It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.

> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?

I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.

1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,

2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,

3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.

Have you tried running without antivirus? Some parts of Windosw are still slow eg the filesystem, but the main thing making everything slow is antivirus software IME, including Defender.

I don’t know what’s wrong with my work PC. Home PC also has Windows (because games) and is super fast (even with Defender, but without ATP).

You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.

In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.

Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health.

If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.

Or just BYOD :)

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

https://pi-hole.net/

(or at least shut all the "windows 10" stuff and return to something that look like Windows 2000?)

Pro runs just fine on a laptop.

When people talk about Candy Crush they mean they see it first thing when they start Windows Store as a recommendation. It is definitely not pre-installed on Pro, if it is I haven’t found it in 4 years...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...

They are less brazen about it, I had to look in my Applications list.

https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...