NoelC

What IS the actual LTSB version? Is it Enterprise build 10240? I don't have a desire to interact with Bott or Kelly. -Noel

"Turns out to be incorrect". LOL The guy being paid by Microsoft is telling the truth, while the guy being a journalist is lying for nefarious motives. Right. I have been watching since mid-2015 and have personally observed Windows 10 calling various motherships first hand (Microsoft has zillions of servers worldwide and also heavily uses CDNs). I have the documentation to back it up. The notes I have been keeping about what internet addresses are contacted by what entities at what times by Windows (and what I have had to remove, reconfigure, or protect with ACLs to stop the comms) are over 1,000 lines long. Let's just say they don't favor Bott's position that nothing's up. Here is a very small excerpt... -Noel

Over paranoid? I like to think of myself as "just paranoid enough". -Noel

Gee, let's think about this... Every problem we see Microsoft with could be solved by becoming more adept at doing technical work. Yet they don't. -Noel

Good point, I'll look into it. I certainly want them removed entirely from the disk to save space. -Noel

That's a scary (and very good) thought, Jorge. All things seem possible if one throws out the need for practical usability. I'm reminded of a time long, long ago when I was tasked, as a young engineer with no experience, with redesigning a data entry form. I had never been to the data acquisition site. I had no experience with actually doing the tests that led to numbers being put on paper. I hadn't even talked to someone who did the work. But I was told to make the data processing process more efficient. The form I ended up designing would indeed have gathered just the data we needed for our reports - it would have been more efficient for data entry and processing. Easy for the keypuncher to work with - not unlike some of today's OCR forms. Without knowing it, because I didn't understand AT ALL what was actually happening at the data acquisition site, I created something that looked great on paper but which would have essentially tasked the people manning the test equipment with mentally processing the data into something that was very different than what they were reading out from the equipment. A task that would ultimately have been impossible given the training and time constraints on the folks in the field. The field folks reported in: The form was a failure. Lesson learned: Things can look like a good idea on paper to someone in the office and be completely impractical in the field. The key thing was that management back at the office cared what was reported back in. They didn't try to spin the feedback or change expectations or close off the feedback channel - leading to no lesson learned and ultimate business failure. I illustrate this because it is entirely possible that people with no practical experience can create processes that simply can't work in the real world. In today's terms, I am imagining the Windows Update re-design having been done by twenty-somethings who have never actually had critical systems go down because of a botched update. Doom and gloom is waved off by a cheerful "well, we'll just have our people make sure not to put out any bad updates!" This, of course, at the same time other managers are reducing the system test budget, because the public is just SO willing to test beta quality software... -Noel

Thanks for that feedback. I must be mostly on the right track then. There are a fair number of services that make no sense if the Apps are removed. I have my sights set on them next. Once I figure out the right set, I'll add the commands to disable them and let you know here. -Noel

All's well with Windows 10 build 10586.104 and Aero Glass for Win 8.1+ version 1.4.5.520. -Noel

People are proving to be unwilling to lift their heads from their useless pursuits of something to relieve their boredom. It may take a breakdown of society to change this. It may be that the devices will have to literally stop working (because of no data connectivity and/or no power) before people will pay more attention to what's really going on around them. We haven't even begun to address what spending $100+ / month for the privilege of distracted walking / driving does to people's long-term financial health. Yes, I realize there has always been a "phone bill". Solar USB chargers (that actually work) anyone? -Noel

Stupid question, and I apologize for even bringing it up if you've already thought of it, but does the problem go away after a reboot? Regarding what could cause it... If rebooting does in fact help, I'd suggest disabling hybrid/fast bootup and taking the slightly longer time required to do a real shutdown / bootup. Windows has to rely so much on 3rd party drivers getting everything exactly right at power transitions (e.g., to/from sleep or hibernation) that it's often better to just not go through them. -Noel

Sounds like you need to move to a place with higher humidity. Not that it doesn't bring other problems. For what it's worth I leave most of my external USB drives plugged-in permanently. Nothing wrong with nightly backup. I posted some other stuff here... More real-world actual processing stuff, not just canned benchmark programs: http://win10epicfail.proboards.com/thread/54/performance-tests-fanboys-beware-faster I have proven through careful comparative measurements that Windows 10 10586 is not faster than Win 7 / 8.1, and in fact gets slower at doing mundane things like retrieving files from a server and processing the data in ways people do when they do serious / business computing. -Noel

Double check the list at the top. After that, I'd only suggest even considering the ones that say "Security", and only if they're well-documented. Always remember, it's Microsoft's programmers we're talking about. These are the same folks who brought us Windows 10 and who are working to shoehorn malware in via Windows Update. They are not to be implicitly trusted! Consider Woody Leonhard's advice here: http://www.askwoody.com/ MS-DEFCON 2: Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. -Noel

