Windows 10: "It wouldn't be right to call it Windows 9."

[SecretAsianMan]

There is a setting in Windows 10 under Settings > Privacy > Speech, Inking, & Typing called "Getting to Know You" which does say it collects info including "speech and handwriting patterns, and typing history".  I think this is the 'keylogger' most people were concerned about.  Microsoft had this to say about it:

 

This is the inking and typing function, which users can turn off at any time. Microsoft does not collect any personal information via inking or typing. It is gathered for product improvement purposes, for example, to improve the handwriting visual translation engine, or to improve the user dictionary, language library and spell check functions in Windows. The data is put through rigorous, multi-pass scrubs to ensure it does not collect sensitive or identifiable fields (e.g., no email addresses, passwords, alpha-numerical data, etc.). Data is also chopped into very small bits and stripped of sequence data so it cannot be put back together or identified. The data samplings collected are limited; Microsoft is not capturing everything you write, nor is it capturing data every time.

 

Provided you believe them, it doesn't literally send Microsoft a complete transcript of all your keystrokes.  Even still, I turned it off.

[deleted user]

_

[Badfinger]

Yeah, at this point, with all we know about the Snowden leaks, and the extent of which spying has infiltrated all of our lives, how malware can be loaded onto harddrive firmwares to service OS reinstallations, everything, I'm just never going to trust an Operating System with any of my data when it's been specifically designed to sell it to advertisers, never mind all the hooks the American government has in it.

 

Ok this is a touch too far for me. It seems pretty obvious that Microsoft wouldn't sell information to the government.

 

Corporations will always pay more.

[brkl]

Does anyone know if you can change that fugly new background when you type your password to sign in?

[osmosisch]

Does anyone know if you can change that fugly new background when you type your password to sign in?

Is this what you mean?

[brkl]

Yes. I'm not all that opposed to Microsoft imposing a background, but it's really terrible and doesn't look at all like the rest of Windows 10 visuals. Cheers.

[brkl]

So this is worrying.

[Deadpan]

Ok this is a touch too far for me. It seems pretty obvious that Microsoft wouldn't sell information to the government.

 

Of course they're not going to sell it, because the government doesn't pay for that stuff. They just take it.

[feelthedarkness]

If that nasty gov't is stealing all your data your PC is a lesser target, given that the phone companies are already well documented as cooperating with data sharing. 

[brkl]

Y'all are talkin in abstract when my desktop has been taken over by Communist China apparently.

 

Does anyone have any idea what that could possibly be? I don't anything apart from what you can see from that screenshot. I just saw that stuff suddenly.

[SecretAsianMan]

What folder are those files in?  They might be part of a recent language update or something.

[feelthedarkness]

Yeah, I populated my machine with like a million asian fonts files from a language pack due to buying records from Japan. 

[brkl]

In the Desktop folder. They have zero bytes.

 

EDIT: Yeah, that thing broke my Windows, it won't start anymore. I guess I'll try to find out how to reset it.

[brkl]

I could fix it from the Command Prompt from inside the boot menu using the somewhat lacking instructions in that link. I guess someone at Microsoft really likes that background.

[Brett E]

I'm downloading Windows 10 at the moment and my new HDD arrived today, I need to replace the old one (6 years old) and I was thinking that I'd do a clean install on my current drive then clone it to the new one. Does that sound like the best way of doing it? 

 

I'd prefer to just put Win 10 on a usb or something, boot and install fresh but apparently you need a product key if you do it that way. Which does make me wonder about future issues...

[RyanCConnelly]

Brett that's close to what I did, although I ended up not needing a fresh install after upgrading and cloning it.  I agree that it's a pretty fail-safe way to proceed, avoids product key mishaps and the likes.

[Brett E]

Ok cool.

I spoke to a friend last night that said I can't fresh install to 10 so I'd have to do a fresh install of 7 onto the new drive and then upgrade that to 10. I think I'll see how the upgrade and clone goes, if it's good then I'll leave the fresh install for now.

 

Edit:

It turns out you can do a clean install, I was misinformed so I have a lot of installing to look forward to.

 

Double Edit:

It failed, back to plan B.

[Badfinger]

You can do a clean install AFTER you do an upgrade install. So if you upgraded your old HDD to win 10, you could then do a fresh install on the new one.

 

You should be double extra careful that you have the right version of Win10 when you create the media drive. :[

[Brett E]

Well now I've installed Windows 7 to the new drive and I again downloaded Windows 10 and tried to install but I guess either because I downloaded it manually without prompting it didn't like it and demanded a product key so I had to cancel. Now I'm just going to get this install of 7 up to speed with the necessary programs and install Windows 10 as an upgrade whenever because I cannot be bothered with it any more.

[Badfinger]

If you want the free upgrade copy of Windows 10 your first install of Windows 10 must be upgraded from 7 or 8. After that, install as you'd like.

[SecretAsianMan]

I decided to do a clean install of Windows 10 while I still had a relatively small number of applications installed.  A couple of quirks I had to deal with such as a few drivers and devices not registering properly as well as having to reformat the drive a couple times, but so far it seems to be ok.  It hasn't activated yet, something I'm hoping will resolve itself in a day or two.  I'm hoping its a server issue with all the systems trying to get registered.

[Gwardinen]

Warning for any people using secondary hard drives: don't mount on A: or B:!

 

I mounted my secondary hard drive on B: because I was like "fuck zip drives, I'm reclaiming these letters!" - Windows was not as passionate about this as me, and apparently even in Windows 10 still has a bunch of legacy behaviours associated with those initial two drive letters. It refuses to index files on those drives, and in a bizarre move won't allow searches in libraries (Documents, Videos, Pictures, etc.) unless they're indexed, so it wouldn't search any of my stuff. It also seemingly made the start menu act sort of weird and janky in some ways.

 

I've now remounted that drive onto F: and it's solved a bunch of problems, but I did have to mass edit registry entries for B: to F: and change a bunch of desktop and Start Menu shortcuts, as well as where Steam and Battle.net think my games are. Hopefully this is the end of the problem, but I would not be surprised if several more programs kick up a fuss about suddenly being on a different drive path than they expected to be.

[syntheticgerbil]

Zip drives? Those are for the 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disk games!

[Gwardinen]

I thought the Zip drive took over the 5.25" drive slot? Maybe I just think that because in my computer it physically did.

Anyway, Windows 10 still believes in floppies and won't be persuaded otherwise. Be warned.

[syntheticgerbil]

It probably does, I never have actually used a zip drive.

 

I do think it's bizarre at least the B Drive is still reserved for disk drives in this day and age.