this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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You joke, but I attempted to set up a Windows partition back in January so I could play some games on Game Pass, and made it nearly a whole two hours before I wiped the partition and vowed never again.
There were ads on the login screen. And that was just the start! I haven't seen so many ads on a desktop since the early 2000's when I used to fix PCs infected with spyware for people.
At least back then the ads had naked girls!
Did you just rawdog the home version or something? You gotta use at least some protection man! LTSC Pro install, some debloat scripts... anything but a straight install.
Lord knows what you could have caught!
Problem is, there are no good debloat scripts. It's all written by amateurs who don't know what they're doing, messing up the system in subtle ways that then take ages to figure out.
And if you are an amateur yourself, you have no means to validate that the scripts aren't harmful.
I'd say that the ctt winutil does a pretty good job. I've been running installs cleaned by it for a good year now without major issues
I thought so as well for a time, but that tool in particular is what finally made me lose faith that there might be any good debloat tool out there.
Basically, someone mentioned that it does a weird thing, so I've decided to take a look closer, and stumbled about a whole lot of dumb choices. To exemplify, I'll just repost that part of my comment from back then:
Remote assistance is not rdp, it's Microsoft's support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.
The rest of that I'll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.
I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn't be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the "which apps are preventing shutdown" dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.
Good catch. Never used Remote Assistance, so I don't know how different it is, and if it actually requires telemetry.
Although the broader issue isn't the why, it's that it does those things at all without clearly communicating them to the user. Even their documentation has severe lack of any kind of explanation.
Privacy.sexy works great...
Might be down right now ( https://privacy.sexy/ )
Up: https://github.com/undergroundwires/privacy.sexy
The icks is what I caught!
Some tools for the forsaken:
https://privacy.sexy/ https://github.com/builtbybel/Bloatynosy/releases https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Not FOSS: https://winaero.com/download-winaero-tweaker/
Someone's curated list I just found: https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy
Yep. I have to use Windows for work, and even pro version shows so many ads it's crazy. I can't even imagine how much they paid for this copy of professional OS for working workers, and it still shows fucking ads all the time. It's crazy that nobody in the windows world thinks it's outrageous.
My gaming group all uses Windows, and they go to great lengths to downplay the enshitification.