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Comment by Yizahi | Hacker News Reader

I don't get author's complaint about reinstalling Windows every few months, imho it is completely insane. Even in the age of Win95/98 I never had a need to re-install more than once a year maybe and I was in school at that time and all software was downloaded from shady sources. Now - there is zero need to re-install at all, I only do it when I change hardware platform completely - storage, MB etc.

Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this? Windows itself shows me reboot needed popup once a few months maybe and that's about it. Some software can show it's own popup when I launch it and it is often relevant.

Windows is not perfect and Linux is great (and not perfect too) but really, some complaints about Windows seems to be straight from late 90s, with custom virus packaged Win98 distributives on torrents.

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Even with a paid Windows 10 Pro you get ads for games right in the Start menu. It's insane.

I have yet to see an ad in the start window. Yes it is anecdotal but maybe my experience is more current.

I work at a MSP and install Windows almost daily. On most systems, I install Windows Professional version 1903, the latest version. On all of those, Candy crush, Skype, One Drive, Office, and a myriad of other App Store apps autoinstall. Each of those are basically ads for paid products. This is on the small business-oriented "Professional" version of Windows, mind you.

Not only do they install, but they immediately fill the start menu tiles with this spam.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure those autoinstalls are placeholders. If you go into add/remove programs, they're around ~120kb give or take. I think this goes along the lines of the "Office" install that would come with Windows 7 or 8 installs where you click it and it tries to rush you through the process of acquiring Office.

That seems to be right in line with parent calling them advertisements.

The parent (unless we mean further up chain) didn't call them advertisements, but stated that they are store apps that auto install. There is certainly a placeholder there so they are for sure advertisements, but I don't believe you could take this fresh install, take away internet access and click on Candy Crush and start playing it while on a flight. You'd need to download the actual app first.

I said "Each of those are basically ads for paid products." OneDrive and Office 365 do fully autoinstall, and if it's impossible for a layman to differentiate between an ad and a native app, I consider it at least partially autoinstalled.

OneDrive seems to be built into Windows 10 as far as I'm aware, but you must configure it to do much of anything. There was a proper OneDrive application at one time, but I don't know how much of a thing it has been since Windows 8 (10 it just seems part of Windows Explorer plus some hooks in 10 proper). It doesn't show as a tile for me on either my personal or work machine, but that might not be the case for everyone. If I click on it in the applications list on the left, it opens Windows Explorer to the OneDrive "folder".

Office 365 that is interesting because on a clean install, I still had to go to office.com to install it. I didn't have icons for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. and certainly not the GBs of data already consumed by it. I'm looking at my work machine at the moment and it has an "Office" tile that I can sign in and use the web versions, but it doesn't appear to be a full Office install.

They have previously served up game wallpapers with a link to more info about the game, or a link to the Windows Store page for that game.

E.g., googling turns this up: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...

But as I mentioned in my other comment, for me it's been literally once and I leave 'Windows Spotlight' on, because I like the random city/nature photos it shows.

My girlfriend's got windows 10 on her computer, the other day she asked me if I could fix the start menu for her. I hadn't really looked at it before then. It was full of crap she didn't install, there was a popup in the bottom corner advertising for an office 365 subscription. She just wanted me to get rid of the tiles. There's no option for this, only an option to make them bigger. So in the end I sat and manually removed them. 2/3's if them were were links to crap like Amazon and eBay, candy crush and other shit that just came preinstalled. Nothing she actually uses on her computer ever ended up pinned there.

My favorite Windows feature is how the start menu search is so slow. I hit the windows key, type the name of the app, hit enter and I get an Edge window with what I typed as a Bing query.

At the same time I've had instant search in menus in Linux (gnome, kde, xfce, whatever, you name it).

Which displays ads next to the search results, which makes MS money. Coincidence? I think not.

Though as Hanlon's Razer said: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Part of me wants Microsoft to be so evil they have deliberately made the start menu search so impossibly poor that you end up opening a web search half the time and making them money. But I know deep down, that they are just incompetent and can't be bothered with the desktop anymore.

> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Yes, but: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice"

Start menu 'web search' is the first thing I disable. Of all the stupid things in windows 10, web search is quite possibly the worst. It's a feature nobody wants except Microsoft.

This comment makes me realize I should go disable it right now. Thank you

Sadly in the latest win 10 update it's no longer a simple setting in group policy. You have to muck around in the registry.

https://www.howtogeek.com/224159/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-...

Create dword with value 0 for BingSearchEnabled in [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search]

I already had disabled Cortana, if not also create CortanaConsent dword with value 0

It may be because I am running a Windows Insider build (19008.1), but this registry tweak doesn't seem to work for me. Any other tips?

