[CP5670]

I won't be upgrading to it either until it's been around for a while, but I do want DX12 sooner or later.

3.  When it was all done, the screen asked me if I was Michael (I am), and I clicked yes.  I did not sign in with my Microsoft account.  Windows 10 desktop appeared, but it was not my old desktop background or theme, and most of my desktop icons were missing.  Going through the personalization menu, I could not find any of my themes I had created before. 

Are there any theme patchers available (or necessary) for it? I use a custom theme in Windows 8.1 but need a theme patcher to make it work, which gets occasionally reverted and broken by Windows updates (which is why I never use auto-updates).

I assume that most peripheral drivers that work on Windows 8.1 would still work with Windows 10, like the Creative X-fi drivers and VSTMIDI. These are interchangeable between Vista, 7 and 8, as the driver model is largely the same. It would be nice if someone confirms that though.

[jr2]

I won't be upgrading to it either until it's been around for a while, but I do want DX12 sooner or later.

3.  When it was all done, the screen asked me if I was Michael (I am), and I clicked yes.  I did not sign in with my Microsoft account.  Windows 10 desktop appeared, but it was not my old desktop background or theme, and most of my desktop icons were missing.  Going through the personalization menu, I could not find any of my themes I had created before. 

Are there any theme patchers available (or necessary) for it? I use a custom theme in Windows 8.1 but need a theme patcher to make it work, which gets occasionally reverted and broken by Windows updates (which is why I never use auto-updates).

http://www.windowsxlive.net/   <- 10 support, check

EDIT: Good summary of Win 10 privacy from the site linked to at the bottom of this post:

Windows 10 has some handy new features, but if you believe the rest of the internet, it also comes with features that eviscerate any semblance of privacy. But that view is a little overblown. Let’s take a closer look at what each of these settings actually do—and which ones are actually a privacy problem.
 
Windows 10 has a reputation for “phoning home” more often than its predecessors, and while that’s primarily true, much of this was already present in Windows 8—and an awful lot of it is present in other products like Android, iOS, and Chrome. That’s not to say all of those settings are good, just that there’s very little new happening here.

You can read the privacy statement for Windows 10 here. It’s not quite as sweeping as the Windows Insider Preview policy that caused so much commotion, but it’s still very broad (as most privacy policies are).

Plenty of sites have published lists of all the features you should turn off in Windows 10 to protect your privacy, but many don’t explain in detail what each of these settings do, which makes it hard to separate FUD from fact. So let’s go through those settings and explain what we know about them, where the real problems are, and how to turn everything off.

I'll wait until people say it's satisfactory. There's a lot of whining going on about how it monitors things unless disabled, including keylogging apparently to make it easy for support to see what you did wrong when you ask for help. It might be a bunch of hogwash but I'll wait until people say it's fine.

IIRC the keylogger etc was just for the Technical Preview and gets turned off.  Actually:

So it’s not a “keylogger”, it’s more of a text analysis engine that takes already written text, scrubs it and takes words out of sequence, and analyzes them for dictionary and spellcheck purposes. However, once again, the language is extremely broad, and this is probably the most troubling privacy setting on the system.

Here's a rundown on what all the privacy settings do, and how to turn them off if you so desire:  (it's quite a comprehensive list)

http://lifehacker.com/what-windows-10s-privacy-nightmare-settings-actually-1722267229

[Klaustrophobia]

"Other companies (with terrible reputations for user rights/privacy) already do this" is not a valid reason to accept terrible privacy practices.  I don't condemn anyone for taking the position of "I can turn this off so I don't mind,"  but I personally find MS's attempts to make blocking their spying as difficult as possible unacceptable and I won't support their software that does this.  I don't want DX12 that badly.  I DID want to replace 8.1 with 10 to get the start menu back, but now I think I'll just find some 3rd party stuff for 8.1. 

[pecenipicek]

At this point i'm just waiting for someone to get a system-level adblock plus equivalent running and calling it a day

[jr2]

"Other companies (with terrible reputations for user rights/privacy) already do this" is not a valid reason to accept terrible privacy practices.  I don't condemn anyone for taking the position of "I can turn this off so I don't mind,"  but I personally find MS's attempts to make blocking their spying as difficult as possible unacceptable and I won't support their software that does this.  I don't want DX12 that badly.  I DID want to replace 8.1 with 10 to get the start menu back, but now I think I'll just find some 3rd party stuff for 8.1. 

Did you miss the little quip where most if not all of this is already in 8.1?  At least you have the options of turning that stuff off (unlike other above-mentioned companies. 

