[jonny383]

Windows bloat, performance, and telemetry is frankly out of control. I use primarily either macOS or Ubuntu for development work day to day, but need to use Windows for specific builds and testing. I don't enjoy the experience.

I'm not sure if these issues are because I don't use it very frequently, but every time I start it up:

* CPU gets eaten alive by telemetry related services for minutes at a time.

* A barrage of updates I didn't ask for get forced on me (Despite whatever settings I put)

* Anti malware tools cause system to be I/O bound for about a minute

Longer term observations

* The disk usage goes up and up and up, even though I'm putting no data on to it

* I keep getting nagged to use a Microsoft account to sign in

* The default internet browser gets reset to Edge

* Some older applications just stop working for no reason, only to start working again weeks later.

On the plus side, Visual Studio seems to be much improved from what it used to be.

[userbinator]

For me, the first hour or so after doing a clean install of any recent version of Windows is spent carefully going through all the settings (not just both(!) control panels, but everywhere else including the services, task scheduler, group policy, etc.) and turning off everything unwanted. It feels like cleaning an infected machine: you're never sure whether you got it all, or something is going to make an unpleasant appearance later.

[LeoPanthera]

There's a free tool called ShutUp10 that makes this process very fast. It even warns you if Windows reverts a setting you changed - which happens all the time.

[userbinator]

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

Wow.... looks like 100+ individual settings to toggle. It gathers them all together, but when I'm going through the configuration, I'm not only modifying the telemetry/privacy stuff but other preferences too, so it might not save all that much time.

(That UI is a little reminiscent of the Group Policy Editor, although I think the extra layer of ambiguous "slider buttons" make it even more confusing at first glance --- e.g. if the "App access to camera disabled" setting is red, does that mean the setting is not applied and apps can access the camera, or does the red mean the camera access is disabled? A "[*] Allow app access to camera" checkbox would be far more straightforward. That said, gpedit.msc's mix of enable-to-disable and disable-to-enable isn't much better either --- it's almost as if they are trying to mislead you.)

[LeoPanthera]

It's true that there are a lot of choices, but they are grouped into safe/risky/unsafe categories. I always just tell it to auto-flip the safe ones, and that does everything I want.

[tartoran]

> It even warns you if Windows reverts a setting you changed - which happens all the time.

New dark pattern from Microsoft. One of the reasons to get off the platform forever. If settings change themselves they shouldn’t call themselves settings

[0-_-0]

There's also W10Privacy [0], with way more settings.

[0]: https://www.w10privacy.de/english-home/

[temporallobe]

Yes you can do that, but it requires lots of time and dedication, and sometimes special knowledge. It’s sad that Windows comes out of the box like this.

[indigodaddy]

You would think there would or should exist some script that could do all this? I’ll look for something online..

[SirYandi]

I've had success with Blackbird[0]. Will look into the other programs mentioned above and compare results. But after blindly running blackbird on a fresh install it changed most settings I would have changed manually and performance has been stable.

[0] https://www.getblackbird.net/

[indigodaddy]

Looks like someone further on down in comments posted O&O ShutUp10 & Windows10debloater— will have to check those out

[cosmotic]

I use a handful of Windows machines regularly and don't experience most of these problems.

Your disk space issue may be related to automated backups, system restore service, and LAN caching of Windows updates. You can disable these. Disk cleanup wizard can help here too.

Edge hijack has never happened to me, although a handful of links inside windows apps/services/docs do force edge to launch (which itself causes a confirmation to make it default, which I decline)

Windows is famous for backward compatibility, especially compared to Linux or MacOS, so I'm not sure what issues you're running into there. There are some strange system dependencies that I've seen cause issues; cortana search powering the start menu search feature and disabling the swap file causing numerous invisible failures come to mind.

Faulting anti-malware is frustrating because on windows you basically have to run it, and the default one is pretty okay. Most commercial options like symantec, norton, mcafee, etc are absolutely terrible.

