The script looks something like this. It's written from memory and I don't have a Windows machine nearby to test it, but it's better than nothing.
$path = %windir%\systemapps\microsoft.windows.startmenuexperiencehost*
get-process *startmenuexperiencehost* | stop-process -force
takeown /f $path /r /d y
icacls $path /grant "${env:UserName}:F" /inheritance:d /t /c
rm -recursive -force $pathhttps://www.howtogeek.com/224159/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-...
I already had disabled Cortana, if not also create CortanaConsent dword with value 0
I agree that a lot of Win10 defaults are derpy. But just tune it a bit and its reasonably power user friendly. Maybe not what you want to support personally, but sufficient for professional use.
Like I said, maybe not the crap you want to put up with in your personal life, but as a professional tool... worth tweaking to suit your needs.
(Oh, and in a full professional environment, can also be set by group policy)
Though as Hanlon's Razer said: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Part of me wants Microsoft to be so evil they have deliberately made the start menu search so impossibly poor that you end up opening a web search half the time and making them money. But I know deep down, that they are just incompetent and can't be bothered with the desktop anymore.
Yes, but: "Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice"
FWIW on a Windows PC, Windows Spotlight shows me nature and city photos with a bit of info about the place. I think I've seen a game wallpaper maybe once in all the time that PC's run Windows 10. It was pretty (some sort of anime-style game?) and not exactly a typical ad.
Looking at Google Images, looks like most of these 'game ads' are similar -- but I can understand how they can be annoying if you aren't a gamer.
If memory serves, I removed them and moved on with my day. Think the occasional big update will add a new one, but then you remove it as well and you're good for a while.
That's interesting though. I game heavily on my Windows 10 instance. Most web browsing is gaming related and this is done in Edge as well. All I get are the scenic/animal lock screen images. Really wish they'd get some images that support 3440x1440 because it looks pretty rough (Windows Store looks even worse).
I run Windows 10 (pro) with nearly all the default settings. It took me a while to even realize what these "ads" were that people were complaining about. A free game that gets included with the OS! That's it.
The quality of image and curation is surprising
Problem solved. It is a shame that the default is so garbage but there's an easy solution.
Not only do they install, but they immediately fill the start menu tiles with this spam.
Office 365 that is interesting because on a clean install, I still had to go to office.com to install it. I didn't have icons for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. and certainly not the GBs of data already consumed by it. I'm looking at my work machine at the moment and it has an "Office" tile that I can sign in and use the web versions, but it doesn't appear to be a full Office install.
E.g., googling turns this up: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...
But as I mentioned in my other comment, for me it's been literally once and I leave 'Windows Spotlight' on, because I like the random city/nature photos it shows.
Open Chrome.
"Try Microsoft Edge!"
One way to absolutely guarantee I will never use your software is to constantly nag me about trying it.
This isn't true.
It's routine for goofy conflicts even within MSFT's own stack (Office + Windows + whatever) to put you in a place where reinstalling Windows is the easiest fix.
Plus, if you install and uninstall lots of software (e.g., if you work at a software company), C:\Windows just gets bigger and bigger over time. The only way to reclaim that space is to wipe & reinstall.
As for size of Windows dir - it not "leftovers" from uninstalls (but they exist too of course), it is a feature of Windows and 95% of it is a Windows updates, all chain of updates is stored locally and can't be safely deleted (according to MS engineers). Yes, it grows very big, especially if start point was older version/SP of Windows. In extreme cases, e.g. installing release version of Win7 and then updating to all service packs and updates will cause it to increase by 15-20Gb. But it is a known expected "feature" and it doesn't slow your PC, only clutters your c:\ partition. And re-install will not reclaim this space, it will be taken again immediately as soon as updates arrive on your fresh install of Windows.
If by chance you a talking about clutter of 3rd party apps, then it is not a windows problem. E.g. some drivers like to keep older installers in appdata, some apps keeps backups of data there - worst offender is Garmin updater, which creates 12Gb backups every map update. That's not Windows issues.
Honestly, it's indefensible to have a 30GB Windows folder.
The author is not claiming it's necessary, only that they like to reset their computer to a known good state.
They can save you a lot of pain.
One thing I think happens is Registry gets abused by apps and such over the years.
And it is just a hierarchical database, nothing special about it. It shouldn't be very different than accessing files on the file system.
(there were some bugs at the past that caused Windows Explorer to slow down but those were fixed long ago and they were just bugs with a single application, not something inherently slow with the registry itself)
Speaking of Explorer, one of the classic ways to end up with a Windows system that's slow for no readily apparent reason is shell extensions. Either on the rightclick menu or in the thumbnail engine. At one point I had a folder I couldn't navigate to without getting an error popup that mentioned Nvidia in it - a chain of handlers had been installed such that JPEG decoding was delegated to the graphics card, so trying to create and cache the thumbnail of a corrupt file crashed in an unrelated-looking place.
