Since the government will most probably install the enterprise edition of W10, there is the possibility, that the images, they use for installation, already have turned off the "telemetry" - except for internal purposes of course... >;)

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Aloha, Uli

I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TINFOIL TO MAKE A HAT! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO!?!?

Varying thicknesses of tinfoil may be required, depending on how well-suited said thicknesses are for the particular occasion in question.

Choose wisely as the reflectivity of aluminum depends on the surface characteristics and varies between 84 and 92%. Maybe make a hat using something better? :)

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River Song (aka Linda Latte on planet Earth)
"Happy I-Phone girl on the GO GO GO"

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"Sour Grapes make a bitter Whine." <(0)>

Choose wisely as the reflectivity of aluminum depends on the surface characteristics and varies between 84 and 92%. Maybe make a hat using something better? :)

Aren't most signals reduced by passing through building walls? Just sit in the middle of the right building, and aluminum is not so bad....

Back on the thread topic: if I knew you to use a *nix CLI, I would, but since Windoze is all I know....

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Please Sir, may I have Another?

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Finally bit the bullet and done an in-place repair installation of my Windows 7, after lots of trouble last night getting Bitdefender's Antivirus Plus 2016 to work (black screens are not fun to look at).

Started this afternoon, did the install without Updates. That still took a good 5 hours to complete, because of the large amount of files and settings it had to copy over (close to 4 million!).

But, I am now in a very speedy Windows 7. Used the DVD's activation key to activate it without trouble. And so after updating all my drivers and rearranging my desktop so its icons are spread over both monitors again (games right, apps left), I'm now doing Windows Update.

Sneaky bastard had "Receive recommended updates the same way as important updates" checked in settings, so at that time I had close to 400 updates waiting at over a gigabyte of data. Unchecked that and important fell back to 157 updates, 105 optional ones. Although that latter number includes the 38 language packs I can install, I'm only going to install English.

However, the rest of those updates have all the jewels in Cosmo's list.
All of them are unchecked, none of those are getting on my system. Not until I've gone through it with a fine tooth comb.

Now I just don't know what it's doing. Earlier it was downloading the updates, but it's stopped doing that. The last 4 reboots nothing has installed either. Shrug.

Perhaps go do dinner first, and figure this out later. :)

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Now I just don't know what it's doing. Earlier it was downloading the updates, but it's stopped doing that. The last 4 reboots nothing has installed either. Shrug.

Perhaps go do dinner first, and figure this out later. :)

In my experience, when you get updates from MS's servers, you'll end up with 100% CPU on just one core, and probably a lot of disk activity for upwards of an hour or two before updates will even begin downloading the first update, and then it does that again for every update that follows.

Pretty sure what it is doing is verifying the checksums and versions of every file that the update will change, to see if that file is needed. When you get updates directly from MS through Windows Update, it will do partial downloads of every update, depending on what files you need from it. It saves on bandwidth, but at the cost of not being very fast.

When I use WSUS though, none of that processing and overhead happens--the computers connected to WSUS get the full, complete update and there as very little CPU load or disk activity (until the actual installation of the updates).

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

In my experience, when you get updates from MS's servers, you'll end up with 100% CPU on just one core, and probably a lot of disk activity for upwards of an hour or two before updates will even begin downloading the first update, and then it does that again for every update that follows.

AFAIK that is the .NET installation, running from under a svchost.exe process. It's done that for an hour and a half. And will do that again in a bit because it gets 25+ updates in. Insecure much?

But I fixed the downloads... apparently they were in already, but I then changed the preferences to "I want to decide when to install them", which it didn't like. I put it back onto Automatic and all 157 important updates are now installing.

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Agreed. .NET updates take forever to install. I was pretty disappointed when I first got my SSD, because driver installations were blazing fast, and most of my programs and software installed so fast that it didn't have time to even display the progress bar at all.

But then I started doing updates and even with a SSD, it was just dragging-on and being ridiculously slow. It turns out that about 75% of the total time for Windows updates is entirely CPU-bound, to one single core. That other 25% that is disk activity is mostly negligible with a SSD--except when it comes to .NET. Those ones still take entirely too long to install.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

That (.NET updates) is pretty much what retired my last Single core p4 Northwood, which was the workhorse involved in porting the AKv8 applications from Mac to Windows back in the day. Naturally 100% core use on a single core machine was never going to be pretty, and it certainly wasn't. RIP single core p4 with no hyperthreadinng, lol

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

RIP single core p4 with no hyperthreading, lol

Or, for $20, if you're socket 775 and have an 800Mhz FSB, you could always do this.
Worked very nicely for me, gives you hyperthreading and it will also support 64-bit (EM64T). Turned my old Foxconn 925XE into a Win10x64 Pro box quite nicely. Cooler upgrade also, those old P4s run hot.

