The Windows OS Thread - Formerly THE OS for gamers and normies, now sadly ruined by Pajeets

[King Vidiot]

So, is there any reason not to switch over to Windows 10 IoT LTSC? Like, is there some important feature that it doesn't have?

Also, would I have to reformat my drive, or can I just "update" my current version of Windows to it?

The only common feature Windows 10 LTSC doesn't have is the scheduler for 12th generation or newer Intel CPUs. The updated scheduler is only available for Windows 11.

I haven't tried it myself, but according to this post, there are ways to switch to LTSC without reinstalling:

I just came here to demistify the idea that you're locked into either the consumer Windows or the LTS Windows. This is incorrect. If you feed it the ISO of what you want to jump to and give it the correct key, it will accept it, and you can do an in-place upgrade, keeping all your stuff.

A while back, on bare metal, I jumped from Win10 20H2 to Win10 21H2 LTSC. And if for some reason I regretted this and absolutely needed Win10 22H2 I could just feed it that ISO and again give it the key.
I just tested these scenarios in virtual machines to confirm it's still the case. There is complete fluidity from one to the other.

This is true for Windows 10, and I'm going to assume 11 won't/didn't change this.

This will likely mean letting go of your genuine activation (if you had one to begin with), but...do you actually care about?

 

[Miller]

-For screenshots I use ShareX which is much more robust than the little snap tool that comes with Windows. It can do screenshots with more on-the-fly edit options, it can record your screen, it can edit images, combine images, read QR codes, make QR codes, upload files to specific file hosts and so on.

I use either Windows key + Print Screen or a macro tied to the screenshot function of AMD ReLive.

 

[Banana Hammock]

https://digitalmarketreports.com/news/25091/microsoft-recall-feature-on-windows-11-not-removable-after-all/

Boy, I can't wait for Windows 10 support to end next year.

 

[Slav Power]

This is a perfect example of Microsoft's marketing team being the real issue. Remember, they've spent millions on the CoPilot+ branding, with a shitton of ARM laptops with that dedicated CoPilot button and CoPilot box labels. They were truly convinced it would be a success, that Recall was a sound idea because it has the letter A and the letter I somewhere in there and that means money. People obviously hated the idea but they can't back out now, gotta force it down everyone's throats.

The engineering team on the other hand? They wanted to make it removable. The menu where they've put the option to uninstall it is that old Vista era single tree view one, the one that's buried under 10/11's UI. 0.1% of Windows users would bother with it. And those optional functions, when they're gone, they're gone. You don't want Hyper-V? It's gone, it won't secretly hog your VMX instructions. This obviously clashed with the marketing team's plans despite it being so buried in the OS it wouldn't affect their bottom line, and right now they're in the reigns of the project because money talks, so the moment the story about Recall being uninstallable went around they came out with this "bug" excuse in hopes they'll still recoup the millions wasted on CoPilot+ branding if they just force people to use it. But it's the marketing team that forced the engineering team's hand on this one, otherwise there wouldn't be any talks of the optional features menu in the first place.

Now, the optimistic scenario is this. The initial Recall implementation was primitive as shit, everything sat unencrypted in AppDataLocal. Now we see MS engineering team implemented it with the optional feature system in mind. Therefore I'm expecting that the final implementation of Recall will be easily guttable and won't be rooted into the core OS. The marketing team wants you to believe that, but it's the engineering team implementing it into NT is what really matters by the end of the day. And with NT there's always a way, and it seems that MS' engineering team will give us that way by not giving enough of a shit about what the marketing team says and not implementing Recall super tightly into the OS, just another slightly more cumbersome program to uninstall like Edge. Difficult, but not impossible to nuke from the system.

 

[Kosher Dill]

The only common feature Windows 10 LTSC doesn't have is the scheduler for 12th generation or newer Intel CPUs.

Another one worth notice is WiFi 6 (and up), and the 6GHz frequency band.
There doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this other than that there's only one chipset for it, from Intel, and the only Windows drivers won't work on anything but Win11.

 

[Slav Power]

the scheduler for 12th generation or newer Intel CPUs

And that scheduler only matters if you have E-cores enabled, or have E-cores at all. My i5-12400 only has P-cores so the W10 scheduler treats it like a traditional 6 core 12 thread CPU that it is and it doesn't cause any issues.

 

[anustart76]

Search inside the file explorer is also a piece of shit on W11. At my job it can't find anything even when you have the file open in another window. Now imagine trying to find a file inside one of the backups of 20 years worth of files. If it wasn't for the folders and files that thankfully follow a naming convention, we would be fucked trying to find anything manually.

