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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

I seriously doubt that Windows 10 is doing anything so grave as to require you to run some arbitrary PowerShell script you found on the Internet with elevated privileges. If you do not understand every single command in this thing, you should avoid it, and if you understand every single command in this, you don't need it.

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Just to give the other point here. I do understand every line of it and agreed with most of it. I had previously hunt down a lot of those switches manually, now I have a custom fork of this script disabling the stuff that bothers me and keeping those I like. Also, its very presumptuous of you to assume no one need this. If windows welcomed choices like this before it would be a better development environment.

There's another category. Those of us who manually did this already, are annoyed we didn't write down all the steps, but are glad to find this posted here.

There's another category. Those of us who were so aggravated by it we ended up starting an entire open source project and now have 12k users.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript

As I rely on some deeper Windows features (like Storage Spaces), I'd be very wary of running a giant script instead of targeting features I dislike (such as OneDrive sync). Last I saw it breaks features like the Windows Store app.

> Last I saw it breaks features like the Windows Store app.

That is a feature, not a bug. I wish I could find something that would break windows trusted installer from using 25% of my CPU all the time on win 7.

There is nothing inherently bad about having a store app. And it's the only way to install some programs. How is its removal a feature?

The windows app store is an infested malware cesspool:

http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cessp...

http://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/23/windows-store-infested...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-was-this-windows-store-app-...

They have gotten better (these links are in chronological order), but best practices for individual users and administrators is to disable the windows app store.

The whole thing is open source (MIT license) and based largely on community contributions. It did break the Windows Store originally, but that was fixed a long time ago.

If you have any issues with it let me know - we work on it pretty much constantly.

> you understand every single command in this, you don't need it.

Just because I understand/know how to verify them doesn't mean I can write them down myself in the same time, so no, I don't "need" it, but it is useful to have and to compare to what I'm usually doing.

Pff don't be paranoid. If there is something malicious in this script then, a) it will be fairly obvious; all this does is modify registry values, and b) someone else will probably post about it - it would be pretty big news!

Besides you clearly need to read it anyway - it does stuff that not everyone will want, like disabling the lock screen.

Edit: In fact I'd be curious if there has ever been an actual instance of `curl ... | sudo sh` being malicious. I mean it's an obvious attack vector but it's also obvious. I've never heard of anyone actually using it.

Do you understand every single line of code in Windows 10? No. Then you can't make the claim it's not doing anything grave. I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying your argument is illogical and inconsistent.

But that's my point. I don't understand every single line of code in Windows. When I run Windows, I'm deciding to trust it. If you've stopped deciding to trust it, then adding more untrusted code (code that relies heavily on undocumented registry flags and the behavior of Windows itself) is like trying to put out a fire with lighter fluid. And this script doesn't have to be malicious to be bad.

Some people run experiments on black-box operating systems, using VMs where changes can be tested and rolled back. There is a long tradition of users reverse engineering Windows behavior. No need to blindly accept anything.

> When I run Windows, I'm deciding to trust it.

I run Windows because I have to for work. I don't trust it.

Some of us don't want any telemetry, or any crap. An idle OS should be idle...

Then get Debian or Fedora. I'm serious, if the OS is doing things so bad you're willing to execute untrusted code with elevated privileges to modify the OS, you've already lost.

It is never black and white. Moving to Linux would only be feasible when the vast software library is available on Linux, including, but not limited to, productivity, games, media playback, drivers (hardware support). In the mean time, scripts like these fill holes that should not be there in Windows.

I do agree that people executing this script should not only rely on "it's open source, so smart people will look at it and find issues", but actually research and fully understand what is going on.

> willing to execute untrusted code with elevated privileges to modify the OS

Everything in that script is straightforward and if not easily googled to determine what its doing. It's not black magic.

Its just FUD

This machine is dual boots Win 7 and Linux Mint. Work is an older MBP and another LM desktop. There's one laptop with Win10 that's kept around mainly to keep up with the tech and it would be really nice to turn off all that extra MS bullshit.

