My first month with Windows 10

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Mike
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My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mike »

So Microsoft had "decided" to silently cease all (security) upgrades to my old trusty Vista Notebook, Win 7 had disappeared from the shelves, an update of that Notebook with Windows 10 left me without graphics acceleration (but at least the Core2Duo could now sport its 64 bit muscles!)

- enough reasons for me to say, sod that, that Notebook is now nearly 8 years old, it has done its service well, let it have its well-deserved retirement and me use the freshly gained knowledge about Windows 10 to get everything right.

...

Bought that new Notebook 2 weeks ago. With pre-installed Windows 10 Home. Everything was prepared to move the data partition of the old Notebook over to the new one.

1. Of course, during installation I switched *everything* off, that could contribute to the OS being overly verbose,

2. Supplier wants me to use DL DVD for the recovery media - not there, sorry, only single layer. Instead I saved the *.iso-files away. Only one of them was >4.5 GB...

3. After roughly 3 hours use I needed to accept, that the supplier had pre-installed the technical preview of Windows 10. On a model fresh from the assembly belt. WTF?!?

4. Half a day later, and with some bucks less, I wiped the pre-installed Win10 with another freshly obtained Windows 10 Home. That PC is *mine* now.

5. Directly after installation, I found out the SD card slot didn't work - supplier actually did one thing right and delivered a driver DVD.

6. A quick search for new hardware in the hardware device manager with inserted DVD cleared up all warning signs. And the SD card slot worked again.

7. Copying all data from the SD card to the data partition HD, surprisingly to me, took off with >80 MB/s. 8)

8. Connected to internet and told Windows 10 to handle it as metered connection. I'm using UMTS with a 5 GB volume/month - will return to this at the end.

9. Installed graphics drivers, keyboard driver - first thing the keyboard driver does is an update of 100 MB! :evil: => automatic updates switched off.

10. Installed Visual Studio 2015 at a friends place (even the smallest installation - C++ only - comes at 3 GB),

11. Installed Office 2016 (another 750 MB),

12. Installed Adobe Reader DC - and needed to deinstall it at the following day, because it "refreshed" itself with yet another 400 MB+ update...

... will most probably re-install it later and apply the registry setting to only check manually for updates.


Coming to the conclusion of this posting:

People complain because all they hear was Windows 10 purportedly sending all their data to Microsoft. And 3rd party apps sending all their data elsewhere. The real problem lies elsewhere:

Installations over the 'net are really cool, as long as they aren't replaced once per day with a full-size "update".

During the tests, I sometimes had the impression, that the new Notebook somehow had transformed into a black hole for data. Literally trying to drain everything it could get from the net. My router didn't stop blinking. But hardly *sending* out anything, just receiving.

Can't those companies not just get the software right and working, obviating the need for daily updates? I paid for the software, and I pay for a monthly data volume!

I don't mind Windows fetching all the necessary security updates - but that other stuff must be unduly clogging the connections around the globe.

Has anyone else made similar observations?


P.S. I miss Aero.
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akator
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by akator »

I agree with your assessment about Windows 10 abusing network access.

In August 2015 I bought a new i7 laptop to replace another machine that just died. I liked 10 far more than 8 and found it just as usable as 7, so after using it for months I decided to upgrade other machines.

The results were very mixed. A quad core machine still runs great on 10, but 2 other "10 capable" computers did not. The first was a 5-year old dual core that become completely unusable and was freezing often. A clean reinstall of 10 only worked for about 3 months before the problems returned. The second was a dual core touchscreen laptop that came with Windows 8, so it should have been fine on 10, but it also bogged down and became very sluggish after several months.

My solution for both those computers was to install Linux Mint and now they run perfectly.

For the 2 machines still running Windows 10, I have noticed a ridiculous amount of processing when the machine is supposed to be idle. When the display turns off after 5 minutes, the fans spin up and the processors leap to 50% or more. As soon and I use the computer again and the screen come back on, the fans spin back down. I never experienced this behavior with W7. And I've got Cortana and tons of other things turned off, so that shouldn't be causing the issues. I've tracked this down to a Windows idle process but disabling it screws things up, so it can't be turned off.

My solution has been to put everything to sleep or power off entirely whenever possible. It's silly that these power efficient machines aren't so efficient because Windows 10 keeps cranking up processing when they should be sipping power at idle. Plus, whatever it is doing is tripling the HD use, and I predict that will lead to shorter hardware life.
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mayhem »

W10 is now like any Apple or Android device... updates are available when they are available, not bundled up once per month like before.
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Mike
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mike »

After another hunt for the possible culprit(s) wasting my monthly volume I finally arrived at that one:
Mike wrote:11. Installed Office 2016 (another 750 MB),
OfficeClick2Run.exe producing inbound traffic and trying to load updates, only to find out "oops, you're using a metered connection, sorry about that" - and then after discarding 20 MB+ data it restarts that idiocy on next reboot. :evil:

It isn't exactly useful to disable the corresponding service, as then all Office products suddenly refuse to start up. :shock:

Solution: disable automatic updates in one of the Office applications - it's there, in the "Account" tab:

Image

For the time being, "Silence in the Box". :)
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by joshuadenmark »

My moms laptop crashed ever one month running windows 10 (she is 70 years old) I don't now why! Installed Linux Mint, totally free. Now the machine runs like a dream, without any crashing whatsoever :mrgreen:
Kind regards, Peter.
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Vic Porter »

Mike wrote:That PC is *mine* now.
Those stars should be quotation marks given the Microsoft remote control and the built-in spyware. Not that I would call anything "mine" if I wasn't allowed to recompile it.
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mike »

Mike wrote:That PC is *mine* now.
Vic Porter wrote:Those stars should be quotation marks given the Microsoft remote control and the built-in spyware.
You read a later paragraph in the OP?
Mike wrote:People complain because all they hear was Windows 10 purportedly sending all their data to Microsoft. And 3rd party apps sending all their data elsewhere. [...]
Microsoft doesn't need your data, because they already have your money. Unlike Facebook, Twitter & Co.