PowerToys Run: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/
EverythingPowerToys: https://github.com/lin-ycv/EverythingPowerToys

Install the 2 programs and the plugin, and you'll be able to do a Mac Spotlight-like search powered by Everything search, which is much better than the default Windows garbage search

 

[Squishie PP]

Search inside the file explorer is also a piece of shit on W11. At my job it can't find anything even when you have the file open in another window. Now imagine trying to find a file inside one of the backups of 20 years worth of files. If it wasn't for the folders and files that thankfully follow a naming convention, we would be fucked trying to find anything manually.

I would imagine that in the not-so-distant future, conventional search functions will be completely deprecated or outright removed in favor of Windows Recall.

 

[Pepe Cortisona]

PowerToys Run: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/
EverythingPowerToys: https://github.com/lin-ycv/EverythingPowerToys

Install the 2 programs and the plugin, and you'll be able to do a Mac Spotlight-like search powered by Everything search, which is much better than the default Windows garbage search

I would love to do that, but it's the computer at my job, and IT have them very restricted. At home, the only windows pc that I have left still runs Windows 7, but that's more on me because I only use it as a glorified typewriter (that old ThinkPad keyboard is so good), but thanks for trying to help a brother out.

 

[MAAAD]

So how do I remove the "Activate Windows" watermark anyway? Tried looking it up and the only (unreliable) method that worked for me is typing "slmgr /renew" in PowerShell every time before turning the PC off, the sign re-appears whenever you forget to do that or enter Hybernation mode.

>inb4 buy a loicense
No.

 

[anustart76]

So how do I remove the "Activate Windows" watermark anyway? Tried looking it up and the only (unreliable) method that worked for me is typing "slmgr /renew" in PowerShell every time before turning the PC off, the sign re-appears whenever you forget to do that or enter Hybernation mode.

>inb4 buy a loicense
No.

Just use the massgrave script to get it activated: https://massgrave.dev/

 

[Joe Swanson]

So how do I remove the "Activate Windows" watermark anyway? Tried looking it up and the only (unreliable) method that worked for me is typing "slmgr /renew" in PowerShell every time before turning the PC off, the sign re-appears whenever you forget to do that or enter Hybernation mode.

>inb4 buy a loicense
No.

Microsoft activation scripts, just search it and use the first github link

 

[Overly Serious]

The initial Recall implementation was primitive as shit, everything sat unencrypted in AppDataLocal.

I'm not sure I see that, tbh. It's only unencrypted if your actual drive is unencrypted. Even on the non-Pro versions without Bitlocker the drive is still encrypted by default. If you deliberately used an unencrypted drive then yes, the Recall store is also unencrypted but then so is your whole system and other important data. If it is encrypted then yes, when the OS is running it is unlocked and accessible, but then it's something anyone with user access is supposed to be able to access, otherwise it has no point.

It doesn't really matter if it uses AppDataLocal or some other directory - someone would find it whereever they put it and it would be classic Security Through Obscurity. Putting it in there is the consistent approach to storing program data.

Most of the security criticism of Recall seemed to come down to saying "if you have privileges for that particular user on the OS, you can access the data", to which I kind of say 'yes - how else do you want it to work?'

 

[Slav Power]

If it is encrypted then yes, when the OS is running it is unlocked and accessible

That's the issue, the way Windows NT, NTFS and Bitlocker works means that this implementation is horrendously insecure and is only secure when you're not running your computer. When you do, Bitlocker unencrypts everything, and then every unprivileged program can access the now unencrypted Recall data, so it would be trivial to pull that data out, it's raw JPEG's and an unencrypted SQLite database in AppDataLocal, no need for admin elevation to even pull it out. UWP apps have more security than that.

It should've been realized in a way where all the data Recall stores is encrypted even when the entire drive is unencrypted, akin to VeraCrypt containers or KeePass databases, and have it done so that only the OS can read and write that data. So even if your drive is unencrypted or got unencrypted by BitLocker, the data stored in AppDataLocal is still under lock and key and it's much harder for a bad actor to pull it out. Ideally you also make it so that you cannot touch that data without admin privileges despite being in AppDataLocal and that alone is an extra layer of security.

 

[RollingRock2]

Windows 11 rant. So Windows 11 has a fake right click on file explorer where you need to hit "show more options" to open the real right click that has "Cut copy delete properties" etc. options. Well there is more like that.

I had a problem where a program was broken. So I thought I would uninstall it and reinstall, not a problem. I'll just uninstall the program. I'm just an ordinary windows user. So I hit windows and type "remove program" and hit enter. It opens the program manager (so it seems). But I can't uninstall it. I click uninstall and it just doesn't work. Huh. I think "I must need to run the program manager as an administrator." So I right click the icon and do that.

