Windows 10 - My Angst

This post began as my comments on a Facebook group which is largely populated by oldschool hacker geeks (moo). It seemed to resonate, so I copypasta'd it over here. It's more sweary than my usual style but given the audience was appropriate.

I have a very good laptop with a high end i7 and 16gb RAM. Installed win 10 hoping it would be the fix for 8.1 ... Slow as fuck. All the OS overhead to "improve user experience" made me want to slash my wrists. 

Know what "user experience" I want? A FUCKING FAST ONE. 

That's why i paid $3k for my machine, not so Windows could hog all the resources doing whatever the fuck it thinks it should do, but so shit responds immediately. I want my applications to leap up at a touch like frogs in a dynamite pond. 

Threw Ubuntu on it, and huzzah. Even running win 7 in a VM under Linux host with half the memory assigned as was on the physical board the apps are fast. I can have five VMs running simultaneously, doing updates, 40 tabs open in Firefox, zero fucks are given it just cruises along. Boot back into winX ..... Lag lag lag. 

Tweaked to fuck and still plods like a donkey. 

I'll take my fast as holy hell over derpspeed any day. An OS is supposed to be a host to whatever it is you need to do, not the experience itself. Especially if that experience sucks.

I just don't get it, it bothers me actually, because my monster lappy (it's an Asus ROG) is better than 98% of the laptops on the market so if my user experience is scabby testicles then I reckon throwing it onto a smelleron M, centrino or similarly underpowered budget CPU should turn it into a bowl of Jello. 

I spent two days throwing 30 years of computer nerdery at it. It was defeating. Two decades ago I had tweaked DOS to the point I could have my SBLive driver & MSCDEX called at autoexec & config.sys and still have 634kb base memory available, I know how to tweak shit, what the actual flying fuck is wrong with this OS that I can't make it not suck? 

Disable all the "enhancements". Fidget services and autoruns .. two days later, it was just always grinding.

I know, it's searching my hard drive and indexing things, and I have a shit ton of things to index. But that shit really grinds my gears, that my puter is gonna sacrifice its ability to perform like the high performance piece of tech that it is to blow all its clockticks on digging through my underwear drawer then send god knows what (the pcaps were alarming) to god knows who burning all my bandwidth in the process so that some "microsoft affiliate and/or associate" somewhere I'm just supposed to "trust" isn't actually looking at the competitive information for my work (and that their system is secure so that if it IS ever breached that some untrusted blackhat doesn't have free access to all my docs) so that they can deliver better advertisements to me.

How about NO.

I paid for the machine, and I pay for the power that shoots those electrons through the machine, and I pay the interwebnet bill and all of those things are supposed to be so I can learn shit and communicate, not so some dickhead can tell that I really like Nine Inch Nails and maybe I should check out this band that claims to kinda be like them.

Nope nope nope.

*** The above was posted 30 October 2015. Jump forward two months to mid January 2016 ***

Well, it happened. I gave in. I re-installed Windows 10 on my laptop, and consequently five other machines so far that I take care of.

On my lappy, the reasoning was simple - I did a kernel update on my Ubuntu install that broke everything and rather than spend the next week unfucking it with a hammer, I pulled my VM images and did a reinstall. Ok, that doesn't explain why I'm on a Windows 10 machine right at this moment, it's mostly because I was dual-booting Win8.1 with the Linux and I just couldn't suffer the 8.1 anymore so thought I'd give WinX a second chance.

I'll admit, it's better than 8.1 - but that's kind of like saying getting kicked in the balls is better than having your dick chopped off... neither solution is something I would normally opt for, if given a third option such as having a clean Win7 install.

Even now, as I type, there is for some reason so much going on that me typing into a text box on a webpage in Firefox with a half dozen tabs open is too much for it to handle, it's like typing into terminal screens back in the dialup days: type like a maniac then sit back and wait for that 1200BPS bitflinger to catch up. 

So why did I install it on all those other machines?

I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist. There is very good reason, for I know for a fact that, for example, OEM "recovery disks" include a shit ton of bloatware that must be removed or, over time, they'll phone home and invite all their friends and even with that sucker just sitting there with no operator input the damn thing will eventually burst into flames under the load of its own suck. 

And, I know that Microsoft does nothing out of pure benevolence.

Come on, think about it - it's one of the biggest companies in the known universe, it's software runs three quarters of the computers on the planet, there's hardly a single human being whose miserable life isn't somehow affected by their product. They didn't get to be this way by giving their shit away for free, there has GOT TO BE a reason they're "giving away windows 10 as a free upgrade". The must be.

Obviously, the telemetry is a big deal. And frankly I don't think we've even begun to touch on the true capacity of that telemetry data, there almost certainly is some kind of back door that is, so far, completely hush-hush. There's not a doubt in my mind that the three letter achronym LEAs have somehow mandated that M$ slip it in there, given the direction of discussion regarding encryption of late, and it would certainly help explain why they're giving it away, or rather, that they're not giving it away, it was just paid for out of some black budget to give the cowboys at our collective spy agencies a leg up in their games.

So again, it goes back to WHY OH WHY WOULD I DO THIS TO MYSELF AND ALL THOSE INNOCENT MACHINES!

I had, in the matter of a week and a half, every one of those stable Windows 7 installs suddenly go sideways - strange, hard to kill spyware suddenly appeared on the kitchen computer, which literally does nothing but sit there and look up recipes and play youtube playlists over the speakers so my wife can jam out while she's cooking for the fam. My mom's computer, that she only ever uses for email and spider solitaire was suddenly riddled with nasties. Even the kids computer, which was locked down with UAC suddenly forgot how to driver its devices. Bedroom computer suddenly can't computer. 

Then that Win10 popup in the bottom, like the old MS Word clippy.

"heeeeyy man, I see that your computer is suddenly come down with the fail. I betcha upgrading to your free copy of Windows 10(tm) would fix that!"

And, it did.

Yes, I'm saying that Microsoft is deliberately crippling Windows 7 machines in order to force their humans into giving in and installing Windows 10.

Luckily, I could really care less if MS knows that we watch YouTube in the kitchen or Netflix in the chill... they probably already knew that. However, when it comes to my actual work computers, there's no fucking way I'm letting it go on there.... so here's what you do!

1. Install a copy of Windows Server on a VM (whatever flavor you want, I had a copy of 2008 laying around so that'll do).
2. Create a domain.
3. JOIN THAT DOMAIN!

You'll stop getting the offers to update as MS then assumes that you're covered by some kind of legit IT dude who will rage if his garden suddenly blossomed with a new operating system, and your existing computers won't suddenly get sick and die by remote code execution - hey, let's call it what it is.

/rant