I cut the start menu out completely and replaced it with Keypirinha. Instant fuzzy search with no shady web requests, just like on Linux with xfce4-whiskermenu/rofi.

The script looks something like this. It's written from memory and I don't have a Windows machine nearby to test it, but it's better than nothing.

    $path = %windir%\systemapps\microsoft.windows.startmenuexperiencehost*
    get-process *startmenuexperiencehost* | stop-process -force
    takeown /f $path /r /d y
    icacls $path /grant "${env:UserName}:F" /inheritance:d /t /c
    rm -recursive -force $path

I try to stay away from Windows, but Keypirinha is my go to as well when I'm forced onto it. That and VirtuaWin make Windows a lot easier to deal with.

Disable websearch, and just start typing right away.

I agree that a lot of Win10 defaults are derpy. But just tune it a bit and its reasonably power user friendly. Maybe not what you want to support personally, but sufficient for professional use.

How do you disable it?

Registry >.> https://superuser.com/a/1325836

Like I said, maybe not the crap you want to put up with in your personal life, but as a professional tool... worth tweaking to suit your needs.

(Oh, and in a full professional environment, can also be set by group policy)

Windows is like desktop linux from the 00s now. There are several different UI toolkits, all of the settings buried in separate areas, and the desktop defaults are completely unusable without a lot of tweaking.

First things to do on a new windows 10 install are run the decrapifier.ps1 and install classic shell.

Problem solved. It is a shame that the default is so garbage but there's an easy solution.

Change the lock screen wallpaper away from 'Windows Spotlight' to an image of your choice.

FWIW on a Windows PC, Windows Spotlight shows me nature and city photos with a bit of info about the place. I think I've seen a game wallpaper maybe once in all the time that PC's run Windows 10. It was pretty (some sort of anime-style game?) and not exactly a typical ad.

Looking at Google Images, looks like most of these 'game ads' are similar -- but I can understand how they can be annoying if you aren't a gamer.

I think they mean tiles in the start menu advertising various games like Candy Crush-ish stuff.

If memory serves, I removed them and moved on with my day. Think the occasional big update will add a new one, but then you remove it as well and you're good for a while.

That's interesting though. I game heavily on my Windows 10 instance. Most web browsing is gaming related and this is done in Edge as well. All I get are the scenic/animal lock screen images. Really wish they'd get some images that support 3440x1440 because it looks pretty rough (Windows Store looks even worse).

I actually like the Spotlight screen wallpapers a lot.

So do I. I think if Apple had a default screensaver/lockscreen image server and every now and then showed a photo of the new Apple Watch or something, the Apple people would oooh and aaaah over how amazing it was.

I run Windows 10 (pro) with nearly all the default settings. It took me a while to even realize what these "ads" were that people were complaining about. A free game that gets included with the OS! That's it.

Surprising feature I love the most in W10

The quality of image and curation is surprising

>Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this?

Open Chrome.

"Try Microsoft Edge!"

For me it was OneDrive, not sure how to explain it but it felt like every N times I hit CTRL+S to save my work prompted windows to raise a "Hey, try Microsoft One Drive!" modal which stole focus from what I was doing.

One way to absolutely guarantee I will never use your software is to constantly nag me about trying it.

I haven't seen this beyond 1809

Now with Chrome! (without the chrome)

My favorite is that if you turn on "Focus Assist", which is suppose to suppress popups so you can focus, it creates a notification alerting you that you have Focus Assist on. Not just once, but every time you turn on your computer.

"Now - there is zero need to re-install at all, I only do it when I change hardware platform completely - storage, MB etc."

This isn't true.

It's routine for goofy conflicts even within MSFT's own stack (Office + Windows + whatever) to put you in a place where reinstalling Windows is the easiest fix.

Plus, if you install and uninstall lots of software (e.g., if you work at a software company), C:\Windows just gets bigger and bigger over time. The only way to reclaim that space is to wipe & reinstall.

I do plently of install/uninstalls of MS software - office re-install, office upgrade, MSVS install/uninstall (all of this due to other reasons, not because it was "slow") and I don't see any regressions because of this, including on my older work laptop with 3 years old continuous Win7 install.

As for size of Windows dir - it not "leftovers" from uninstalls (but they exist too of course), it is a feature of Windows and 95% of it is a Windows updates, all chain of updates is stored locally and can't be safely deleted (according to MS engineers). Yes, it grows very big, especially if start point was older version/SP of Windows. In extreme cases, e.g. installing release version of Win7 and then updating to all service packs and updates will cause it to increase by 15-20Gb. But it is a known expected "feature" and it doesn't slow your PC, only clutters your c:\ partition. And re-install will not reclaim this space, it will be taken again immediately as soon as updates arrive on your fresh install of Windows.

