This topic is how to get around annoying features in windows. Anything is acceptable except bypassing copyright protections on whatever. Beware downloading anything from these articles. Neither I or OTG assumes any responsibility for your unsafe computer habits.
Windows 10
It irked me to be denied access to a folder on MY COMPUTER. And with Microsoft Xbox Gamepass on PC now some games have settings that can only be accessed through .ini changes or settings executables. Or I might want to add a 3rd party post-processing program like Reshade, SweetFX or EnB or I might want to add a few mods.
Pretty self-evident. I don’t trust a freshly installed Win 10 but directX 12 is worth it in my opinion.
This is for Vista and up, and one of those things that Windows does that are supposed to help you, but are incredibly annoying to those of us who don’t want Windows to F around with out folder settings.
In short, this sets ALL folders to “General Items” by default, and disallows Windows from automagically changing them.
Only half joking, but for the few things where I actually do “need” Windows, I run it as a virtual machine under LInux, which has become trivially easy in modern releases. I never, ever use Windows email, default browsers, nor any browsers w/o additional privacy and security, nor most “convenience” tools that I can get elsewhere: Essentially, I run a handful of games on Windows that don’t run well under Wine. Far as I can tell, Microsoft acts as though they have rights to every keystroke and mouse gesture and every byte of data coming and going from my machine, and they make “opt out” as difficult as possible, and then undo random “opt out” choices every other update. So the only reasonable answer is to opt out of sharing personal information with Windows. I don’t think Microsoft is “evil”, but I don’t like overly nosy neighbors, so same goes for Google, Facebook, Terry (neighbor, couple houses down the street)…
Now, if Linux is too daunting (and in some ways, it still is), then plan B could be running Linux as a VM under Windows – that’s trivially easy, too! Think of it as a VPM (Virtual Private Machine).
