Windows 10 Is Bringing Shitty Ads to File Explorer, Here’s How to Turn Them Off
March 18th, 2017— BEGIN POINTLESS RANT ABOUT HOPELESS SITUATION —
It’s just incredible how grim Windows is getting. Linux is still terrible on the desktop, and Apple has abandoned macOS to embrace their primary role as a mobile phone company. Even people who stuck with Apple through the near collapse in the 1990s (that’s when I ditched Apple) are now throwing in the towel. And now, with Windows 10, you get ads in the file system and you can’t use the latest chips with older versions of Windows if you want to receive updates!
Sure, you can turn the file system ads off for now. But if you want to see where this is going, try killing the Cortana process in the task manager as a so-called “Administrator” and watch what happens. Hint: It just respawns after a couple of seconds. haha Yes, there are ways to actually kill it, or, more accurately, make it appear to be killed, but is this how I want to spend my day? No.
I don’t believe the task manager. I know I’m not root on Windows machines. I just got over it and moved on.
So, never mind the surveillance on Windows 10. Just bake that in from the start. Trying to fix these issues is an exercise in futility, regardless of platform, anyway.
On the usability side, I’ve lost track of how long I’ve spent hacking Windows 10 to resemble and behave like Windows 7. Windows 10 search is often broken with language packs other than U.S. English (Void Tools Everything makes even properly working Windows 10 search seem broken.) I have to use a 3rd party windows manager to get my most used application windows (Firefox and Thunderbird) to retain their exact sizes and positions on the desktop. I recently tried a system image backup from Windows 10 pro to a network location, and it was failing. I’d never seen this before (in close to two decades), although Windows backups to network locations failing represents a huge genre of content in the Windows-Is-Shit universe. I screwed around for 20 minutes and eventually noticed that the Windows Backup service was set to disabled for some damn reason on my machine…
Windows 10 is a big downgrade from Windows 7 (which was a downgrade from Windows 2000, if you ask me). I refused to use Vista or Windows 8 personally, although those were good for PC support business. That said, I see insane issues on Windows 10 client machines that remind me of dealing with Linux desktop environments now.
It’s a shit sandwich all around in the general purpose computing world. It’s a very serious worry, because I see the least capable computer users (most computer users, in other words) fully embracing swipetard devices and operating systems, which are mainly intended to serve as tamper proof vending machines and surveillance platforms. While someone always figures out how to jailbreak phones and tablets, the whole situation is exhausting.
Ok, that’s enough.
— END POINTLESS RANT ABOUT HOPELESS SITUATION —
Via: The Next Web:
At this point in time, it’s safe to say that most copies of Windows 10 are legit, which means Microsoft has already made money off of it. Unfortunately, it looks like the company is thirsting for more, and wants to inject ads into its File Explorer tool.
According to the folks at Thurrott, the ads (starting with promotions for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service) are easing their way into the upcoming Creators Update, which some people are currently testing in beta. There are also similar notifications in the previously released Anniversary Update. Nobody asked for this, and yet, here we are.
They might just be small pop-ups, but that’s how it starts, folks. Microsoft has many other products it might want to start slinging, including Office 365 subscriptions and Skype credits – and who knows whether the company will eventually want to expand to serving up ads from other businesses?
Thankfully, you can turn them off by following these steps:
Launch File Explorer and the click View > Options > Change folder and search options.
In the Folder Options dialog that pops up, select the View tab.
In the Advanced Settings box, scroll down and uncheck the option labeled “Show sync provider notifications.” Hit OK.
Ughh. Your experience is helpful Kevin, I refuse to upgrade to Windows 10 especially on my personal machine until it is absolutely, forcibly necessary.
I’ve been with Windows since 3.1 / Dos days, from my perspective it’s like Microsoft is slowly unlearning how to make usable operating systems, since XP. Microsoft Office’s new(er) menu system is damn near esoteric, I had zero hope for Windows 10 and I’m glad I steered clear.
Ultimately, I think the core crowd of cognizant users/admins will migrate to Linux. The appeal of Windows for me was not having to jump through all of these hoops to have a workable operating system.
If they’re going to force people to modify the OS to this degree, I might as well put my time into an operating system that hasn’t publicly agreed to sell my every click and keystroke to a third party for bonus money.
Microsoft has the business and educational clientele for now, but they’re shooting themselves in the foot (for the fifth time) on this one.
Time to put Ballmer back in?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-8IufkbuD0
I know this doesn’t/can/t help most people due to the volume licensing requirement but Windows 10 LTSB doesn’t have most of the bloat you find in the other version (ie: no Cortana, Edge or “modern” apps”).
@Duras, cling to Windows 7 as long as possible, or until 2020, which is when Microsoft will stop updating it. Even that assumes you’re not running a newer CPU, which would already cause your updates to fail. Unbelievable.
