power you need the power! How do the youngsters at Microsoft even presume that just changing things wholesale without thinking it all through could possibly work? And no, we "oldsters" who are complaining about how Windows 10 is worse aren't just dinosaur stick-in-the-muds. We're the experienced ones who know that important stuff can be lost when things don't go right. -Noel

Sorry, that does need some explanation. I bought a 3rd party firewall product called Sphinx Windows 10 Firewall Control that allows much better management (not to mention isn't subject to secret Microsoft under-the-table rules). Note that the Windows Update process actually requires the Windows Firewall service to be running or it won't update anything. I think of that not as a limitation, but a feature. If I have both wuauserv and MpsSvc disabled, it seems quite unlikely Microsoft is going to find a way to push Win 10 through the door on my Win 7 and 8.1 systems, nor push anything through the Win 10 door until I'm good and ready to receive it. The script is a work in progress, primarily designed for me to return my Windows 10 systems to my preferred configuration, which may not be useful for everyone or anyone else as is. But the structure's there; you can edit the script to your own needs. -Noel

TELETYPE MODEL 33 ASR, baby! -Noel

That makes a lot of sense and cuts right to the heart of the issue. People simply expect Windows to be a computer operating system on their computers - not some cloud-integrated play toy environment whose biggest accomplishment is updating itself. Continuously. You do know that we're no longer supposed to want computers, right? -Noel

Don't want to do that. I actually use the tab completion feature. Without checking at all I'd give any older settings about a 3 in 10 chance of working on the new CMD window. -Noel

Yes, with lots more stuff being tweaked. It's not organized very well yet. -Noel

At the moment my test VM says "Connect to the Internet to activate Windows". I have no real need to allow it to do so just to test this upgrade stuff. Found an interesting thing while developing a much expanded re-tweaker script... I could not configure a scheduled task to "Disabled" - but I COULD just delete it. This command cannot be completed: SCHTASKS /CHANGE /DISABLE /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\SettingSync\BackgroundUploadTask" while this one works fine: SCHTASKS /DELETE /F /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\SettingSync\BackgroundUploadTask" -Noel

LOL, I just did a geeky thing and lo and behold the new CMD window behaved in a remarkably wrong way... I grabbed a command out of a script and pasted it into the CMD window. A filename showed up in front of the command! Why? Because the command line I grabbed had a TAB in front of it, rather than spaces. Pasting it in made the CMD processor think that I'd typed TAB, looking to use one of the filenames in the current folder. All that's left at Microsoft are junior programmers who insist on redoing everything and believe they actually know how to make things better than what took their predecessors an entire lifetime to polish. -Noel

Yep, I just experienced the same thing. No Symbols for you! -Noel

Not sure what to do... It all went perfectly for me. Then after a reboot nothing came back... I guess it could have to do with the differences in our systems before the in-place upgrade, since some of the settings are actually retained. -Noel

Symbols downloaded the day after release, and unlike the previous Insider Preview, there are no lockups. It is working great. There is still the dwm incompatibility message, but watermark is not there, and everything appears to be running fine. Not locking up here, but it really only just barely works, with all kinds of visual glitches, and frankly without a working theme atlas the look isn't really much better than the (poor) stock Windows appearance. Big Muscle of course needs to provide the updated mapping for the various resources before the previous theme atlases will work. Or someone needs to take the time to create a new one that maps by default to the stock theme atlas. Thing is, Microsoft seems to keep changing things, so that's just paddling upstream. I find myself de-motivated when I see all the work to improve the desktop look and feel evaporate. I guess most of the folks who don't use this software have felt that long ago and gotten past it. -Noel

Most illustrative in the user comments section was the one practically illiterate guy who ranted about "ANTI-Microsoft" comments. -Noel