Now, with all the settings of the auto-update procedures being put in place (I also "caught" some extensions of Visual Studio producing traffic there), the traffic has dropped to a near-zero rate comparable to my old Vista Notebook. What amounts to transmissions not anyhow initiated by me, that is. :)
Vic Porter wrote:Not that I would call anything "mine" if I wasn't allowed to recompile it.
Good luck trying to grasp the entire source of any contemporary OS. Alone, you'll hard pressed to spot any malign parts even in source. You can't even be sure, that a malevolent compiler would not insert extra code beyond what is seen in the source into recompiled executables ... especially when you recompile the compiler with itself. :P

http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems ... /184406158

... and to quote from there:
Ed Nisley wrote:Ken Thompson's notorious UNIX backdoor served as an example of why you cannot trust large-scale programs, either. Basically, Thompson created a tampered version of the Standard C compiler binary that recognized when it was compiling itself from untampered source and reinserted the tampered code. That code also recognized when the compiler processed the UNIX login command's source code and inserted binary code that accepted a fixed password known only to Thompson.

No amount of source-code scrutiny will reveal the existence of a self-reproducing tampered binary, so creating a secure system must begin with bootstrapping all the tools from provably secure binaries.
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Vic Porter »

Mike wrote:Microsoft doesn't need your data, because they already have your money.
My point was that Microsoft can force updates. If you do not control what runs on your computer, whose is it?
Mike wrote:Good luck trying to grasp the entire source of any contemporary OS.
Indeed. However, my point is the ability (and permission) to observe, choose and alter what your computer does. The vast majority does not care, but the willingness of computer literate folk of giving this up baffles me. Whatever makes you happy, but please don't claim you're in control. ;) (And yes, I'm aware of Ken's essay.)
Mike wrote:Unlike Facebook, Twitter & Co.
Well, I browse via Tor. ;) (hey Jeff, how about unblacklisting some exit nodes?)
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mike »

Vic Porter wrote:My point was that Microsoft can force updates. If you do not control what runs on your computer, whose is it?
I'm under no illusions here.

It's the whole point of an OS to provide a shell around the bare hardware, so the device drivers, file system, system and productivity applications (and, well, also games) have a common ground to operate on and present an interface to the user. As soon as you connect a computer to the 'net, all bets are off. For most personal computers today, the OS isn't anymore stored in ROM.

It's a pity, that the rough world outside ultimately requires those security updates. One could also get to the impression, that - unless they happen to be bugfixes for buffer overflows - those updates merely serve to put the endangered data structures at other random places, so attacks go blind. That would however only amount to security by obscurity. :(

The PC being mine, however, was not strictly pointed at that aspect: the supplier also had installed a strange tool which produced something like a ghost window floating near the mouse pointer while dragging a window, and WinZip. The first program becoming an annoyance within short time, and I regard WinZip as totally useless: no point in having another file browser running, specialized in *.zip archives, when Windows could handle *.zip files as folder windows since Windows XP (finally - I had access to that luxury already with RISC OS on an Acorn A5000 in 1992!).

What made me draw a line under that pre-installed Windows was however, the entire network configuration setup was broken. When I tried to open the settings, I was put into an eternal waiting loop. Also, the Microsoft servers *refused* to send updates! :shock:
Mike wrote:Well, I browse via Tor. ;)
Do you have *.addthis.com blocked in your web browser? ;)
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Vic Porter »

Mike wrote:I'm under no illusions here.
Suggesting that Microsoft does not need your data because they have your money tends on the side of denial. There's that sweet 3rd party money to be had.
Mike wrote:As soon as you connect a computer to the 'net, all bets are off. For most personal computers today, the OS isn't anymore stored in ROM.
In the Windows world, the computer is personal like a barcode tattoo. ;)
Mike wrote:Do you have *.addthis.com blocked in your web browser? ;)
Some OSs respect the hosts file.
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Re: My first month with Windows 10

Post by Mike »

Vic Porter wrote:Suggesting that Microsoft does not need your data because they have your money tends on the side of denial.
If you want 100% privacy, use a computer that is not connected in any way to the internet. And preferably has a fixed OS stored into ROM.

...

Even with your tor browser, your computer+OS can be assigned a unique ID. Tor is just another example of "security by obscurity", in that case the attempt to hide the originator/one side of the internet connection. What you however fetch as data already betrays you. Cookies and other semi-permanent data stored by your browser just makes it a little bit easier to identify you.

The weakest point is your ISP anyway. They know your personal address, and can store away your entire traffic in both directions. And the people potentially interested in your data have enough resources at their hands to decrypt your data within a few hours. Doesn't even need a compromised system below your fingertips, even though that would make their job even more easier.

And you are telling me I'm tending to the side of denial?

If you're online nowadays, the only thing that remains private is that between your ears.

...

One final word: you're hanging up this whole discussion on my five word assertion "That PC is *mine* now". I already wrote in the preceding post what I mainly meant with this assertion. You entered this topic with a post trying to ridicule that statement from *your* point of view. Fine. You've had your fun now.

If possible I'd like to continue this thread in the future with some other information that could be usable for other people so they know what to expect with Windows 10 - and make the OS usable in the view of a technical compromise. Thanks.
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