It STILL can't uninstall the broken program. It doesn't have any error message it seems like it does it but it just doesn't work.
Now this program, If you tried to install it with a version already installed it would try to repair the install instead of reinstalling. But it couldn't be repaired. So I NEEDED to remove this installation first. Which shouldn't be a problem to remove a program off my own computer.

OK well I guess I'll just delete the program's folder, then all the computer has to do is remove it from the installed programs list, right? So I go back to the program manager (so it seems) to do that and... the program still doesn't go away. There is still no error message it just doesn't work when you click it.

After some confusion and frustration I realized that Windows 11 has a FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER like the fake right click.
If you hit windows and type uninstall program it opens the FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER that apparently doesn't have the real permissions.
If you open control panel and then click uninstall a program it opens the real program manager.
Pic rel if you find this unbelievable, the fake program manager is in the background the real one is in the foreground. The fake one has big icons and calls everything apps.

 

[AStupidMonkey]

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

 

[the rat]

Windows 11 rant. So Windows 11 has a fake right click on file explorer where you need to hit "show more options" to open the real right click that has "Cut copy delete properties" etc. options. Well there is more like that.

I had a problem where a program was broken. So I thought I would uninstall it and reinstall, not a problem. I'll just uninstall the program. I'm just an ordinary windows user. So I hit windows and type "remove program" and hit enter. It opens the program manager (so it seems). But I can't uninstall it. I click uninstall and it just doesn't work. Huh. I think "I must need to run the program manager as an administrator." So I right click the icon and do that.

It STILL can't uninstall the broken program. It doesn't have any error message it seems like it does it but it just doesn't work.
Now this program, If you tried to install it with a version already installed it would try to repair the install instead of reinstalling. But it couldn't be repaired. So I NEEDED to remove this installation first. Which shouldn't be a problem to remove a program off my own computer.

OK well I guess I'll just delete the program's folder, then all the computer has to do is remove it from the installed programs list, right? So I go back to the program manager (so it seems) to do that and... the program still doesn't go away. There is still no error message it just doesn't work when you click it.

After some confusion and frustration I realized that Windows 11 has a FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER like the fake right click.
If you hit windows and type uninstall program it opens the FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER that apparently doesn't have the real permissions.
If you open control panel and then click uninstall a program it opens the real program manager.
Pic rel if you find this unbelievable, the fake program manager is in the background the real one is in the foreground. The fake one has big icons and calls everything apps.
View attachment 6392691

Only on Windows 11.

 

[DavidS877]

Only on Windows 11.

I'm pretty sure the split add/remove programs and apps are in 10 as well. Although in 10 I seem to recall things just don't show up in the other one so you wonder how the heck to remove something that's only a Program when you use the 'other' view.

 

[the rat]

I'm pretty sure the split add/remove programs and apps are in 10 as well. Although in 10 I seem to recall things just don't show up in the other one so you wonder how the heck to remove something that's only a Program when you use the 'other' view.

Just went through my own list of programs installed and they seem to all be in both the UWP program and control panel program. I've never personally seen the behaviour you're talking about in Windows 10 unless A: you mean stuff like UWP programs not showing up in the control panel which would make sense or B: Microsoft broke something in a recent update. I use Windows 10 2021 LTSC N (Build 21H2, 19044.4780) so the second possibility wouldn't surprise me.

Not sure about the most recent builds of regular Windows 10 Pro but I've never experienced anything in the UWP settings program to just not work.

 

[Squishie PP]

Most of the security criticism of Recall seemed to come down to saying "if you have privileges for that particular user on the OS, you can access the data", to which I kind of say 'yes - how else do you want it to work?'

Ideally, it would be completely removable. As it stands now, keeping recall installed at all is going to pose a risk because all an attacker (or Microsoft themselves) would have to do is silently enable it and start exfiltrating data.

After some confusion and frustration I realized that Windows 11 has a FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER like the fake right click.
If you hit windows and type uninstall program it opens the FAKE PROGRAM MANAGER that apparently doesn't have the real permissions.
If you open control panel and then click uninstall a program it opens the real program manager.
Pic rel if you find this unbelievable, the fake program manager is in the background the real one is in the foreground. The fake one has big icons and calls everything apps.
View attachment 6392691

Holy shit, this is un-fucking-real. I am so glad I stopped using CurryOS years ago. If it is this bad now, it will only get worse as Microsoft tries to twist their OS into an unrecognizable state in order to appeal to normalniggers.