Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years Despite Windows 10 users clamoring for Microsoft to change course on its avowed termination date for the operating system's support, the IT giant has instead chosen to spread AI far and wide with Copilot – whether you wanted it or not. Copilot is on the way to Windows 10 22H2 Home and Pro users, less than two years before …
::sigh:: operating systems need less clutter, not more crap to get in the user's way.
I suppose it makes sense to port the thing to Windows 10, though - why should all the stubborn holdouts be able to elude the clutches of copilot by, effectively, doing nothing?
Plus, a goodly few of them may not upgrade just so they don't have this crap thrust upon them. Thrust it anyway, and there's one less reason to stay with Windows 10.
It's most unfortunate that micros~1 has been so incapable of producing a clean, usable operating system that they now feel they must add a copilot to help the meatsacks through the day. Shame Nad's Army won't see it that way.
Some repressed memories are rearing their ugly heads at the mere mention of Clippy. What is it that makes artificial cheerfulness (AC) make me as a user feel the need to apply the 230 V kind of AC to various parts of a computer's anatomy that were never intended for it? Let's face it, Eddy the shipboard computer in the HHGTTG was far more annoying than Marvin the paranoid android ever could be.
EDDIE: According to my programming, in the evening leisure periods the crew will like to relax and enjoy pleasant social activities with a wide range of shipboard robots and computers. Man and machine share in the stimulating exchange of -
[Screeching noise]
ZAPHOD: What happened?
EDDIE: Oooo-ahhh-ohhh-ha.
FORD: I just jammed a quick negative load across its logic terminals.
EDDIE: Hey that hurt!
FORD: Huh. Good.
I despise helpers that watch what I am doing. So I disabled it the moment it was installed. Or more accurately I hid it. MS is probably still spying and phoning home. Same as all the other megacorps we allow into our lives.
I remember when Clippy turned up in Word. The whole team spent the next couple of hours discovering how to disable it. That was before the WWW was commonly available and we had no external resources to use. By 10am Clippy was banished. (Dave, it looks like you are trying to kill me... yup)
I've been selected by my employer as a victim test dummy tester for our pilot (their pun, not mine!) program of using Copilot. My first instinct was to see if I could opt-out. But after some reflection, having someone who actually knows how to use their computer explaining how much Copilot slowed them down with nothing useful to show for it would be useful feedback.
I'm really expecting Copilot to be a "controlled flight into terrain"...
Microsoft thinks I'm far more interested in exploring the "neat new features" of Windows, than I actually am.
Guys, it's an operating system, not a video game. It acts (very crudely) as an interface between the apps I need to run and the PC hardware and "rest of the world". I do not want its help, I do not want to explore it. I just want it to be there and do its job reliably.
And another thing...I can understand upgrades. But they should be incremental improvements, not wholesale new installs. It's an operating system, and if you haven't got it right by now, you never will. You have had many, many years. Windows 10 does everything I need it to do and it seems very reliable and quite easy to use. WTF do I *need* Windows 11? And, more importantly, why do I need to PAY for it? What makes Windows 11 better than Windows 10 (in simple words, please)?
Windows has become a tool to allow Microsoft to poke its nose into our lives (the OS equivalent of Google Chrome) Oh for the happy days of Windows 7 when the OS (mainly) did what it was asked and nothing more.
When I noticed I seemed to be spending more time fighting Windows, than using it, I gave up and migrated to Linux Mint. An Apple OS initially appealed (because of greater software choices) before I recognised I would likewise be forced into not infrequent hardware purchases to keep current with Mac OS - so another financial treadmill to avoid.
I decided because of security concerns to give the Linux Wine windows emulator a miss and instead use a locked down Windows 10 VM running within Linux for some local windows specific scanning software, Microsoft Money and Mailstore (to archive/backup my external email)
As regards Windows talking to the mothership I blocked every Microsoft ASN I could find at my home firewall (as I likewise do for Google, Amazon, Facebook, Adobe, Yahoo and Oracle) I do allow access, but only on device specific as of need basis.