Seriously.  You guys all like to hate MS products, which I get, but then act like previous iterations were somehow not MS products.  Why aren't you running a distro of Linux?  And if you have to run Microsoft, why not run the latest offering and shut off all of the crap that gets you upset?   There's like 40 different settings you can turn off in that article I linked, with descriptions so you're not just blindly shutting everything off including possibly useful features.

I guess I'm saying, unless you're going to switch to Linux, I know which operating system you'll be using in 5 years, so I don't see what all the fuss is about, considering all the stuff you don't like is optional.

If you're boycotting 10, please tell me you don't use a smart phone.  Or Facebook. 

[karajorma]

Pretty much most of us have said we're happy with Windows 7. So I don't accept your "YOU MUST LIKE AND USE WINDOWS 10 OR YOU"RE A LUDDITE" argument.

[Fury]

Don't burst a vein jr2. What do you care about others, just leave 'em be. This subject is not worth arguing over.

[Klaustrophobia]

There's like 40 different settings

That pretty much sums it up right there.  There are forty (or whatever the number actually is) settings I need to worry about strewn all over the OS to keep my data out of Microsoft's servers.

And I believe you missed the point of my post if you're going to go the "8.1 already had it" route.  I hate these 'features' in 8.1 also.

I wonder, if you install spybot on windows 10, does it try to remove the OS?

[jr2]

Well, a program like Spybot that keeps track of all the features that require data collection, and presents them to the user for approval with simple explanations, all in one convenient place, would be nice for those who are concerned about their privacy and stay off of Facebook, Twitter, etc and don't have smartphones unless they are running a custom ROM with all of that stuff either off or controllable... wait, those are the same people who won't run anything other than official MS Windows... nope, yer all screwed. 

EDIT:

Don't burst a vein jr2. What do you care about others, just leave 'em be. This subject is not worth arguing over.

I'm just trying to get people to see there are ways to have our cake and eat it, too.  I know I've seen that horse drink water before...


Honestly, if you worry about your privacy, and refuse to run custom OS builds or be bothered with settings, then you should be running Linux.  For real.




EDIT2:  I'll just leave this here (this article supports leaving all of those options set to default)

Holy tin foil hat, Batman! If you’ve been reading the tech news lately, you’d think that Windows 10 was a giant piece of spyware rather than the latest version of the world’s most popular PC platform. Now that tens of millions of users have installed the new operating system, some people have noticed that Microsoft collects certain user data and they’re freaking out. Slate’s David Auerbach calls Windows 10 “a privacy nightmare,” while Rock, Paper, Shotgun writes that “Windows 10 is spying on you.” Zero Hedge, a conspiracy-focused news site, writes that “big brother is very much here . . . and we invited him into our homes for free.”

Should you be concerned? In a word, “no.” By default, Windows 10 sends some information about you and your activity to Microsoft, but the data it collects is largely designed to improve your user experience. Better still, if any or all of these features concern you, you can turn them off. Let’s take a closer look at what’s really going on here.Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Windows 10 Privacy

Microsoft is Collecting Data for Targeted Ads

Each Windows 10 computer is assigned a unique advertising ID so that programs that have ads can provide more targeted marketing messages to you. First of all, this feature is not unique to Windows; most Web advertisers track user activity for the purpose of serving relevant messages later. Ever browse Amazon and then go to an unrelated website and see an ad for the product you were just looking at? With everything they know about you, Facebook and Google are particularly good at reaching you.

Second of all, you want targeted advertising. Turning off your advertising ID only ensures that you get worse ads, not fewer ads. Would you rather see flashing banners for miracle belly fat cures and get-rich-quick schemes, or promotions for a video game you’re likely to play or a gadget you might need? Windows 10 does not show you ads, by the way. Individual apps can show ads just as they do on Android and iOS.

Cortana Knows About You

Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, uses data it collects about you to present timely, targeted information. When you click on the search box, Cortana shows you a series of cards with your upcoming appointments, local weather and sports scores. In order to match this information to your lifestyle, the software needs to know your location, access your calendar and gather data about what interests you.

You can’t have a context-aware operating system if you’re not willing to provide the context. If you want Cortana to track your flights, it needs to read your email to look for an itinerary message. If you’d like it to “show me all the emails from Mark that I haven’t read,” it has to see your contact lists to know who Mark is.

Unlike Google Now, which has been doing the same thing for Android users since 2011, Cortana makes it really easy to adjust or delete what it knows about you. You can go directly into the Notebook and set your favorite sports team or decide to delete your location. You can also decline to share any particular type of information (email, calendar, flights) with the assistant. That’s pretty granular control.