Don't even dare put a sleeping laptop in a case where air can't circulate! But that's just silly, right? Who'd ever want to put a laptop into a case? (I'm being sarcastic) Microsoft has made running Windows only about running Windows. It no longer matters to them whether we do anything else. Yes, there are WAYYY too many scheduled tasks. They're just hanging stuff all over Windows 10 without a care about whether the system is efficient. It looks like junior application programmers have taken over system design at Microsoft, leaving (I guess) middle school students to program the Apps. I'm developing a Re-Tweaker script to re-do many of the settings I choose to change, Apps I choose to remove, services and scheduled jobs I choose to disable - and which get put back by each in-place upgrade on 4 month intervals. It's just ridiculous to have to do all this stuff. -Noel

I don't know the details under the covers, but the Taskbar no longer responds to re-theming... I don't know whether you'd say that was replaced or not. All it is now is... Flat (with the possibility of blur, as though that somehow could be considered the resurrection of Aero Glass). In any case, the Win 10 Taskbar seems to follow the formula of something that's plain and less usable replacing something better. I haven't seen one "App" that improved on what it killed off. I imagine you're thinking long-term (or maybe corporate), but it's not clear why Windows 10 would be "the only OS left to use" any time soon except if someone who's, shall we say, technically challenged is making the decisions. -Noel

Good quality MyBook USB drives can be had for a song nowadays (under 3 cents a gigabyte). It's just irresponsible to be without backup if your data has any value to you. A 2 TB drive is well under $100. You could easily blow more moolah going out drinking or seeing a concert. Schedule regular system image backups, and set up some file backups. Don't just get one backup drive. Get a few of them and occasionally take one somewhere else (e.g., to protect against an unexpected fire, etc.) Matter of fact, I just ordered another one: 4 TB Western Digital MyBook on Amazon for a measly $119.99. -Noel

Fair enough. I don't mean to be critical. Please bear in mind I know people who thought the "cloud" had "safely" backed up their data but weren't actually able to recover all their files. I'm pretty sure there had been folks on this forum who have said as much. Do yourself a favor (if you haven't already)... Figure out how to back your own data up and take the time to do it. The safety of our data is not someone else's problem, and frankly (speaking as one who has his own data backed up) I don't really want anyone copying any of *my* data to the "cloud". I wouldn't even say a thing about it but for the fact that some asswipe at Microsoft now thinks that such activity is required. An option I could turn off - no problem. Settings sync and onedrive installed out of the box and it being necessary to go figure out some really geeky ways to kill them off - problem. -Noel

This, my friend, is known as "The New Normal". And it's brought about by people (unlike ourselves) who just accept that things are as they are and don't demand better. Avast went down this path a couple of years ago. It's pretty ironic when the security software takes lessons from the malware it is supposed to prevent. -Noel

Yes, you're right - a thread just for this tool would be a good idea. I'm taking a derivative of it further, actually, into becoming a generalized Re-Tweaker - since that's what *I* need - but making something that's a generalized product for others is far more involved than doing something that suits oneself. Ideally this would grow up to be a generalized App uninstaller / installer with a GUI and checkboxes that would not be subject to the "Microsoft doesn't want you to be able to uninstall this and this and this" rules. That's a long way from a script that works for me alone, or even one that works anywhere. One step at a time. -Noel

Yep, that's exactly the idea. I just have to find the time to code on it a little more... -Noel

I can't legally distribute the SQLite3.exe or SetACL.exe tools with the script (Gnu tools are okay). You have to download the ones that are missing yourself. At some point I will see if I can get the script to go gather them up, but it's not like that at the moment. As I mentioned in post 145 in this thread, you need to download them from these URLs: SQLite3.exe from (https://www.sqlite.org/download.html) SetACL.exe from Helge Klein (https://helgeklein.com/download/)-Noel

Ooh, someone like me who thinks updating and rebooting a computer is a non-trivial thing, that's best planned for. Uptime matters! We're so old-fashioned! In all seriousness, it depends on the needs of users to access the system. As one who normally doesn't get much sleep, I usually did/do maintenance late at night. Since I'm self-employed, weekends and weekdays blur together for me nowadays. -Noel

No, I run with my own account, but I run with UAC disabled, which is probably different still from either logging in as Administrator or running elevated... -Noel

According to Woody, the latest "trust us, this patch improves Windows" doesn't leverage GWX. No one so far has been able to derive what it does, and so suspect it's a Trojan. I only mention this because GWX isn't apparently Microsoft's only tentacle. -Noel

Second one is just a smiling sheep with serious teeth that Google turned up. But yeah, you got the idea. -Noel

No no, I wasn't being critical of you; sorry you took it that way. I was wondering maybe whether I'd neglected to upload my latest. Even thinking that, I don't know of a reason Apps should have reappeared after having been removed. Could be a sin of omission. I need to study what aviv00 posted a bit. I do remove a registry entry that seems to keep Cortana from coming back, but I don't do anything similar to try to keep the other Apps from coming back as I didn't see a need. It's possible the script is simply working against something in the system set to actively try to "heal" the changes to the database file, and thus timing could matter. It's not system protection, though... An SFC check comes up normal after App removal. For the moment I can only suggest persistence (i.e., run it again, as you did), until the list at the end shows only two items. -Noel