My approach does break things - a lot of firms utilise Azure for instance, so web browsing can be intermittent, and it does hi light that Apple seems to avail itself of Cloud competitors storage when hosting iCloud et al …. but everything in life comes at a cost.
More recently my Win 10 VM seems to be talking to the mothership once again, so I have taken the nuclear approach of blocking all outbound connections from the VM except specific AV updates and access to Mailstore.
I feel more in control and I have learned a lot trying to repair what my restrictions break. We aim to loose by the smallest possible margin.
Now where’s my tin foil hat gone ?
May I ask what VM software you're running under Linux? I'm currently doing the opposite - running Zorin in a VM under Windows 10. But my long-term goal is to use Linux as a host thereby completely doing away with Windows. Thanks!
You may indeed - its VMWare Player which is free for personal non commercial use.
See here
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player/workstation-player-evaluation.html
I migrated to Mint about 5 years ago and its been subject to multiple OS updates (all seamless so far) Just as well really as I am no Linux geek!
Its been such a long time I can no longer recall how I installed player, but it seems reliable and stable.
Its been such a long time I can no longer recall how I installed player"
"I migrated to Mint about 5 years ago and its been subject to multiple OS updates (all seamless so far)"
"but it seems reliable and stable."
That is probably about the best, possibly unintentional, reviews one could make :-)
Install and forget is how it should be. No one should have to become an expert on installing software, whether that be VMWare Player or the underlying Linux Mint OS, most especially not because you upgraded one or the other :-)
Many thanks, Recluse. I'm actually using the Windows version of VMware Player for my VMs (started off shelling out for Workstation several years back, before realising that the free Player did all I required).
It's reassuring to hear that the Linux version seems to be of equal quality. Thanks once again!
I thought this line in the article was particularly damning:
“…Microsoft intends to further squeeze further value from its Windows 10 user base…”
Time was when a company would sink or swim on how much value it gave to its customer base, at risk of being outmaneuvered by competitors.
How quaint, I know.
“Oh for the happy days of Windows 7 when the OS (mainly) did what it was asked and nothing more.”
Yup, I hear you. I actually set up about a dozen Windows VMs, each of which to run one particular app, and all of them using the same license key. Once I got GPU passthrough working, yeah let’s get several instances of that set up.
Not only Win10, but also Mac OS, Linux server, and even Solaris, Free BSD, whatever I want!
I admit I do have one Win7 setup (also Ghost Spectre) that I let online because I have it running Steam. Sadly, this absolutely perfect setup I only get to enjoy until Dec 31. Because Steam are foolishly dropping Win7 support on Jan 1.
Grr.
To reduce mothership traffic in windows 7 / 8 /10 /11.
After every windows update make sure that every instance of diagtrack.dll and compattelrunner.exe are removed.
Also disable and/or delete all the telemetry related scheduled tasks ( there about a dozen of them ).
I've got an 10 year old 11.3" i3 laptop I use to read BBC News and The Register while watching the TV in the living room, it was originally Windows 8.1 but upgraded it to 10 when that went out of support. It has become so unusable slow even on those relatively simple websites I was going to chuck it, but I put Linux Mint on it, and now runs at the same speed as it did new, if not faster. It only has 4GB of memory and it usually had a commit of 9.4GB on Windows, under Linux there only a few 100KB in swap - that's the difference not having a tone of shite in the OS makes, and would be far worse with AI shite. That was my last remaining Windows system, and good riddance.
They seem to really not want to move on the hardware requirements. The insistence is beyond any kind of sense. The lack of enthusiasm for Win11 is very marked, almost as if people don't see why they should replace their device to get exactly no benefit. No, your new PC is not significantly better than your 4-year-old-PC.
Which makes one suspect that there is a metric buttload of money heading their way from... where? ... to ensure that we all buy new PCs in October 2025.