[tartoran]

I am in the same boat except that I am forced to use windows 10 for 8 hours a day. I try to not pay too much attention but it is irking me a little every single day. Visual Studio used to be a great product but ever since I started using VS 19 I started having ugly issues every single day. During a day it hits weird bugs such as it simply won’t build, search functionality ocasionally is broken and I get crashes and auto restarts. Looked around for help and others are having the same issues but no solutions. Ms folks close the issues as ‘unable to replicate’. I replaced the machine and did a fresh install but no resolve so I have to live with it unfortunately.

[ttt0]

> Ms folks close the issues as ‘unable to replicate’.

I'm sorry, but that begs the question - what is even the point of telemetry then?

[tartoran]

Good question. I don’t know. I hope the next version at least they’ll have these bugs fixed. I noticed this pattern over the years, every other major version of VS is decent and in between lemons. Im so reluctant to upgrade when everything works fine, you don’t even know.. But I have to unfortunately, my work dictates that

[Kaze404]

Windows defender makes Windows 10 absolutely impossible to use on slow (non-SSD) drives. That would be fine if there was an easy way to disable it, but it's literally impossible without digging through guides online. It's insanity that this is allowed.

[kiddico]

You might be interested in OOSU10 (https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10) which has options to disable just about everything you can think of, including Defender.

[Kaze404]

Thanks, I'll use it on my gaming VM.

[throwaway888abc]

And windows still "reasonably" works after ?

[wvenable]

Yes! I haven't noticed any difference.

I've started using OOSU10 on all my Windows installs as well as Windows10Debloater. It makes a performance difference on resource constrained devices and for other devices I just like a cleaner Windows install.

[geitir]

It's super easy to disable if you have group policy

[Kaze404]

I know there are ways to disable it, but none are intuitive and/or discoverable by regular people.

Also Group Policy is not available on Windows 10 Home (without hacks anyway).

[rfoo]

I'd say it is easy enough, just paste some random scary command from a quick Google search into the shell. Or maybe my expectations are too low. It is not like I could have known how to disable the insanely stupid ApplePressAndHold thing on macOS without searching online...

[Kaze404]

The problem is the average person wouldn't know what a shell is in the first place, and those are the ones with the least powerful machines that suffer the most from this. They shouldn't have to go through a process that has the possibility of ruining their machine just to get it to work reliably.

[temporallobe]

Windows Enterprise has none of these issues (I use for a development project). It’s a perfect, smooth experience and I love it. Of course you’ll have to shell out something like $1100 for a license, which is highly impractical for most hone users.

[mdaniel]

A common refrain is that if you're not paying, you are the product, but does Microsoft still charge for Win10? My last contact with it was that I was offered a free upgrade from 8, and I don't recall 8 having these issues, so maybe that's why it was free.

Anyway, when I saw the monster price tag for Enterprise, I suspected that is what they determined was the cost of loss of analytics

[chipsa]

It's not just analytics, but also expected level of support.

You can still buy win 10. The major point of the free win 8 upgrade was to let them avoid supporting the old version, which indicates the value of it to them was more than the cost of getting everyone to buy a new license.

Note that the free upgrade is not supposed to be transferable. New computer means new license, so you gotta pay.

[m463]

- macos is taking away more control. I hope apple reverses course. I would like them to nanny less and think about making their platform less inward and more outward.

- ubuntu still does a lot of silly stuff.

(I remove or neutralize motd, appport, snapd, ubuntu-report, unattended-upgrades, ubuntu-advantage, whoopsie and more)

[dehrmann]

> A barrage of updates I didn't ask for get forced on me (Despite whatever settings I put)

Let me just reboot for you when you're afk without asking.

[jiggawatts]

What kills me is that Windows will forcefully power on a sleeping laptop and update it no matter what you do. There is no "off" switch for this.

If you have a gaming or pro laptop in a bag, this is a fire hazard and could kill people.

I don't know how this was ever approved within Microsoft, but it is outright criminal negligence that should see them sued into the ground. Better yet, I'd like to see executives jailed if anyone every dies because of this arrogance.

Microsoft employees, get this through your thick heads: Your updates do not matter as much as my life!

[manexploitsman]

There's a bunch of nice tools that make most of that stuff go away in matter of few clicks https://github.com/search?q=Windows+10+telemetry&type=

[fortran77]

Well then, this setup isn't for you. Why not read some of the other articles on Hacker News?