Keyboard, Handwriting and Voice Tracking

In two places within its privacy settings, Windows 10 says that it can collect your handwriting, typing and voice. In the “getting to know you” section of the privacy settings, Microsoft says: “Windows and Cortana can get to know your voice and writing to make better suggestions for you. We’ll collect info like contacts, recent calendar events, speech and handwriting patterns and typing history.” (Emphasis mine.)

While the idea of capturing speech and writing sounds bad, this data can help the company improve its next-word prediction, voice interpretation and handwriting recognition for everyone. Also, if you take Microsoft’s word (and I will on this point), it doesn’t take any personally identifiable information and carefully anonymizes what it does take. In response to my questions about the “getting to know you” feature, the company said:

“Some of this data is stored on your device and some is sent to Microsoft to help improve these services. Data sent to Microsoft for product improvement is put through rigorous, multi-pass scrubs to remove sensitive or identifiable fields (such as email addresses, passwords and alphanumeric data) and strings are chopped into very small bits and stripped of sequence data to prevent the information from being identified or put back together.”

Windows Update Shares Bandwidth with Other Computers

When Windows 10 launched, 14 million people downloaded it in the first 24 hours and yet there were no system crashes. I was able to grab it four times in the first day and, in all cases, the 3- to-5GB download took 30 minutes or less. Microsoft achieved this strong performance by distributing the load among its users, in much the same way BitTorrent hosts files across hundreds or thousands of individuals’ computers. So, with this system in place, your computer may help send some of Microsoft’s Windows update files out to the Internet and you’ll benefit from other people doing the same. You can turn this feature off, but it doesn’t jeopardize your privacy.

Microsoft Accounts Sync to the Cloud

From the moment you install it or run it for the first time, Windows 10 wants you to use a Microsoft account as your login. You can set up a “local” account that lives only on the computer, but then you lose the ability to install apps from the Windows Store, among other key functions. By default, the account syncs settings to the cloud so that, if you log into another computer, preferences such as your Start menu, wallpaper, email account settings, calendar and contacts list come with you.

If you ask Cortana to “remind me to clean the toilet when I get home,” and you have the digital assistant on your phone, it will tell you to clean the moment you arrive, but that only works if you have a Microsoft account. If you have more than one device in your life — and who doesn’t — the benefits of using your free Microsoft account are obvious. Google’s accounts provide a similar experience syncing your Chrome browser settings between different computers and your phone.

It is a little bit ridiculous that your kids need Microsoft accounts if you want to set them up as “child” users in Windows 10. If you don’t want your elementary school student to have email, you can always register the child account yourself or you could give the kid a local account. However, the child accounts have really granular parental controls you won’t get elsewhere. Having that account tied to Microsoft allows parents to log in, set restrictions and view a list of every website the kids have visited, every app they’ve used and what times they were on the computer.

Bottom Line

Yes, by default, Windows 10 sends some information back to Microsoft, but every piece of data it collects provides a tangible benefit to the user. Even collecting data to use in advertising is a user service, because it leads to higher quality ads. To its credit, Microsoft provides a way to turn off any of the data-collecting features, but you’d be better off leaving them in place.

[Luis Dias]

wtv just installed took 15 minutes, had to reinstall graphic drivers, right click and press "update from the nets" bang. I'm happy.

[CP5670]

The phone-home issues are not such a big deal IMO, given that you can turn off everything with a little work. I would certainly do that though. A bigger problem is turning off automatic updates. It looks like the only solutions there are kind of hackish (disabling/enabling the service). This is a step backwards from 8.1 and earlier versions.

[jr2]

This one seems easy, but it only works with Pro, they disabled the option for Home editions (if you were Technical Preview, you should be Pro AFAIK, I am):

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/8013-windows-update-automatic-updates-enable-disable-windows-10-a.html

[Mika]

While the idea of capturing speech and writing sounds bad, this data can help the company improve its next-word prediction, voice interpretation and handwriting recognition for everyone. Also, if you take Microsoft’s word (and I will on this point), it doesn’t take any personally identifiable information and carefully anonymizes what it does take. In response to my questions about the “getting to know you” feature, the company said:

“Some of this data is stored on your device and some is sent to Microsoft to help improve these services. Data sent to Microsoft for product improvement is put through rigorous, multi-pass scrubs to remove sensitive or identifiable fields (such as email addresses, passwords and alphanumeric data) and strings are chopped into very small bits and stripped of sequence data to prevent the information from being identified or put back together.”

