When I tried to do that, a bunch of them had no uninstall option and I had to do a PowerShell command to get rid of them.

I followed the instructions on this page: http://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s...

Uninstalling Cortana is even trickier so I haven't done anything with it yet, but it's probably the feature I would most like to get rid of.

Microsoft said: "You can turn off Input Personalization at any time. This will stop the data collection for this feature and will delete associated data stored on your device, such as your local user dictionary and your input history. As Cortana uses this data to help understand your input, turning off Input Personalization will also disable Cortana on your device. At https://www.bing.com/account/personalization, you can also clear data sent to Microsoft, such as your contacts and calendar data, user dictionary, as well as search and browsing history if your device also had Cortana enabled."

Cortana is just a cute name for part of the indexed search feature, which is controlled by Group Policies:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

Cortana is not turned on by default, and if she's not been turned on, there is no real benefit to removing "her".

However, for the record, I think Cortana is great....

Since Windows 10 is "Windows as a service", patched and maintained remotely, I'd expect random screwing around to be repaired remotely. However, it would be interesting to know if this will affect Windows' stability or performance. However, in general, it's probably a bad idea to mess around with the workings of things you don't understand.

This is one of the reasons I don't mess around with Android, or try to remove all the Google apps I don't want, or remove Google Now ;-)

Thank you for all the information.

I don't have a Microsoft account, so the account personalization link doesn't work. Unfortunately, my machine is still constantly contacting Microsoft. It's a problem because I'm often tethering my computer to my phone and I have pretty limited bandwidth caps.

Ah. Have you set Windows 10 to not download from a metered account?

The main point of Windows 10 is that it's a mobile operating system with cloud integration. (Remember, the same OS runs on smartphones. Cortana, apps, and Live Tiles came from Windows Phone.)

The Microsoft account gives you access to 15GB of free space on OneDrive, and the online Office apps (including OneNote and some new ones). The idea is to use the same apps on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets so you get the benefits of a cross-platform ecosystem.

It's also maintained and updated on a continuous basis -- remember it's "Windows as a Service". If you read all of this page (1), it will give you a good idea of the telemetry involved.

If you had Windows 10 Pro laptop joined to a company domain you would get a lot of control, but if you're operating as a consumer/amateur then you're fighting the whole design of the system, and that's probably a losing battle. It's like a vegan complaining about a steak-house menu.

Try running ShutUp10 from http://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Have you thought of switching to Linux Mint? ;-)

(1) https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

That will work if you're tethering via WiFi, but Windows won't let you set an "Ethernet" (RNDIS) connection as metered, presumably because no Microsoft engineer has encountered such thing as a bandwidth cap.

Ah, many thanks for the info!