Hacker News Reader

Comment by canyp | Hacker News Reader

The most egregious thing in recent iterations of Win11 is that a fresh installation will basically map all of your home folder to OneDrive. My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. A recent Windows update also told me that I need OneDrive now to back up my files. Yup, apparently you really, really need it.

View on HN

Now Windows 11 also pops up a scary security notification saying Windows Security found a problem, then when you click on it it tells you that you're not using OneDrive and you should turn that on immediately.

They are using the same tactics as scammers: urgency and false claims. Microsoft doesn't even hide anymore.

This threw me so hard when I grabbed a cheap laptop from Costco with win11 pre installed. I was saving files to c:/users/me/desktop and then when I opened Desktop in File Explorer, my shit was gone.

My dad has been raving because he discovered that his Windows computer has been uploading all of his pictures to OneDrive. He doesn't remember an option to enable that behavior and can't find any ways to simply turn it off. This is on top of the other nags and sketchy behavior that Windows has been pushing on him normally. He's fed up with it

The silver lining is that my dad's finally getting a new Linux machine for Christmas :^)

Worse is that the notification for this “error” telling me I couldn’t back up without OneDrive was behind the little dot in the restart/logout menu in the start menu, which (until now) only showed me that updates were required. Now that they’ve infested that notification with ads there’s no reason for me to ever look at it again. Good job, Microsoft.

Windows 11 not only reinstalls OneDrive and Teams with every major upgrade, but also peppers the task scheduler with numerous runners to make changes to your system for things like OneDrive, Teams, and Edge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com