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Comment by Scarblac | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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