It's the wrong solution to an old problem: having your configuration in hundreds of .INI files was a problem because opening and reading files took a long time. Instead of solving the problem and making opening and reading hundreds of files fast (which would be awesome for a number of other uses of a computer) they created new file that every application would read and write to. It seemed like a great idea at the time.
Every problem has a solution that's simple, elegant, and wrong.
This seems to be the correct answer, but not for the reason you think ("outdated information"). The registry is a highly indexed database, because it needs to be quick at answering if say a low-level kernel-level driver needs something in real time for an operation. Many of those indexes are variations on Most-Recently-Used (MRU) caches. The more applications that make random queries to the Registry, the more those MRU caches churn and the more likely the MRU caches are full of small, one-off application data versus important stuff that needs to be queried as quickly as possible. (Over time Windows has seemed to work to compensate by changing indexing strategies, but at a high level a lot of the slow down issues with registry still boil down to index problems.)
The Registry wasn't intended to be a general application configuration store, per the original registry usage guidelines. Certainly that ship sailed.
(Also, the key problem with INI files was not that opening/reading them took a long time, it was the same centralization problem: almost every Windows 3.x application stored their INI in C:\WINDOWS for a number of dumb reasons. When Windows 9x started enforcing basic directory ACLs and not every program under the sun could read/write to arbitrary files in C:\WINDOWS, people scurried for the Registry as that seemed the closest to what they were already doing, squirreling config data in C:\WINDOWS for dumb reasons. It took a while for developers to realize they should just put config files in whatever format they prefer in %LOCALAPPDATA% or such like and stop trying to centralize them.)
In the Windows 3.1 days I had some interesting problems when importing data into an MS Access databases that would contain reports for our senior execs to read while offline (the web was not a thing back then) and import throughput slowed down to a near-halt after 30 megs of data or so. Our solution was to do the import in chunks, and defragment the database between them.
Why is your software looking at registry entries that it didn't create?
I may want to know where Photoshop is installed to I can register a plugin. Or know about the printers installed. Or know more about the environment than the OS is willing to tell me. Or those may be entries that older versions of other applications of mine did create. Or Windows. Or older versions of Windows.
There are many reasons to look into registry entries that aren't the ones you wrote.
Sure, it happens rarely - but it really depends on your usage patterns. If you often have to try out software on a regular basis (I've always used Windows VMs for work stuff when I needed to evaluate things from $randomVendor) it might accelerate this. Or sometimes it's a piece of hardware. yes, some are 90s tales but to some degrees it has persisted.
Probably refers to the "notification center" in the bottom right next to the systray.
Windows ME taught me a lot of storage, backup and organizational skillsets, because I did have to refresh it every month. Literally. For two years (yay for Norton Ghost).
To your point however, since Windows 7, I really haven't had a need to refresh any of my or family's systems.
It does take me ~10min to get rid of some junk upon new install, but only because I'm pedantic. In reality the couple of pre-installed things don't bother me.
I don't really know about "ads". I don't see them as screensaver (just nice rotating landscapes), and again, once I uninstall initial Start Menu games and crap, I don't see them there either.
Really, the most annoying thing is that I have to persuade it several times I've tried Edge and am making my choice with Firefox :P
I don't know why this is the case, but it's been the case since the 95/98 era atleast (I don't have experience previous to these).
A reinstall isn't required, but it absolutely runs better once you do so. The only improvement I've seen is that generally it will take longer before windows needs a reinstall. It's possible you just don't realize how much performance/speed you've lost over time.
Popups? Maybe he means the new notification system that was included with... 8? I hate notifications that cover part of my screen while I use my computer/mobile, so I have them disabled. I can understand that they are annoying for some, and they are not trivial to completely disable.
As for bad upgrades - I had linux upgrades which failed something in the video path and I was stuck with broken X server and no GUI. And I didn't manage to repair that state even after extensive searching on stack exchange, so I just deleted everything and reinstalled. Another time I tried to install custom software and ended in a error hell of incompatible versions of libc, libtrpc etc. and it simply didn't work (it was on Debian), but at the same it worked just fine on another VM with different distributive.
No OS is perfect currently.
Same with "unsolicited popups". What are you using that does this? Windows itself shows me reboot needed popup once a few months maybe and that's about it. Some software can show it's own popup when I launch it and it is often relevant.
Windows is not perfect and Linux is great (and not perfect too) but really, some complaints about Windows seems to be straight from late 90s, with custom virus packaged Win98 distributives on torrents.