If by chance you a talking about clutter of 3rd party apps, then it is not a windows problem. E.g. some drivers like to keep older installers in appdata, some apps keeps backups of data there - worst offender is Garmin updater, which creates 12Gb backups every map update. That's not Windows issues.

It grows very big even if you start with Win 10.

Honestly, it's indefensible to have a 30GB Windows folder.

Office hasn't had goofy conflicts with Windows since it switched to App-V-based installs nearly a decade ago (just after Office 2010, IIRC). (3rd Party Extensions to Office may still do dumb things, but the base Office install itself won't.)

last year I had to (ie, on MSFT's suggestion) reinstall Windows to fix a conflict with Outlook and Office, all with modern revs, so ... ?

> I don't get author's complaint about reinstalling Windows every few months, imho it is completely insane.

The author is not claiming it's necessary, only that they like to reset their computer to a known good state.

the basic OS install is rarely what you would consider a "good state" (unless you have superficial use cases, maybe). That being said, I'm surprised people don't use recovery points/custom windows Install images more. (especially in a business environment when installing multiple computers)

They can save you a lot of pain.

The author also said they take an image of their "good state" and revert to that, not that the OS is in that state by default.

Install -> happy -> slows down -> random crashes -> slows down more -> reinstall -> repeat

One thing I think happens is Registry gets abused by apps and such over the years.

This is one of those 90s inspired urban tales. Even a decade old CPU can rip through the entire registry without breaking a sweat.

And it is just a hierarchical database, nothing special about it. It shouldn't be very different than accessing files on the file system.

(there were some bugs at the past that caused Windows Explorer to slow down but those were fixed long ago and they were just bugs with a single application, not something inherently slow with the registry itself)

It's not the registry itself, it's using the word "registry" as a synecdoche for all the things that may be installed there. And hooked into Windows subsystems.

Speaking of Explorer, one of the classic ways to end up with a Windows system that's slow for no readily apparent reason is shell extensions. Either on the rightclick menu or in the thumbnail engine. At one point I had a folder I couldn't navigate to without getting an error popup that mentioned Nvidia in it - a chain of handlers had been installed such that JPEG decoding was delegated to the graphics card, so trying to create and cache the thumbnail of a corrupt file crashed in an unrelated-looking place.

Well yeah, but it isn't specific to registry or even to Windows, you could get that with pretty much any extensible system. In Window Maker, for example, you can set up the application menu to use a dynamically filled entry so i wrote a shell script that scan my Steam folder to fill the installed games. Any mistake there could have had a similar outcome (e.g. launching Steam every time i right clicked on the desktop or generating an endless .\.\.\.\.\.\.\. list from not skipping the . directory or whatever). KDE and GNOME have many extensions and people already complain about GNOME's performance when it comes to shell extensions.

So why does a search of the registry with zregedit take so long?

It's not that the registry grows large. It's because it accumulates cruft. If your software relies on information in the registry to make decisions, it'll often make decisions based on outdated information a long uninstalled (or upgraded) program left there.

It's the wrong solution to an old problem: having your configuration in hundreds of .INI files was a problem because opening and reading files took a long time. Instead of solving the problem and making opening and reading hundreds of files fast (which would be awesome for a number of other uses of a computer) they created new file that every application would read and write to. It seemed like a great idea at the time.

Every problem has a solution that's simple, elegant, and wrong.

> If your software relies on information in the registry to make decisions, it'll often make decisions based on outdated information a long uninstalled (or upgraded) program left there.

Why is your software looking at registry entries that it didn't create?

> Why is your software looking at registry entries that it didn't create?

I may want to know where Photoshop is installed to I can register a plugin. Or know about the printers installed. Or know more about the environment than the OS is willing to tell me. Or those may be entries that older versions of other applications of mine did create. Or Windows. Or older versions of Windows.

There are many reasons to look into registry entries that aren't the ones you wrote.

> It's not that the registry grows large. It's because it accumulates cruft.

This seems to be the correct answer, but not for the reason you think ("outdated information"). The registry is a highly indexed database, because it needs to be quick at answering if say a low-level kernel-level driver needs something in real time for an operation. Many of those indexes are variations on Most-Recently-Used (MRU) caches. The more applications that make random queries to the Registry, the more those MRU caches churn and the more likely the MRU caches are full of small, one-off application data versus important stuff that needs to be queried as quickly as possible. (Over time Windows has seemed to work to compensate by changing indexing strategies, but at a high level a lot of the slow down issues with registry still boil down to index problems.)

