Please wait...
Apparently, you can get third-part applications that restore the
Windows 7 look-and-feel.
Yeah, it's dicey, considering MS rejiggered and repokered the look and feel of the core widget toolkit. There may be some dependencies involved in trying to go back.
[ http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/change-windows-to-classic-view ]
Dunno. I'm not running Windoze 10 and I don't plan to anytime soon. Windoze 7 is sort of tolerable but I really want to move my $work desktop to a VDI so I can put Linux back on my laptop, or maybe switch to a tablet or something.
I saw no reason to upgrade to 8 or 8.1, those were a step backward. But with W10 being offered for free until about 7/29/2016, and MS installing upgrade-nagware on W7, what the hell.
I was pleasantly surprised that the W7 Backup and Restore control panel was added back in, after the insider build I had previewed that still had it missing (as was the case in W8/8.1.) And I now have full UASP support for my H87 motherboard, which is also nice.
Not so nice is the fact that they now use the Notifications applet for essentially advertising purposes - I am getting offered to try Office 365, over and over again.
I actually don't think I care that much about the flat look-and-feel to change to classic view.
Is Windows 10 being offered for free to Windows XP users? Because that is what I duel boot with... or have in my virtual machine... but I have no desire to upgrade unless it is for free.
You will of course need to sign a pledge promising to put all of your stuff on Azure and Office365, and never do business with Apple or Google again.
Hmm... not entirely true. I had a professional version of 7 running, and it upgraded to 10 without having to buy it.
Wed Oct 14 2015 10:13:40 AM EDT from fleeb @ Uncensored
I don't think so.
And your box may already have been hacked.
Meh, for the few times I boot to the Windows side, or start my virtual machine I don't feel overly threatened. No data of importance is kept there.
Heh. They're not upgrading server versions, but W7 Pro is definitely
on the free-upgrade path.
Server is a different story altogether. The same people who lambasted Linux by complaining that it "takes you back to the command line" are moving aggressively towards everything being configured from PowerHell. If you want the GUI you will eventually have to run RSAT on a remote desktop.
Of course, PowerHell is nowhere near as intuitive as a Linux command line.
Even the Windows admins I know say that.
Server is also questionable as to M$'$ motives with regard to Office 365.
They are pretty clear about [A[A[A
not promising support for hybrid environments (on-premises and cloud together) beyond the next version. This seems to imply that they want as many customers as possible fully migrated onto their cloud. Micro$oft has a serious case of Google envy.
well, in this case its rather amazon envy.
From all of those cloud providers you can get a free trial with computing time... except for the most established one: amazon.
Of course. Why sell once what you can sell over and over again forever? That's the dark and dirty side of "Teh Clu0d" (tm). And they still sold you a Windows license!
So ... Windoze 10 and its already-earned reputation for constantly spying on you and sending your keystrokes, browsing habits, microphone and camera data, etc. back to the mothership.
Overblown? Real? Somewhere in between?
There's a third party app to disable all of the spying but it pays for itself by inserting ads into every program you open. Wow.
Others seem to be blacklisting DNS entries, but that probably blocks updates...
Supposedly, you can opt out of that stuff, but also supposedly it limits what Windows 10 can do for you. Heh.
"Windows 10: aka you WILL use Bing and Azure whether you want to or not!
Seig heil!"
You can completely uninstall Cortana - but since it's integrated with search this effectively breaks the desktop search engine.
Open a powershell window as administrator
run
Get-AppxPackage -Name Microsoft.Windows.Cortana | Select PackageFullName
It'll give you the fullname of the cortana package. Mine gives "Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_1.4.8.176_neutral_neutral_cw5n1h2txyewy"
So then remove it with
Remove-AppxPackage Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_1.4.8.176_neutral_neutral_cw5n1h2txyewy
That should be it.