But I have to question your attitude, especially here on a forum called "Hacker News"; why do you advocate against exercising ownership over one's rightful property? Microsoft already got their money and they should leave users the hell alone. There is a proud history of hacking one's PC and poking big brother in the eye, don't forget that!

I walked up to my laptop and in the upper-left corner of the screen Cortana wants me to try ordering Star Wars tickets. Fuck you Cortana, don't tell me what to do!!!!

It's called Hacker News, not Script Kiddie News, and the difference between understanding what you're doing (or at least, doing something with the intent of learning something from it) and running someone else's code without understanding what it does is pretty much the demarcation point between being a hacker and being a script kiddie.

As it has always been and always will be. Some will blindly run it, some will review it before running it, some download just to rip out the bits and pieces they like. Some just want to understand the OS...

"untrusted" by who? You?

I have a bit of a pet peeve about the word "untrusted", because it leaves open who is doing the trusting.

Very few Linux users understand what all those daemons are doing on their system. I certainly don't, and - albeit a long long time ago (kernel 2.4) - I even wrote Linux kernel code (networking: firewall and NAT).

I tend to agree. Things like this will most likely break in the future.

They will be undone, they can cause deeper issues in the OS, and they can in some cases cause vulnerabilities.

I see this a lot with chrome. People will load it up with extensions, then blame the browser when something doesn't work.

I'm not saying don't ever use it, but remember this if you start having weird issues, or one day the changes are undone.

It doesn't mean MS is out to get you, they just don't support those who are changing undocumented internals and don't need to announce hen they change some undocumented internal registry entry.

I understand pretty much everything in here (and have manually disabled most of the things this disables in the past), but the script serves as a useful checklist and shortcut. That's it's value.

Up voted for this:

"If you do not understand every single command in this thing, you should avoid it, and if you understand every single command in this, you don't need it."

It's so universally applicable!

" if you understand every single command in this, you don't need it." - Oh, I don't need it, but it's kind of convenient to have a reference of them, all in one repo.

Tool users, remember?

Not true - automation is great! I understand the script and would use it.

Agree -- people are missing the point that this stuff would easily take over an hour to do manually in the GUI.

If I don't understand every single line of code and algorithm in any piece of OSS I use, do you feel as though I don't need it? Not starting a flamewar with this question, I'm genuinely curious

> If you do not understand every single command in this thing, you should avoid it, and if you understand every single command in this, you don't need it.

So... you're saying that if you do know all this stuff, then you should manually type it all in a shell window (or hunt down in a gui) on every win10 box you want to administer?

So people shouldn't use any software they didn't write on their own?

There's a difference between running a signed executable from a source you trust versus running something you don't trust. There's a difference between running code with ordinary privileges and running code with elevated privileges. The best-case scenario is signed code from a trusted source with ordinary privileges.

A good general one to rip out the bloatware is:

  Get-AppxPackage ** | Remove-AppxPackage

Safe but sometimes you have to execute it restart and execute it again for seemingly no reason but it works and won't damage anything. Run powershell as admin.

EDIT: A cursory glance of the script doesn't show anything dangerous. It may do thinks you don't want though but PowerShell's pretty decent to understand what's going on even if you don't know the commands specifically.

Be careful, this breaks things. I ran this when I first switched to Windows 10, and I found that it killed search in the start menu, certain control panel applets that relied on the metro framework, and somehow, VSS.

It rips out all the metro apps. It does nothing to cortana so that's confusing. VSS?

It doesn't have to be malicious to be dangerous, it can just be wrong. Nobody's running a test suite on these things whenever a Windows update comes down, nobody's testing them on a wide array of Windows configurations, and from the ones I've seen before, they can cause problems with your PC.

There are other applications which do something similar to the one linked here. Destroy Windows 10 Spying, to name an example. This is a GUI app. Does the same apply? Are the default options not sane? Did you read and understand every line of all software you run?

You can check the source code of the script.

You can not check the source code of windows.

Who of those could have something to hide?

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