The Registry wasn't intended to be a general application configuration store, per the original registry usage guidelines. Certainly that ship sailed.

(Also, the key problem with INI files was not that opening/reading them took a long time, it was the same centralization problem: almost every Windows 3.x application stored their INI in C:\WINDOWS for a number of dumb reasons. When Windows 9x started enforcing basic directory ACLs and not every program under the sun could read/write to arbitrary files in C:\WINDOWS, people scurried for the Registry as that seemed the closest to what they were already doing, squirreling config data in C:\WINDOWS for dumb reasons. It took a while for developers to realize they should just put config files in whatever format they prefer in %LOCALAPPDATA% or such like and stop trying to centralize them.)

Thank you. It's very interesting.

In the Windows 3.1 days I had some interesting problems when importing data into an MS Access databases that would contain reports for our senior execs to read while offline (the web was not a thing back then) and import throughput slowed down to a near-halt after 30 megs of data or so. Our solution was to do the import in chunks, and defragment the database between them.

I agree with everything that you said, except the part about windows explorer slowdowns being fixed. I still find it to be an order of magnitude slower than Gnome's file manager for simple cases. I understand some of the reasons why this is, but its still pretty nasty.

I might have agreed with you up to ~2 months ago (my 2 Win7 installs had been running for 3-4 years each) until a real, normal, official Radeon graphics card update completely hosed the install. Unusable and unrecoverable from the save point thing, whatever it's called.

Sure, it happens rarely - but it really depends on your usage patterns. If you often have to try out software on a regular basis (I've always used Windows VMs for work stuff when I needed to evaluate things from $randomVendor) it might accelerate this. Or sometimes it's a piece of hardware. yes, some are 90s tales but to some degrees it has persisted.

Plus between chocolatey, having the data sync-ed with a Synology NAS, and making the effort of finding the command line for all my customizations of windows, I have deploy scripts that means I am operational in less than 30min.

> Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this?

Probably refers to the "notification center" in the bottom right next to the systray.

Agreed.

Windows ME taught me a lot of storage, backup and organizational skillsets, because I did have to refresh it every month. Literally. For two years (yay for Norton Ghost).

To your point however, since Windows 7, I really haven't had a need to refresh any of my or family's systems.

It does take me ~10min to get rid of some junk upon new install, but only because I'm pedantic. In reality the couple of pre-installed things don't bother me.

I don't really know about "ads". I don't see them as screensaver (just nice rotating landscapes), and again, once I uninstall initial Start Menu games and crap, I don't see them there either.

Really, the most annoying thing is that I have to persuade it several times I've tried Edge and am making my choice with Firefox :P

Windows eats itself slowly over time, and it requires reinstalling to right the ship.

I don't know why this is the case, but it's been the case since the 95/98 era atleast (I don't have experience previous to these).

A reinstall isn't required, but it absolutely runs better once you do so. The only improvement I've seen is that generally it will take longer before windows needs a reinstall. It's possible you just don't realize how much performance/speed you've lost over time.

Windows gets a big update every few months. Those would always fail for me because I had a custom partition layout (Hackintosh) and I would have to reinstall every time.

Popups? Maybe he means the new notification system that was included with... 8? I hate notifications that cover part of my screen while I use my computer/mobile, so I have them disabled. I can understand that they are annoying for some, and they are not trivial to completely disable.

I mean, yes, there popups. But my linux installation does exactly that too, every login I get software update popup by default and if I don't want to see it I need to change options manually (and update settings in linux are far from trivial).

As for bad upgrades - I had linux upgrades which failed something in the video path and I was stuck with broken X server and no GUI. And I didn't manage to repair that state even after extensive searching on stack exchange, so I just deleted everything and reinstalled. Another time I tried to install custom software and ended in a error hell of incompatible versions of libc, libtrpc etc. and it simply didn't work (it was on Debian), but at the same it worked just fine on another VM with different distributive.

No OS is perfect currently.

Oh, definitely. Linux is worse, that's why I use Windows. Doesn't mean Windows is flawless, evidently.

You're running mis-licensed software on a wonky partition and you're complaining about Microsoft!?

Aha? What does Windows care if I have partitions at the end of the drive that it can't even read?

Well, I had to re-install Windows 7 many times due to what I believe is VisualStudio. After many updates it just fills my hard drive with the library redist packages etc. Then things stop working correctly. When I got a new machine for Windows 10 I didnt not install Visual Studio, no more problems so far.

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