I don't like W10, but acquiesced to using it like most everybody else. It's invasive, intrusive and other nasties and tries to do all kinds of things I don't want nor care about. After I made the changes below, it now works more like I want it to... like W7. That is, just run my software and be reliable.
1. Disabled virtually everything W10 would let me and then used O&O App Buster to disable everything on their list. Of course that meant that certain things wouldn't run. Like displaying photos, playing music, opening PDF, etc. When those "failures" occurred, Windows would come up with a box and ask, "which program do you want to use to run your photo, music, whatever"?. Then you go back and "enable" that function. For example, enabling "photos" function when your picture wouldn't display. All in all, I've probably got a half-dozen things enabled that I use. The rest are turned off.... maybe 30 items.
2. Used Revo Uninstaller to remove Cortana, One Drive, Brave, and a couple of other W10 things... can't recall all of what I removed as it's been quite a while... but basically everything "Microsoft" or "Windows" I thought I could do without.
3. Disabled Edge. I really dislike it.
4. Disabled "Create Restore Point" function. I had this fail 8-10 times within a year and kept having to reinstall Windows and redo settings. I finally just updated W10 to get it working again and then disabled it.
5. Used Group Policy Editor to disable Windows Automatic Updates.
6. Set delay times in Windows Update so MSFT has time to catch and fix problems before they get put onto my machine.
That's it, off the top of my head. If I think of other, I'll add later.
FWIW...
1. Disabled virtually everything W10 would let me and then used O&O App Buster to disable everything on their list. Of course that meant that certain things wouldn't run. Like displaying photos, playing music, opening PDF, etc. When those "failures" occurred, Windows would come up with a box and ask, "which program do you want to use to run your photo, music, whatever"?. Then you go back and "enable" that function. For example, enabling "photos" function when your picture wouldn't display. All in all, I've probably got a half-dozen things enabled that I use. The rest are turned off.... maybe 30 items.
2. Used Revo Uninstaller to remove Cortana, One Drive, Brave, and a couple of other W10 things... can't recall all of what I removed as it's been quite a while... but basically everything "Microsoft" or "Windows" I thought I could do without.
3. Disabled Edge. I really dislike it.
4. Disabled "Create Restore Point" function. I had this fail 8-10 times within a year and kept having to reinstall Windows and redo settings. I finally just updated W10 to get it working again and then disabled it.
5. Used Group Policy Editor to disable Windows Automatic Updates.
6. Set delay times in Windows Update so MSFT has time to catch and fix problems before they get put onto my machine.
That's it, off the top of my head. If I think of other, I'll add later.
FWIW...
