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Yup. Unfortunately, when you allow corporations to get so big, society pays a heavy price when they fall. The top mgmt laughs all the way to the bank.

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HiFlyer, Bill C.

There IS no leadership change. It would be if Nadella left and his replacement brought in a new team. But I doubt that even that will help — MS is at a decay stage and the only question is how long that is gonna take and what will it take down with it.

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HiFlyer, Sessh

Noel Carboni wrote:

What’s worse, I’ve personally seen the Windows Update service started even when it has been overtly disabled.

I can confirm that.

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Sessh

Noel Carboni wrote:

I’m not convinced that Windows 10 will NEVER have merit.

I am. I don’t believe MS has any competence to produce anything useful and no interest in doing it either. They are out to extract wealth not produce it, like all tech corps.

Noel Carboni wrote:

I really didn’t sense that v1607 got worse than v1511, though IMO v1703 is worse regarding Microsoft’s direction of “you can only have it our way“.

In addition they also changed things for change’s sake — no good reason. And there is no way to tell whether all the scripts that I cleaned the bloat and telemetry with will work in 1607 and up. In fact, I know some don’t.

I was only referring to why doing it NOW — when we have discovered the misbehavior and intentions of MS–not before, when we could not have imagined it.

Nevertheless, I never touched 8 or 8.1. I tried to educate myself but the effort-benefits ratio kept coming down against it.

Like you, I had to consider my options when my Win7 hw croaked. I tried to find decent hw with Win7 preinstalled at a decent price, but could not. I found, instead, practically new Dell Latitudes E7450 seemingly dumped by corporate/federal agencies, all running Win10Pro, at very good price.

Incidentally, one can get a fair idea about new features/improvements and their usefulness from following the media on the topic over an extended time. I just could not see anything in the post-1511 editions that attracted me and justified the pain. And the only thing I could see was the pain for post-1511. 99% of the changes are in the GUI, which mean nothing to me. It is an awful waste of my time to re-learn how everything works, all due respect to the “advantages” mentioned here. I simply cannot justify the effort and take the risk due to MS incompetence and disregard.

The choice at that point was either to install Win7 and reconfigure and optimize it from scratch; or do it for the 1511 that came with the hw. Since at the time MS had not yet shown its “creative” intentions and had given up its GWX campaign, I deemed the 2nd option more cost-effective.

But once I saw where MS was going I decided to stick to 1511 for as long as I can — no WU and frequent backups.

Which does not look very dissimilar from what you’ve been doing. Had it not been for the hw death I would be still running Win7.

I had an exchange with the people who brought back OS/2, which was superior to Windows. I used it before I was forced into WinNT by IBM incompetence–the same one that is s**wing Win10–a monopolist failing to compete.

I told them they have a golden opportunity to make a killing — OS/2 is so similar to WinXP/7 that most users will jump on it if only it ran Windows applications. Sadly, it won’t and without that it will go nowhere.

The concept of competition has disappeared from the American lexicon. They all talk about it, but no longer know how to do it and don’t need to. Whenever they see competition they buy it or merge with it. And there is no longer a govt that defends against monopoly and oligopoly. Witness all the behemoth constantly being created.

US founders are turning in their graves.

Edited for content

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HiFlyer, Elly

Noel Carboni wrote:

Windows 10 on my hardware would NOT have brought me one blessed new thing I needed, nor has Windows 8.1 failed in any way that lowered my productivity. Even if I happened to like the Win 10 UI or something (which I don’t), I still couldn’t justify moving critical systems without even one real advantage to having done so.

EXACTLY what I’ve kept saying. So why keep updating and playing the MS game? Why keep working so hard for no gain whatsoever?

I simply don’t buy the security argument. Most fixes usually come post-hoc anyway–the hackers are miles ahead of MS.

I find that disabling WU–at least for now, when it’s still possible–and taking frequent image backups is infinitely more productive than dedicating myself to protection from MS malware and useless c..p for not benefit whatsoever.  I have fixed on 1511 .679 — it is close enough to Win7 and sufficiently free of MS creative nonsense. I run all the sware I was running on Win7 and I have yet to come across exclusive Win10 soft ware that I have any need for. Heck, I still use Office 2000 which is several fold more useful than the bloated useless monsters they sell these days.

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HiFlyer

I am waiting with trepidation to see MS take full control of the PC and disable ANY and ALL user settings–you run only what they want and not run what they don’t. It’s the logical conclusion  and if they have not done it fully yet is probably because it’s hard, or have not figured a way yet.

The norms have been changing for a long while now and the current situation is a logical conclusion of that.

Having come here from the Soviet bloc I can tell you that you gotta fight for freedom — you won’t sustain it any other way. Unfortunately, Americans have not been doing it for quite a while and you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Noel Carboni, HiFlyer

Have you checked with Thomas Jefferson? He predicted the end of free US when corporations take over. We’re already there.

 

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HiFlyer

MS did not choose to leave the consumer market, it was driven out by its utter incompetence and I doubt it’ll do any better in the cloud, which is where the numbing and dumbing down will help.

Microsoft boasted it had rebuilt Skype ‘from the ground up’. Instead, it should have buried it

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/05/skype_app_slammed_in_user_reviews/

 

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HiFlyer

Numbing and dumbing down is now a common intentional objective in the US — MS behavior is just a small part of it.

It works.

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Bill C., HiFlyer, Noel Carboni

There is still a good market for PCs and it would have ultimately grown from tablet/phone users realization that those are limited devices. But MS is killing it while abysmally failing in the mobile market. Hence their focus on the cloud — they are desperate.

But given so huge an incompetence…

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Elly

That is the fate of all dominant powers–whether corporate or societal. They peak and collapse.

The sheer fact of domination spells doom — you lose interest and competence in competition because you don’t need to. Arrogant ignorance sets in.

Not much difference between MS and the US at this point.

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Canadian Tech

Sorry to tell you so but I told you so.

I wonder if there will be hacks to enable users to hold upgrades off. Could be a profitable market, if feasible.

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HiFlyer