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Title: Windows 10 = Maze of Slow, Intrusive Garbage. Need Help in Un-Bloating and Speeding Up
Source:
Me
URL Source: [None]
Published: Jan 2, 2018
Author: Me
Post Date: 2018-01-02 11:15:46 by Liberator
Keywords: Windows 10, Intrusive, Garbage
Views: 21517
Comments: 92
To you Computer tech-heads, just got a Win 10 HP piece of crap that is running in quicksand. It's not a brand new machine... Firefox is running, but preventing the LF page from opening without permission. Took forever to load youtube as well as all other pages. Have loaded CCleaner and Avast. There seems to be a mountain of bloatware and intrusive programs running in the background. I'm a Win 7 guy, so this is all Greek to me. It's like a selfish Monster has hijacked the machine. The Settings are nothing like the simplicity of Win 7. Very convoluted. How do I take back this machine? And stop the intrusive stuff and updates? Any constructive suggestions are appreciated. Thanks...
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#12. To: Liberator (#0)
A decent downgrade guide, covers the issues pretty well. How to Downgrade Preinstalled or Upgraded Windows 10 Installation to Windows 7/8.1
How would Liberator downgrade when he bought a used computer with Win-doze 10 pre-installed? There is no traceability to a license agreement with Microsoft and therefore no warranty per your dumb ass suggestion.
He only needs an existing Win7 Pro license to install an old version. Since he is mourning the loss of his old OS, he has a good chance of already owning a Win7 that he could install on this Win10 Hellmachine. I never suggested he had any warranty. You made that up. Dumb ass.
With the Win7 PRO that I know of (fully licensed of course) from the original install, it will read the CPU registration and lock to the machine. Win 7 is not transferable to other boxes is what I am suggesting. You are simplifying the issues into silliness.
You get stupider by the day. Win7 and others never lock to a CPU. The OEM versions of newer versions of Windows will lock to a particular motherboard and its components. For these, you must stay with the same computer or at least a motherboard with the same components. However, you can install different CPUs with no problem. For OEM versions, the OS is locked to the first computer (motherboard configuration) you install it on and you cannot upgrade previous versions of Windows with it. If you have a full licensed copy of Win7, you can install it where you like and it can upgrade old versions of Windows (and it has direct support from Microsoft, not the OEM). It does "lock" to a particular configuration of motherboard/RAM/drives/video cards during the registration process with Microsoft. This can temporarily inhibit any component changes, even while still using a computer with the same CPU/mobo/video card. Microsoft will accept new configurations but it takes a little more fuss. In no case is the OS ever locked to a particular CPU or hardware configuration or motherboard. You don't seem to know much about Windows OEM vs. full versions. You shouldn't be offering advice to anyone. Liberator might be better off just trying to clean up his Win10 machine to make it usable. The presence of creepy bloated spyware is discouraging but with some effort, he should be able to get a clean Win10. And keep in mind that this Win7-Forever thing is going to turn out just like the WinXP-Forever did. When the manufacturers of the components and Microsoft stop building drivers for new components and motherboards for an old OS like WinXP or Win7, that OS's days are numbered. Microsoft ended all non-subscribed (paid corporate) support for Win7 in January 2015, two years ago. Even the paid corporate bigwigs will receive support only through January of 2020, only two years from now. And even the subscribed support corporate types get only security patches and minor updates. Microsoft is not producing any new device driver support for these corporate machines so they lack the ability to use many newer components appearing on the market due to lack of drivers. You may want to reconsider making much effort or incurring expense to make a Win10 HP into a Win7 HP with only two years left in the Win7 support cycle. I know this isn't happy advice for you to hear but you need to be coldblooded about it and recognize the reality of what happens when Microsoft sunsets and then drops support for one of its OSes. Ignore buckwheat's advice.
