Not to mention the seemingly-continuous/mysterious "update bandwidth". When I boot up a Windows machine at my vacation condo with a 2Mbps DSL line (okay, yeah, but it's all I can get), it sucks it completely dry for an hour or more, with nothing about updates or anything meaningful appearing on the Windows screen at all.
What's it doing? Who knows.
edit: clarity
reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\DefenderApiLogger" /v "Start" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
reg add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\WMI\Autologger\DefenderAuditLogger" /v "Start" /t REG_DWORD /d "0" /f
Took me like 5 minutes of not being able to use my computer to get through, only to find that I wasn't hacked... but that was something Microsoft hired and paid employees to do.
With that in mind, they haven't done anything like that since. Hopefully people are super mad about it.
Unusual windows activity, random rebooting associated with "updates", is a force of nature. People are beyond anger. They just accept it as part of the natural world. Linux guys like me are the angry man standing on the corner saying that the world doesn't need to be this way, that we can choose not to live like this. But if you believe that something is natural and unavoidable, eventually that guy in the corner looks genuinely crazy.
It is telling that deactivating telemetry is the most significant feature of the enterprise edition.
My guess is that people screw up their machines in a way that triggers some type of registry repair, or they encounter a problem and do a rollback or refresh in safe boot themselves, which will reset things like active services and scheduled tasks. Those fire up, see an unrecognized configuration, invalid entries, or missing entries, and reset those settings to a default.
Seriously, I see these comments on things happening by magic in Win 10 - full apps installing themselves, setting gremlins flipping switches, advertisements eating people's children, etc.- and I've literally experienced NONE of them. Actually I had Error Reporting reenabled once after using the troubleshooting settings to clean the DNS cache instead of ipconfig. I've had plenty of issues to troubleshoot, mostly from my own tweaking, some out of my control, but the level of Win10 FUD is bizarre.
tl;dr - More MS FUD. Don't use every hack posted by internet randos and check any deep customizations after using any automated repair tools.
The second mentions:
1) Drivers being replaced, which is often cited as the overwhelming contributing factor of system instability. It was a huge factor specifically when the driver model changed in Vista and shotty 3rd party drivers is often credited as the single biggest reason Vista flopped. They're anal about drivers, but MS provides ways to prevent drivers from being updated automatically. They list printers being uninstalled as a separate thing, but probably same root cause. Printers and their software hold the top ranking on the "WTF is all this shit?" Scale.
Ads turned back on? Never happened on any of these systems. There might have been some feature that was added in an early release (both articles were written in 2017), but if there was, it was a toggle in the settings to disable it.
Default apps being reset actually DID happen to me once, now that I think about it. It's literally a 5 second fix, which is why I forgot about it.
That article also links to MakeUseOf articles that promote installing 3rd party apps to do things like redirect Cortana, set default programs, etc. Gee, use some rando internet person's hack to change default apps and at the next update the default apps are reset to default? Must be Microsoft's fault. Let's mess with Cortana, which can be used to recommend (advertise) apps and services by examining the user's history (telemetry). What? All the telemetry tweaks and ad settings have changed. OMG MS you so bad! Sorry, M$ you so bad! (Gotta have that late 90s childish Developers Developers Developers rage.)
The overwhelming takeaways are:
A) If you're going to spend hours of your life at the computer, spend 30 minutes looking over the settings for each major release, which happens once every year or so. Same goes for your phones/tablets.
B) Use the tools provided to tweak first and resort to 3rd party hacks only if they're reversible, you know exactly what they do, and you could perform the same changes manually.
It seems windows pro receives less ads than home so it may be that. Anyway there have been times where I was doing heavy browsing where I got over 20% and some times over 25%. I also block everything from facebook.
My top blocked domains today are: self.events.data.microsoft.com, activity.windows.com, watson.telemetry.microsoft.com and reddit.map.fastly.com
self.events.data.microsoft.com, activity.windows.com.
Maybe you are blocking some legitimate traffic, forcing it to retry many times?
Every time our tests ran the windows menu showed ads. Edge default home page showed ads. An OS was supposed to be on the users side and Windows wasn’t.
I quit and have been much happier. Although I work for a tracking company so may be I am a hypocrite. But my current employer has strong ethics when it comes to GDPR, DNT cookie, No cross domain tracking Yada yada.