Comment by danpalmer
5 days ago
How!? Mine is full of ads, and that's after buying a "Pro" copy of Windows, registry hacks, declining every ToS I can find, rejecting all the "free" trials, etc.
Do you have an enterprise install managed on a Windows domain where your admin has disabled all this stuff by any chance?
Where? I don't see any other than the nagging to update settings after larger updates (couple times a year).
The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.
The start menu shows sponsored articles in it IIRC, although this was something I turned off as soon as I could. It also pushes apps like Candy Crush.
The lock screen has ads literally "dotted" around, again pushing cloud services etc.
I keep being prompted to turn on Copilot, and essentially the only options are "Yes" or "Not yet". Opt-outs aren't respected.
I don't use Edge but the OS keeps advertising Edge, keeps telling me in various places and at various times that Edge is better and that Chrome is dangerous.
These are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head, but it's truly pervasive throughout the whole product. Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.
I made my usb install media with Rufus and I it had some option to remove a bunch of frustrating behavior (this option was on by default). For instance it allowed me to create a local account. That seems to have completely removed advertising you mentioned. I had a lot of it in windows 10. Maybe the person you are replying to used Rufus (which is recommended if you want to make the install media from Linux or Mac) and didn’t realize it made changes.
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> The installer has 3 free trials in it (photos sync, xbox, office 365), and then re-runs that part of the installer periodically.
This is all I see and everything I disabled/uninstalled was done from the Windows settings UI (Windows 11 Pro).
> Even just looking through Settings it's not hard to find upsells.
I guess I see this too? Just a little box saying to get Microsoft 365 or install OneDrive on the home page of the settings UI. There's basically nothing of value there though so it's easily missed.
and despite the fact you can install AND uninstall numerous web browsers, for some reason Edge is (supposedly) built into the OS and core functionality and it can't be removed - and is the default app for countless file types.
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