One of your most perspicacious observations here at LF. : ) Going back to my #19 and the performance hits that older Intel CPU-based systems will incur to fix the CPU flaw in these older systems (under Linux/Windoze/MacOS), there are those within the industry who are saying this benefits AMD. AMD's new generation of CPUs do not have this deep security flaw found in the Intel CPUs. These AMD CPUs, the Ryzen line for desktops/workstations and AMD's big multicore server CPUs do not incur these speed penalties that are being enacted now on all the Intel-based machines that are a few years old. So suddenly those old Windows machines are going to get noticeably slower. People that just got screwed by Intel are going to be looking hard at buying AMD if they feel they have to upgrade their machines due to this security flaw. Why would anyone want to reward a company that just screwed them by buying another of their products? Nobody wants to do that. And it does give AMD a food in the door, just as their powerful new chip designs have matured and come to market in sizable quantities. Intel issued a patch to essentially slow down all machines running Linux/Windoze and close the security hole caused by the flawed CPU design. Now that has apparently been pulled back and the AMD machines sail on running at full speed and the Intel-based machines are stuck with worse performance if they patch this severe security hole. Apple will have to do the same, I think. Apple's Mach micro-kernel would seem to be just as vulnerable from what I'm reading. The most recent Intel CPUs are far less impacted by the performance hit incurred by patching this CPU flaw. This indicates that Intel knew for some time that they were producing extremely flawed CPU designs and chose not to fix that problem and then issued a patch to fix and, therefore, greatly slow down those CPUs. It brings to mind the Apple iPhone scandal of stealthily trying to downgrade their performance to save their battery life (warranted for 3 years for AppleCare customers to retain over 50% of battery life, no matter how many times the battery cycled). So I would expect some class action lawsuits against Intel for this. Among others, thing of all the cloud providers with hundreds of thousands of these CPUs who will, as a direct result of Intel's actions, lose 20%-50% of the performance they paid Intel's premium prices to obtain. This will not end well for Intel in court. Then think of all the damage from class action lawsuits by ordinary consumers. For the first time in a long time, this might be the time to consider buying some AMD stock. They really do have some good new hardware in their latest CPU designs. There are also some of the latest Intel CPUs that are containing fairly powerful AMD Radeon graphics instead of the various Intel embedded 3d graphics capabilities, an implicit admission that AMD has progressed faster and cheaper than Intel has. Intel wouldn't license AMD's Radeon silicon for its own chips if it could economically provide the same performance in-house. I welcome the competition, across the board. The rise of AMD against Intel has always been a net bonanza for the consumer, it seems.
What about processors in phones/tablets? ARM, Qualcomm etc. etc.? Android OS?
Apparently, some of the ARM CPUs suffer a comparable defect, the bigger 64-bit ones. So many of these are customized CPU cores, like Apple's A8/A9/A10 CPUs in its iPhones/iPads, that it is hard to make a comprehensive statement about all the ARM CPU variants. But I suspect the high-end ARM CPUs will suffer some performance penalty as well. Most prominent suspects: Windows 10 tablets with ARM and Google's own Chromebook and its clones (like the ASUS Chromebook). The units most likely to be adversely affected will be the most pricey models produced in recent years for Windows ARM tablets and Chromebook hardware. That'll leave a bad taste in the mouths of buyers and summon a parade of class-action lawyers hungry for a payoff. I think people haven't quite realized just how bad this is for Intel and, to a lesser extent, ARM.
Is the defect actually being criminally exploited by malicious hackers? Or is it just a theoretical flaw that MAYBE they might find out about someday?
