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Comment by fuzzy2 | Hacker News Reader

Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.

And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks? They get live notifications when you add or remove hardware, software, when an application has crashed (even when error reporting is off), …. The data contains unique identifiers for your system and user. I don’t even want to know what’s sent when you select full diagnostics.

Windows is a privacy and performance nightmare. It’s good for two things only: corporate environments (manageability) and games.

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Well, sorry about that. Just had to get this off my chest.

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> Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.

It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.

> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?

I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.

What's the use case for still running an OS off spinning rust in 2020?

Well,

1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,

2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,

3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.

>Everything is slow even though the specs are good

Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.

I had the same experience. Windows became noticeably faster without antivirus. Also other problems like not downloading large files disappeared too.

Corporate IT says no. :)

I don’t know what’s wrong with my work PC. Home PC also has Windows (because games) and is super fast (even with Defender, but without ATP).

From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans.

You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.

In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.

Oh, they do know. And they do dogfood. We only have 70 employees. IT doesn’t program though.

Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health.

If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.

If you like me hate hearing the fan on an idle laptop, you need to learn the subtle art of nagging IT just the right amount to get things done :)

Or just BYOD :)

For the IT department it's a tradeoff though; they'd rather have everyone be inconvenienced or their hardware not working at 100% than to risk a virus wreaking havoc on their networks, or ransomware crippling their whole organization. Even without the restricted Windows machines they struggle with enough shit already, because people can't behave on company hardware on the one hand, and every employee is a target.

This is such a huge pain, I keep having to turn off the antivirus because it will often slow "npm i" so much that it'll just fall over and report a crash. I shouldn't have to disable my built-in antivirus just to do basic development!

Any pointers on where to start disabling all the telemetry for someone that was recently forced back to Windows?

https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1

I use O&O ShutUp10 and PiHole. The default PiHole setup seems to block domains used for telemetry.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://pi-hole.net/

I'm surprised that you're having performance issues, since for me it's the complete opposite. I assume it's driver issues, but on my comparatively powerful machine linux still feels laggy.

Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?

(or at least shut all the "windows 10" stuff and return to something that look like Windows 2000?)

Would it be feasible to run a Windows Pro or Server version in a laptop?

Pro runs just fine on a laptop.

When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...

I use a Mac. I spun up a windows server image on AWS and I've been doing all of my development on that. It's cheap if you turn it off and it has snapshots. And it's available from any machine with remote desktop.

Even server includes candy crush and all the junk.

I'd be pretty surprised if that's true. I've recently switched to windows 10 pro and I don't have candy crush or anything installed.

I think it depends on the region or maybe even the time period (maybe those promotional deals only run for a certain period of time and eventually get renewed, if you're unlucky enough to reinstall while in the correct region/period you get it).

Was there a Candy Crush ad in the menu that would install it as soon as you click on int?

No, I specifically looked to remove any crapware and was surprised that there wasn't anything. I also just did a search for candy crush and I only got the website.

Are you signing in with a domain account? I think the crapware is only made visible for local accounts and microsoft.com sign ins.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...

I'm on Pro and while Candy Crush was removed, I now have Farm Hero's Saga and something called "Groove Music". Netflix also somehow made its way there even though I've never once tried to watch it on this PC.

They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.

I think Groove/Zune Music is Microsoft's music player.

Just make this part of your setup process

https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...

I don't know about Server but my fresh Home edition installed a few months ago doesn't have Candy Crush or anything similar pre-installed. And same for my corporate laptop with LTSB - no pre-installed stuff.

ClassicShell is my go to. No perfect but much better

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