Windows 10

You don’t need it. The way this works is by passing-through the GPU/PCI-e directly to the VM via IOMMU. Then you run the VM on KVM, which comes with modern linux. So everything, everything, works.

There are various articles going over how to do it. But the only reason is if you prefer the linux desktop environment, because you’re still running windows.

Yea, but when virtualized and separate from your ‘day to day’ operation it would be a Windows 10 environment with only games and nothing else on it, so microsoft could slurp whatever information they wanted as there would be nothing of value for them, the nsa, the russians or any hacker group that gets access to the data.

This list https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/windows-diagnostic-data, wonder if someone made an “infograph” about it.

Was considering just making a second installation and having it restricted to just a few hard-drives, but then I’d still be supporting a regime I would rather see dismantled.

I suppose, but if you possess the sophistication to setup passthrough pci-e to a VM in linux, you probably have the capacity to run shutup10 and turn off the telemetry in the first place.

That is, until they find other ways to embed it into the OS - meanwhile you’re now considered a “Windows 10” user, which means the Windows Storefront can now advertise it has +1 user thus luring innocent game-developers into making their games exclusive to DRM UWP.

If only OS\2 didn’t fold and perhaps there would be competition enough on the market so neither actor would be bold enough to make such anti customer/consumer/free platform steps.

Anyhoo, time to visit catalog.update.microsoft.com and get this months update.

Cheers for suggestions tho :)

Pretty sure they count linux greybeards running it in a VM as windows users too. No avoiding that if you want to play games.

@stusser - If you have a link or two to any of the better articles on this, I wouldn’t mind taking a peek. More for the novelty of knowing how to do it rather than any expectation of improved privacy or anything.

Sure, here’s one guide.

https://level1techs.com/article/ryzen-gpu-passthrough-setup-guide-fedora-26-windows-gaming-linux

Pretty slick… alas, I don’t have a Ryzen nor the double video card setup. I’m still running an old i3570k and GTX960!

Intel CPUs work fine, but I believe you need broadwell or newer to support the IOMMU stuff. Intel castrated their older chips so they wouldn’t be used to virtualize servers.

What a shitshow.

The vast majority of those apps are probably pretty shit and/or just a front-end for the web pages and ads.

The biggest issue here is that, people are adding “apps” to the Windows Store instead of letting it die off.

Microsoft probably doing like Blackberry tried with their failed app store on the awesome OS10, to focus on “Number of apps” instead of “Quality Apps”.

The issue is MS isn’t curating the store at all.

First sign of trouble. Press the power button, the computer doesn’t turn on, but the fan just go full on. Not sure if it is creators update or just the rig, it is kind of new. Turn it off and then back on, everything is normal. Will wait and see if it happens again.

If it does happen again, check for any hard drive activity.

You probably have a short somewhere, a trace on your motherboard is touching your case.

So I was just browsing through the new Windows 10 Security Center (at least, I think it’s new-it’s not something that I’ve seen before) and I see there’s something called “Fresh Start” which seems like basically a clean (almost) re-install of Windows. That seems great as it used to be you couldn’t do that unless your device came with a Windows DVD or some kind of special disk from the manufacturer. Has anyone given it a shot? My wife’s laptop, which is only about 4 or maybe 5 years old and should be able to handle Windows 10 fairly easily has been terribly slow since the original upgrade and I was dreading having to do a clean install as it’s a Japanese language OS. But maybe with Fresh Start it will be pretty straightforward.

I’m not sure if it’s the same thing, but Windows 10 does have an internal almost “nuke it from orbit” technique to “reset your PC” via the recovery options. It works fairly well to resolve many software-related issues. My guess is that they’ve gone to an app approach and call it Fresh Start.

@stusser @Dan_Theman thanks for the advice, will check it out.

Even hyper OCD me has used it successfully

Repeatedly

Funny thing at work today, suddenly got a popup asking me if I wanted to recommend Windows 10 to others. My first notion was, wtf, isn’t this an Enterprise edition of Win10 that is managed, so why the hell are adverts popping up.

After filling out the questionnaire with the answer ‘1: absolutely unlikely’ I digged into the “privacy” settings and discovered that most likely all the clients in the company were set to ‘Full’ telemetry. Enjoy the data NSA/MS :)

Hopefully the company that managed the client-platform has blocked the siphoning of data/spyware in the network, but who knows. Got it set down to ‘security’ level on my client using local group policy editor at least.

Looking at the list of data gathered (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/windows-diagnostic-data) there is surely some useful information in there outside of “making sure that one Excel button gets moved”.