It is a known defect. The exact details have not yet been revealed from concern that the criminal element would exploit it widely. You probably realize that it is necessary to fix these things because if some indy researcher can find it, so can talented and sophisticated foreign intel services and industrial espionage outfits who want to steal information. So they must be patched to fix their defect. The exact details of the patch will become known in a month or so. This is pretty typical. After that, machines which remain unpatched will most certainly be vulnerable to attack via this CPU defect. The patch issued (or a new Linux kernel) can be diffed against the most recent version of the kernel being used. The patch itself is a roadmap on where and what to attack. This is why issuing the patch is in itself a danger to all machines which remain unpatched because the criminal element will take advantage of it. We are already seeing, for instance, North Korean hackers trying to hijack computers in the West to use them to mine for cryptocurrency. This is always the problem with closing security holes. When you issue the patches, they can be reverse-engineered with a decompiler so that virus writers know what to attack. And any machine which remains unpatched is fully vulnerable. The effort to patch the problem reveals the vulnerability to all the bad actors wanting to exploit such things for malware networks or botnets or cryptomining on other people's machines. From Engadget yesterday: Intel is grappling with another major security flaw in its processors... and this time, the cost of fixing it may be very steep. Researchers have discovered a design vulnerability in Intel CPUs over the past decade that covers the ability of ordinary programs to determine the content or layout of protected kernel memory (i.e. areas reserved just for the operating system). While the details appear to be under embargo for now, the fix is to completely separate the kernel memory from those ordinary processes. That could carry a significant speed hit, since it requires switching between two memory address spaces every time there's a system call or a hardware interrupt request. How much of a slowdown you see depends on the processor and the task in question. The biggest blows are expected to come to virtualization systems like Amazon's EC2 or Google Compute Engine. The Register claims the performance hits could range from 5 percent to 30 percent, but there's evidence to suggest steeper hits might be possible. Whether or not this affects everyday tasks like gaming or web browsing is another matter, though -- there has yet to be comprehensive testing. As it's a chip-level flaw, the bug affects virtually every operating system, including Linux, macOS and Windows. Software fixes are known to be in the works for at least Linux and Windows, but a true solution that maintains performance will require changes at the CPU level. Notably, though, AMD reports that its processors aren't affected due to key differences in memory handling. Intel has so far declined to comment. However, to call this ill-timed would be an understatement. After years of maintaining a fairly secure performance lead, it's facing stiff competition from AMD's Ryzen and Epyc processors. The last thing it needs is a security hole that not only requires design tweaks, but could slow down virtually all the chips it sells once patches are in place. AMD is "not affected". That's because they were building a better Intel CPU than Intel was. Intel cheated on security to rack up higher benchmarks to help their sales as the alleged performance leader. Now we find out the true price we paid for these Intel CPUs which showed very marginal increases in performance in numbers of cores or CPU clock speed over the last five years. Recall the bad CPU instruction in the old Pentium III series as they pushed for 1GHz and 1.3GHz CPUs. They were lucky that they could recall most of them before they went out the doors at Dell and other companies. But that gave AMD a big chance to take the market for years with its new Athlon CPUs. I would say that AMD has an even greater opportunity now as its Ryzen and server class CPUs are already being produced at market scale around the world and its GPUs have good performance with real strength in the notebook and embedded GPU segments. Once the patch is implemented, don't be surprised if AMD's Ryzen and Epyc CPUs are the performance leaders across the entire market. They're close enough already, easily so in the price range of most consumer devices. And forget just about every CPU benchmark that you've seen in at least the last five years. They're all wrong and they favor cheating-ass Intel as a result.
There are no replies to Comment # 25. End Trace Mode for Comment # 25.
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#13. To: Tooconservative, Liberator (#12)
#15. To: buckeroo (#13)
How would Liberator downgrade when he bought a used computer with Win-doze 10 pre-installed? There is no traceability to a license agreement with Microsoft and therefore no warranty per your dumb ass suggestion.
#17. To: Tooconservative (#15)
He only needs an existing Win7 Pro license to install an old version. Since he is mourning the loss of his old OS, he has a good chance of already owning a Win7 that he could install on this Win10 Hellmachine.
#18. To: buckeroo, Liberator (#17)
With the Win7 PRO that I know of (fully licensed of course) from the original install, it will read the CPU registration and lock to the machine. Win 7 is not transferable to other boxes is what I am suggesting.
#20. To: Tooconservative, buckeroo (#18)
You get stupider by the day.
Yep, and every time I break wind from the
beans the sound it makes is: "Buckeroo."
#21. To: Willie Green, buckeroo, Liberator (#20)
Yep, and every time I break wind from the beans the sound it makes is: "Buckeroo."
#22. To: Tooconservative (#21)
#23. To: Willie Green (#22)
What about processors in phones/tablets? ARM, Qualcomm etc. etc.? Android OS?
#24. To: Tooconservative (#23)
#25. To: Willie Green, Liberator, buckeroo (#24)
(Edited)
Replies to Comment # 25.
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