Most people don't read El Reg, so they won't be installing Mint. But might a lot move to Apple instead?
I can sympathize. I have a Dell laptop with 32GB memory, UHD monitor and a Core i7. It has a better monitor than the latest generation of Dell Precision laptops.
Unfortunately it is an i7 that is the generation prior to the earliest i7 on the support list.
I suspect spectre and meltdown type of errata are to blame. If you market your OS as a secure OS you cannot let punters deploy it on broken hardware.
It will be interesting to see if the HCL for the next Windows version will shrink or grow again. In the mean time I will try to buy more desktops. A laptop has too many parts that goes in the bin when a single component fails. (I do try to repair most failures though, but replacing a CPU that is soldered onto the motherboard feels a little dodgy)
It's probably not just reluctance to upgrade. More and more people only hop on a PC or Laptop for work now, so they take what's chucked at them by the corporation.
Many small business users I know have gone away from dedicated PC based machines to using web hosted payment and accounting, booking, web & communication software accessed from a fondle-slab or smart phone.
So perhaps MS have given up on trying to bring those mass market prior users with them and just reckon folks have already largely junked the PC or lappy as a means of useful access to the world.
I can't see too many non-techie or non-tied users bothering to upgrade a piece of rarely used kit that just demands endless needy maintenance like some whingeing child.
Nope the money will go towards buying interfaces and gubbins to make the small form units feel like the old PC, without the need to maintain multiple machines and pay ridiculous license fees & even more subs every year.
The old sort of customers are already walking away from the MS game playing before this hits home.
It's only we technobodies who can't yet do without them.... but give it time & there'll be messages from on high that we're to move to a more "modern", "dynamic", "flexible" approach (read less costly in licenses) that relies on remotely accessing virtualised versions of what we now call the PC or Laptop via a cheaper to run mobile interface, with a few shared on-site machines for legacy machine bashing & set-ups.
I’ve had far better experiences running things offline using my GPU than I have relying on Bing Chat Enterprise, even when the questions relate to Microsoft technologies like Exchange Online, asking questions about things like audit log settings and what they mean. This seems like a situation where Microsoft’s value proposition with this tech will get worse over time, as the more people who use it, the harder it will be to provide in a quick, responsive and stable form.
Lots of fear that AI is the doom of humanity, yet we rush to put into everything, trust it to run our lives, seek advice from it...insanity! Try using the atrophying three pound organ inside your skulls to think, learn, remember and organize with! Already have phones people can't pry their heads out of to hold even a trivial conversation. In several countries they have had to put signals for crosswalks, commuter trains and buses on the ground, because people won't, can't or don't look up and were getting hit walking out into the tracks and streets. Social Darwinism at it's best!!
I upgraded to Linux and I only run Windows from within VM now. Furthermore, I don’t expose Microsoft to the internet anymore.
It’s just a setup to run certain legacy software, and absolutely none of it is ever gonna be tampered with, a.k.a. “updated.”
So that’s why I run the Ghost Spectre edition. No antivirus, no updates, no internet, no viruses, and no meddling.
Also, absolutely zero spying.
Been experimenting with Debian and Fedora and just upgraded all my laptops to Fedora 39 (alright, I have too many laptops). Can't be doing with Gnome, so all are KDE Plasma. I haven't found the need to restore my Windows into a VM on Linux yet - after six months. Maybe never will again? :-)
YAY, I'M FREE!!!
Be darned. Just think of the profits!
The main question is how they are going to get away with dumping Windows 10 when its going to me lots of decent, new kit being landfill because of the bollocks TPM requirements.
We can push them all to Linux but they, sadly, won't like it I bet.
I "upgraded" my mother's Windows 7 laptop to Linux when it kept pestering her to upgrade to Windows 8. I put a README file on her desktop explaining where to find things and she prefers it to the old system - and it's still running fine even though the laptop is definitely getting on a bit.
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