Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fuxy | Hacker News Reader

With the growing number of crap-ware being installed whenever you try to install something on windows I'm amazed that there are windows computers not part of a botnet.

After using Linux as my daily driver for the past 5 years I had to reinstall my windows partition and when I tried install some new software I haven't used before it completely messed up the entire install to the point where I decided to scrap it and re install again.

Lesson learned use VM's wiener you try something new especially on windows.

It's gotten worse in the 5 years i haven't used it that much.

View on HN

If you haven't tried it yet, I would highly recommend using Chocolatey [1] to install Windows software from the command line. Chocolatey packages install without all of the crapware and "uncheck this box to maybe not install a bunch of junk" dialogs. I would estimate that 95% of all software I need to install on Windows is now available as a Chocolatey package, including Chrome, Firefox, Git, NPM, Notepad++, GIMP, Steam, Fiddler, etc.

The best part is that Chocolatey will be included in Windows 10 by default, through the built-in OneGet package manager.

[1]: https://chocolatey.org

The best practice for installing free Windows applications is definitely to use something like https://ninite.com/ which skips all crapware for you. If a free utility isn't on ninite, I think extra hard about whether I really need it and then make sure I'm hypervigilant while going through the installer.

The other mitigation, of course, is to pay for software. I don't worry about whether dbpoweramp is going to do something shady.

I use VMs almost exclusively for "first installs" of programs. Especially if the program cannot be extracted (zip format) from the installer. A large portion of programs I use work just fine from a simple "extract" install.

Some programs are becoming "aware" of VMs, though. I ran into that trying to "screen" a coupon printer. Ended up tossing that in the bit bucket.

Keeping a windows machine virus-free/crapware free is really really difficult. There is always something which is installing something else. The best I've found to manage it is to check regularly using Malwarebytes and using Glasswire to monitor the network connections, but yes, it's far from ideal.

Really difficult for a non-technical user, absolutely. For a technical person, more annoying than difficult.

That's the point, botnets are not mainly composed of computers used by technical users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com