I also do recall there's such a thing as Patriot Act, which requires US based companies to deliver information by request of government. So here I mainly see a carefully picked wording by Microsoft, saying, not guaranteeing with conditions to monetary compensations if this goes wrong.

As I said earlier, Mika is going to Linux world when Windows 7 runs out of steam. I didn't touch Windows 8, nor will I touch 10 at home OR work. And to be honest, Microsoft never made it easier.

If there is one thing that is I just don't get is why MS thinks Cloud services or MS Store are of ANY importance to a corporate customer, this is a swing towards mass markets while saying "pay more for less" for the corporate side? I understand the swing towards the perceived more income providing customer, but given that the most bucks for Microsoft so far have came from corporate clients, this is really bizarre. Then again, cloud services integrated to MS Office are a red flag to a non-US corporate user as well.

[jr2]

Some good comments on both sides here:

Link starting topic: http://windows.wonderhowto.com/inspiration/everything-you-need-disable-windows-10-0163552/

Discussion:

http://reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3gcai5/everything_you_need_to_disable_in_windows_10/

TIL: The wifi sharing everyone is complaining about is 'on' by default, but that only makes it available, you have to check the box saying you want to share it and type the password in again to actually share it - I knew that but thought it was only me as everyone was whining like it automatically shares all passwords with everyone in your social contacts lists. 

[jr2]

For those who don't want auto updates, play with this script to your liking:

Code: [Select]

#   Description:
# This script optimizes Windows updates by disabling automatic download and
# seeding updates to other computers.

echo "Disable automatic download and installation of Windows updates"
$reg = @"
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"NoAutoUpdate"=dword:00000000
"AUOptions"=dword:00000002
"ScheduledInstallDay"=dword:00000000
"ScheduledInstallTime"=dword:00000003
"@
$regfile = "$env:windir\Temp\registry.reg"
$reg | Out-File $regfile
Start-Process "regedit.exe" -ArgumentList ("/s", "$regfile") -Wait
rm $regfile

echo "Disable seeding of updates to other computers"
$reg = @"
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DeliveryOptimization]
"SystemSettingsDownloadMode"=dword:00000003
"@
$regfile = "$env:windir\Temp\registry.reg"
$reg | Out-File $regfile
Start-Process "regedit.exe" -ArgumentList ("/s", "$regfile") -Wait
rm $regfile

From:  https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/blob/master/scripts/optimize-windows-update.ps1

[Fury]

And now the web is full of random fud, , tools and scripts everyone and their dog is playing with. Eventually leading to **** breaking and nobody being any wiser as to why, blaming Win10 instead. Good going.

[jr2]

O.o  If you read the script, it is clearly setting a few registry entries you could set yourself if you so desired.  However, it seems those registry keys no longer have any effect.

[CP5670]

This reminds me of the crap with unsigned drivers back in the day. People found various workarounds for it that MS kept patching out. The group policy setting with the nag message is fine though.

Almost every Windows version has had its issues. I prefer to find workarounds and hacks for them instead of staying with an older version of Windows, which lacks important features going forward (like DX12).

[JCDNWarrior]

Windows 7 all the way for me, got too much riding on my current installs on various devices to upgrade/reinstall the OS right now anyway - A good rule I keep for myself is to always wait till at least the first Service Pack before upgrading, and only if neccesary.

[Dragon]

Group policies are a wonderful thing. It turned out messing with registry I did wasn't even needed, everything was in there. I had to mess with them once in Windows 7 as well. They're a bit of an obscure feature, but they work really well.

Really, my biggest gripe about Windows 10 (and 8) is the aesthetics. This "minimalist" design looks like crap, IMO. Aren't no settings to help with that. The start menu is good, but still a far cry from what it used to be in 7. Aesthetics also took a plunge, XP looked nice, 7 could be used to and 8 looked ugly. 10 is only marginally better, with oversized icons and tablet-style "tiles". I'll still stick to it for performance (which is a marked improvement over 7) and DX12, but I hope a way will come up to deal with the fact the OS is just plain ugly-looking.

Similarly, I find Chromium-based browsers ugly as sin. I loathe how every browser, including the once-great Opera, looks like Chrome. They're all ugly and, to some degree, lack important features. Had to install Opera 12 just to get everything I want (paired it up with a slightly paranoid security suite). Even Vivaldi doesn't implement everything, not to mention I found it downright hideous. Why can't things keep looking good like they used to?