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Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

In Windows you can use the task manager to configure what programs are started with your computer.

Sounds like you don't have much experience with Windows and MS software.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/why-do...

I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive.

I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.

This is the thing: Windows admins praise Windows when they are running a completely different edition of Windows with different configurable behaviors. It looks a lot different for home users who almost certainly do not even know what a GPO is. And this also raises the suspicion of which exact Windows edition those admins are running on their home computer(s) and how they obtained the license for that...

> It looks a lot different for home users who almost certainly do not even know what a GPO is.

Sounds like the Windows version of saying "I don't understand why the whole world isn't running Linux."

You haven't re-created the described problem - Teams sets itself to auto-start again after you start it yourself. After all, it's very reasonable that you might want to join the occasional Teams meeting but not want it running after every boot.

I'm not sure if it's a particular version or environment that does this, but at the very least I can't replicate it on my home PC with Teams (personal). If I disable it in the task manager's autostart, it remains disabled if I start Teams. It won't even let me enable "Auto-start" in the Teams settings if it's disabled in the task manager.

lol, a GPO. Very reasonable solution for a home user.

not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.

Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.

Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.

Not sure about other people here but I really liked how autostart used to work in 7 and before - just drop a shortcut in the Start menu folder and you're done. In 10 at some point, in order to have 3rd party software launched at login I had to use task scheduler.

Also, funny thing: clicking this link pushes me thru https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authori...(...) - feels like they're expecting me using Edge so they could log me in automatically with snatched MSA credentials

You can still do that, the folder is at:

  %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

I have a few sshfs[1] mounts there.

[1] https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win

I tried that path back then but it still didn't work for me - no program I tried to put there incl Windows ones was able to launch at the login. I had just entries in the task manager's startup page. Maybe something changed in 11 - dunno

I can guarantee you that the startup folder still works fine, but in some cases you must create the folder.

Microsoft does not screw around with backwards compatibility. There are multiple ways to start applications on launch now, including the user or public user startup folder, registry entries, and via scheduled tasks.

Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".

I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either.

I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.

That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. They really need a strong hand to rein in all these departments with their own metrics and agendas.

I think the general principle people are operating out of is that: The USER should be the one deciding 1. what gets installed onto their computer, 2. what gets run on the computer and when, and 3. the configuration of their own system. The OS vendor should not be deciding these things, nor the manufacturer of the computer.

It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.

> people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.

This, is it exactly.

Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.

> I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.

This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."

> I think it's a bit overblown.

Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.

I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago, easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home' machines.

> Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.

Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.

Why are you so upset that people derive a lot of value from Windows? Enough that they want to keep using it, and defend it because they don't agree with the "everything is broken" meme.

Because even if you don't touch Windows (or whatever mediocre malware Microsoft presently peddles) those folks come to you and say stuff like "skype won't start" and lo! it does not start, though after much clicking around and rebooting and trying the obvious things you discover that if you right-click and try "open with skype" on the skype icon then skype will start. That problem at some point disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Eh, who knows, it's Windows, and there's more science to reading tea leaves or goose entrails.

Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?

You can have your own view. Nobody is taking it away or forcing you to believe otherwise. My point is why are people so upset when someone has a different view or doesn't agree with your personal view on Microsoft?

What? You shouldn't defend bad behaviour regardless of if you derive a lot of value from the same source. A good organization wants to be called out on shitty practices so they improve.

You can make an argument to convince people of your personal point of view, but there is no reason to be all upset if someone has a different viewpoint. Thankfully we are all at liberty to have our own view on this topic.

Because like industrial waste, Windows exports problems to other systems.

1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.

2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.

3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.

4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)

5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.

So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.

https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php

Yeah, I don't see Windows in the top 5.

The MAX_PATH limit is annoying legacy backwards compatible stuff, but can be avoided by prefixing paths with \\?\ before passing them into the Windows API.

This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/win...

If Python doesn't do this it's just because the sort of people who write Python don't care about Windows enough to fix it.

Not a lot of people know and change that. The point is that they should not have autostarted without consent.

What that has to do with the OS vendor adding programs there that the users did not?

Apart from the fact that most people don't have a clue, and it shouldn't even have started to begin with... how then? I can see e.g. Widgets in the task manager. How do I disable the service permanently from the task manager?

When I look at the task manager, I literally have a tab called startup. It has an entry for Microsoft Teams. I set it to disabled. Teams doesn't start at startup for me.

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