@SW, yep, no access to Win 10 Enterprise edition, but I considered doing the shady process described here:
https://www.howtogeek.com/250503/how-to-upgrade-to-windows-10-enterprise-without-reinstalling-windows/
I decided that it wasn’t worth it, since who knows what MS will subject people—who aren’t running activated copies of Windows—to in the future. I thought that I could maybe switch back to my normal Win 10 Pro if something went wrong, but the whole process just seemed not worth the effort.
Maybe if I’d done it from the start, but I didn’t know about this LTSB trick when I built my system at the end of 2015.
If you get a chance, check out ubuntu. Perhaps it’s just the linux fanboi in me talking, but I find it quite viable as a desktop solution. Especially if you use are already familiar with firefox and thunderbird – they are the default clients.
I have cleansed my machines of Windows 10 long ago and do everything on the last decent version they produced: Windows 7. I agree with Kevin, Windows 10 is cancer.
I still use Linux from time-to-time, especially for recovery jobs on my faltering kit, but for everyday use, Win 7 is my preferred choice. I turned off updates several months ago, though; sick to death of surreptitious efforts to get me to install the Windows 10 trojan horse.
I’ve been dabbling with Ubuntu since 2005. It’s not horrible anymore (and the task bar can be moved to the bottom—only took a decade), but I’ll take my ancient copy of Photoshop CS3 on Winblows over the latest GIMP any day. There’s also nothing on the Linux side that can hold a candle to Premiere Pro. Games. Even Linux fanatics often keep a Winblows partition handy for gaming. (No need to mention wine.)
Then there’s LibreOffice.
It’s not that I have any problem with LibreOffice at all when I’m creating my own documents, it’s that the rest of the world uses MS Office. Hell is other people who use Microsoft Office—which is pretty much everyone besides you and I and the handful of other people who use and like LibreOffice.
I got tired of having to re-create the price lists for solar equipment that my company sends me because Calc botches the job just a bit every time on their MS Excel spreadsheet files.
I tried to convince a small business I do IT work for to use LibreOffice (instead of buying more MS Office licenses). They tried LibreOffice but they were running into the same issues that I was dealing with on the price lists. They were getting Microsoft documents from other people and LibreOffice was about 90% correct at converting them. Not good enough.
If you want to create your own documents and don’t need to share them with people using MS Office, LibreOffice is great. Even documents with basic formatting can look pretty much right on MS Office. Complicated forms created on MS Word on LibreOffice… It’s going to be messed up.
I try to explain the MS Office thing to people in terms of a mind virus, how B Gates is in the schools and how the soup to nuts enterprise deals perpetuate this shit from one decade to the next. It’s like Roddy Piper fighting with his buddy for ten minutes, trying to get him to wear the sun glasses in They Live. And then it devolves into:
“You just have to snap out of it, man! Stop the insanity with the idea that you need Microsoft Office!”
There’s no way to break the cycle because, ultimately, people are dealing with files created by people on MS Office and the average person just can’t be bothered deal with the hassle. They also can’t be bothered to learn how to do equivalent things on LibreOffice that they have known how to do for years on MS Office.
The other option for dealing with Microsoft Office if you want to make Linux your daily driver is to run your Office 365 subscription in a browser, as this article points out:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-use-microsoft-office-linux/
Haven’t tried it personally myself, but I heard about it on the Linux Action Show podcast, so I think it is legit. Maybe that would be good enough for your spreadsheets from the company that Calc chokes on.
I’ll lease software from Microsoft when hell freezes over. I don’t lease anything ever, so, not happening. It’s like this with Premiere Pro now. It’s lease only. I don’t use the new versions. That’s my line in the sand with all this crap. I won’t lease. If Windows goes to a lease only model, that’s very definitely the end for me.
I’m no sort of techie at all, but my opinion is that they just should have stuck with Windows XP and just gave it whatever tweeks it needed to deal with the modern Internet environment. You don’t need any particular technical savvy to appreciate the old sentiment “If it ain’t broke, then don’t freaking fix it!”
@Loveandlight Tens of millions of people continue to use XP, despite Microsoft ending support for it back in 2014. In fact, Windows XP remains the #3 operating system in use today!
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0
Windows 7 will very definitely be the next XP when Microsoft abandons it in 2020. There will be even fewer compelling reasons to upgrade than at the end-not-end of XP. Hardware improvements have flattened out since Windows 7 came out and if people aren’t gaming or using the machines for audio or video production, things like web browsing, email and productivity will continue to work fine on Windows 7.
Take a hint, Microsoft.
My personal recommendation is to not use unsupported versions of Windows because of security reasons, unless the system is airgapped (not used on a network). For example, I have a friend who lets her daughters use a windows XP machine that someone through in the trash. It’s not connected to a network, and the daughters use it to write papers for school and play music.
Speaking of BLOAT, I just checked the size of the Windows folder on both my old XP machine and my Windows 7 Professional machine. XP Windows is about 6Gb and Windows 7P is about 29Gb. What a PIG!!!