pedantry
Enough of all this I'm off to drawer a pitcher
66 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2016
missing the one big difference - you need to use a ms account not local account.
yes i know there are hacks round it, but they would never dare to make that restriction on W10 now, hence the need for a new version.
No local account from the get-go.
Yes it is possible.
It is in theory easy to stop and start WU simply by starting and stopping the windows update service. However, as we all know, if you stop it the 'medic' service starts it again for you - very annoying. Thus you have to disable the medic service first. This is done by renaming the .dll file to eg .bak (or whatever you like). However, this .dll is owned by system, so you have to take ownership first and then you can rename it.
Open an elevated command prompt (in c:\windows\system32) and run the following commands (you need do this only once):
copy WaaSMedicSvc.dll WaaSMedicSvc.BAK /y
takeown /f c:\windows\system32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll
cacls c:\windows\system32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll /e /p "Preferred Customer":f
erase c:\windows\system32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll
(here, Preferred Customer is my windows account name - use your own)
You can also create a .cmd file with these 4 lines in and run it as an administrator if you prefer.
That has disabled the medic for good, although you will need to check if a new .dll is ever added if you do updates in future.
Now you can stop and start the windows update service as you wish. I have a couple of .cmd files on the desktop which stop and start the service - I just run the one I want as administrator. These are the 2 command files:
sc config wuauserv start=auto
sc start wuauserv
pause
sc stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled
pause
Have done some experimenting and it seems to work. Microsoft's PSexec with the -s switch allows you to run as a system user, and thus uninstall system applications.
Download psexec.from the Microsoft Sysinternals site and copy psexec.exe into the c:\windows\system32 folder
Now create a .cmd file (eg test.cmd) containing the following line:
rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL appwiz.cpl
and copy test.cmd into the c:\windows\system32 folder
Now open an elevated command prompt, and navigate to c:\windows\system32
Type
psexec -s -i test.cmd
and press 'enter'. Add/remove programs will then open with system level privileges.
I am no expert so correct me is i am wrong but downloading psexec from sysinternals gives you system level priviliges and thus running psexec with control panel parameter will allow you to add/remove even system apps.
I have had success using psexec mmc to run services.msc as a system user and stop system services such as windows update medic.
Yes you can turn off Windows Update (and turn it on again)
1. disable the Medic Service. Either set Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WaaSMedicSvc to '4' or take ownership of the .dll and erase it
2. then you can turn the WU service on and off as you wish
If you have a PC that meets W11 requirements but do NOT want it to automatically update to W11 but want to stay on W10 then the procedure is:
1. turn off Windows Update so that your W10 machine never updates automatically
2. manually download the W10 security etc updates each month or whatever from the Microsoft Update Catalogue and apply them manually.
I have no idea if I will 'like' Windows 11 or not - I expect there will be bits I like and bits I hate.
However, what I **do*** know is that Windows 11 will be the first release since - well I suppose since it was invented - that mandates that you have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use it.
It doesn't take much foresight to see where this is leading...
By far the majority of comments I've seen on Windows 11 are about rounded corners, centralised start menu etc etc
Everyone is looking North whilst a herd of stampeding elephants is coming up from the South
Windows 11 is not and never has been about tweaking the interface. It is about positioning for Windows as a Service
MS could never have forced eg 'local accounts cannot be used'' onto Windows 10 - but Windows 11 you must have a MS account to install and must have aa MS account to 'use certain features'
That is why MS is releasing W11
This doesn't even make sense - by the end of W10 support in 2025 there are still going to be millions (hundreds of millions?) of perfectly good PCs and laptops running W10 without TPM2 that can't be upgraded. Are they going to be left without security patches etc after 2025?
Also, I bet they get rid of mspaint leaving only paint3D - a deal breaker for me!
I knew they would disallow a local account even before the announcement - they have been wanting to do this for a long time.
Wonder if they will stop using the HOSTS file, thus removing one way of stopping ads etc?
One thing I predict is that they will remove the various ways we have of stopping automatic windows update eg by making the update and medic services unstappable.
Can someone update me (genuine question) - if I use Chrome and use Google to search etc etc, then as long as I am not 'signed in' does it matter what Google collects on 'me' because they don't know who I am and the next time I 'clear cookies / browsing history' everything is reset again?
Or am I missing something?
Of course, before I clear cookies they can serve targetted ads based on the cookies and browsing history stored so far, but since I have an ad blocker I don't see ads anyway.
I think a guarantee is related to the spec at the time of sale. So if 2 months down the line the phone won't turn on then you can claim. If an attack vector is found and a security update issued then not. The sales literature etc never said they would be.
Analogy time again - you buy a DAB radio. All goes well until 6 months down the line someone finds a way to inject their own (eg advertising) message into the DAB signal so interrupting your listening. All new radios are thereafter build with a software fix that means this can no longer happen. Should this fix be retrofitted to all existing older DAB radios?
To me there are two different kinds of passwords scenarios
the first is where you are logging on to say your bank. anybody is very unlikely to guess your password because you only had three tries and then you are locked out and have to do a reset so in this scenario the password almost doesn't matter - no one is going to get it in 3 tries
The second scenario is where the person trying to get your password has access to the file containing the encrypted source of passwords or for example a Word document that is encrypted. in this case of course they have as many tries as they want and will typically run a password cracking program using a very fast computer and an even faster GPU.
In this case they will use a dictionary attack and so you should not use words for example 'my head is painted green' is only a 5 character password as it has 5 works
a simple way to choose a random password is to think of an obscure song or poem and use for example the first letters of each word in the first couple of lines of that song or poem as the password. Add a special character at the beginning or end or both if you want to