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Great. Installed Bitdefender AVP16, rebooted and was looking at my two black screens. Explorer.exe was immediately crashing again. Managed to uninstall it in Safe Mode.

Have complained already about this on their forums.
Really thinking of asking my money back, even though it works fine on the other two systems.

That did mean I had reboot 19 and 20 of the day. Been reinstalling Windows 14 hours now. Am installing the next 45 updates. So far no GWX updates. :)

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Very strange. Switched to Bitdefender (free edition) not too long ago, and it's been good so far. Will watch if you figure out and post about what's going on there.

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

57 times the following error in 24 minutes:

Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7a144
Faulting module name: verifier.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be081
Exception code: 0x80000003
Fault offset: 0x000000000000ae03
Faulting process id: 0xb4c
Faulting application start time: 0x01d16dcf289bc415
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\verifier.dll
Report Id: 6b99e212-d9c2-11e5-9e75-bc5ff419f74a

Oops, sorry for being heavily off-topic here. Kisses Cliff's feet. :)

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That's the application verifier isn't it ? OS may need root certificate updates first ? (just a theory)

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

I've managed to cull it down a little. Still have the crashing explorer.exe, but not as much as it used to. Before I would go to Control Panel and immediately upon clicking anything there explorer would crash. Now it does so once every 5 times or so.

I've disabled all non-Microsoft context handlers which appear in the right-click menu on the Windows Explorer, and things stabilized a little as soon as I took TortoiseSVN out. Trouble is, now most of my right-click options haven't returned, even though I re-enabled them in ShellExView.

So something else seems to be broken.
I'm looking for a good program with which I can compare two registry backups with each other. Anyone know of anything? Already tried the top ones on Google, as far as they can be found (Windiff for instance isn't). Regshot and Regdiff didn't work for me. Am going to try RegMerge next.

Edit: meanwhilst, if you're a user of a wireless mouse, know that it's vulnerable and that it can theoretically be used to remotely add rootkits to your computer: https://threatpost.com/mousejack-attacks-abuse-vulnerable-wireless-keyboard-mouse-dongles/116402/.

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57 times the following error in 24 minutes:

This sounds very much like a hardware problem.
Did you check your memory?

I've always had the problem with explorer.exe crashing on this system, from the day that I built it. I've run a lot of memory- and other test&benchmark&burn-in programs in between then (19 July 2010) and now. Can attest that all's fine.

That there may be something wrong with hardware in my system isn't something I disagree with. But the memory it ain't. :)

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I see KB3035583 was re-re-re-re-re-re-released yesterday, probably after getting a fresh coat of paint....or whitewash.

Ya know, after that initial unsatisfactory experiment with Win10 on one of my boxes back at the beginning of August, i figured I'd just wait six months and maybe try again, assuming that the initial uproar would've induced M$ to alter their approach and clean up their act. Boy, did I figure that wrong. I can't really think of a single positive change in M$'s direction in all that time. Oh, well. I guess I'll just continue with Win XP/Vista/7/8.1 on my various boxes for the foreseeable future.

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Windows 10 lock screen ads begin with Rise of the Tomb Raider push.

Full-screen ads invade the Windows 10 lock screen, but you can turn them off.

With more than 200 million systems running Windows 10—many of them having upgraded from an earlier version for free—Microsoft has decided it’s time to monetize the lock screen.

Over the past few days, Windows 10 users have reported having their lock screens taken over by advertisements for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft started selling the game through the Windows Store last month, in what might be the start of a much bigger push into PC gaming.

Microsoft hasn’t hid its intentions to use the Windows 10 lock screen as a commercial billboard, having first discussed its plans during last year’s Build developers conference. Now, Microsoft appears to be making good on those promises, with How-To Geek’s Chris Stobing and at least one Reddit user having seen the Rise of the Tomb Raider ads themselves.

Fortunately, the ads are easy enough to disable. Just head to Settings > Personalization > Lock Screen and uncheck the box that reads “Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen.”

Keep in mind that the option to disable the ads only shows up if you have selected Picture or Slideshow under the Background section of lock screen settings. If you’re using Windows Spotlight, which routinely refreshes the lock screen with images from Bing, ads are presumably part of the deal.

Why this matters: The lock screen is one of several ways that Windows 10 isn’t exactly free. From Start menu promotions to subscription-based games to personalized ads in Bing and the Edge browser, Microsoft has plenty of money-making hooks built into its latest OS. Most of these can be avoided or disabled, including the new lock screen promos, but with hundreds of millions of users upgrading to Windows 10 (whether they intended to or not), Microsoft is banking on the notion that most people won’t be so proactive.

Read in a deep voice: and so it begins, muwahahahahaha.

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