Just some tidbits here that might be of interest to some. I haven't
used Windows 10 much, but decided to make a new computer
recently, as the Win7 box I use mainly for streaming Netflix is now
15 years old... and that gave me an excuse to make a new one. :)

Some findings that I didn't know:

* As long as you keep a computer unplugged from the Internet during
install, there's no requirement to get a Microsoft account.

(I also installed Linux on a dual boot, using BootIt, expecting
the worst with Win10, but Win10 may actually be usable.)

* The licenses sold online for about $20 are legit, apparently
bought wholesale from OEMs and resold. But don't try to
activate a system if you've been customizing it. Activate it
before you remove the crap.

* Simplewall seems to be a perfect firewall. I've got it allowing
Firefox, TBird and Acrylic DNS proxy through. It's warned me about
numerous other things trying to get through. A test with
NetworkTrafficView from Nirsoft seems to confirm that nothing
but the 3 allowed is getting through, aside from some local
chatter to the router.

* On my Win10 laptop that I bought awhile back I wanted to
replace the login background picture. It was grayed out. After
much unsuccessful screwing around in the Registry, I removed the
restrictions from the ProgramData subfolders where those images are
kept. It turned out that I wasn't restricted. I only had 1 image! Though
I see a red message in some settings windows saying that my
organization controls some of the settings. ??

* The most interesting find: I wanted to change the display resolution
on my Asus Win10 laptop. Things are too small. But Windows showed no
display applet at all. Just basic settings in "personalization", with the
pixel specs grayed out at 1920x1080. Weird. I went to Asus. They
had no driver, but did have an Intel display app... But it was actually
some kind of Metro cr-app at the Windows Store. It would require getting
an account!

After some research, figuring out exactly what CPU I had and so on,
I found a driver at intel.com that looked like it should work. Sure enough,
it worked fine and I was able to switch the display to 1600x900. They
also have a silly skin-on-the-desktop app for adjusting brightness,
contrast, etc. Maybe that's the Metro app. I don't know. I've never
actually seen a Metro app before.

So I bought an Asus laptop with no way to adjust display, with a
device manager that said it was a generic Microsoft display. And it
turns out that both Asus and Intel are cooperating with Microsoft,
screwing their own customers, in order to coerce people in various
small ways to sign up for a Microsoft account.

Maddening sleaze. Yet it was a pleasant surprise that all these
problems had workarounds. I'm almost tempted to switch out my
main box for Win10. Though there are probably 200 other small issues
to be dealt with, like removing restrictions on files, adding Run as
Admin to VBS right-click, tricking Visual Studio 6 into installing...
Those are just a few issues I know about starting out.

If anyone has done extensive research on stopping all MS calling
home then I'd be interested to hear. Have I succeeded with
Simplewall?

On 2/2/2024 8:39 AM, Newyana2 wrote:
> Just some tidbits here that might be of interest to some. I haven't
> used Windows 10 much, but decided to make a new computer
> recently, as the Win7 box I use mainly for streaming Netflix is now
> 15 years old... and that gave me an excuse to make a new one. :)
>
> Some findings that I didn't know:
>
> * As long as you keep a computer unplugged from the Internet during
> install, there's no requirement to get a Microsoft account.
>
> (I also installed Linux on a dual boot, using BootIt, expecting
> the worst with Win10, but Win10 may actually be usable.)
>
> * The licenses sold online for about $20 are legit, apparently
> bought wholesale from OEMs and resold. But don't try to
> activate a system if you've been customizing it. Activate it
> before you remove the crap.
>
> * Simplewall seems to be a perfect firewall. I've got it allowing
> Firefox, TBird and Acrylic DNS proxy through. It's warned me about
> numerous other things trying to get through. A test with
> NetworkTrafficView from Nirsoft seems to confirm that nothing
> but the 3 allowed is getting through, aside from some local
> chatter to the router.
>
> * On my Win10 laptop that I bought awhile back I wanted to
> replace the login background picture. It was grayed out. After
> much unsuccessful screwing around in the Registry, I removed the
> restrictions from the ProgramData subfolders where those images are
> kept. It turned out that I wasn't restricted. I only had 1 image! Though
> I see a red message in some settings windows saying that my
> organization controls some of the settings. ??
>
> * The most interesting find: I wanted to change the display resolution
> on my Asus Win10 laptop. Things are too small. But Windows showed no
> display applet at all. Just basic settings in "personalization", with the
> pixel specs grayed out at 1920x1080. Weird. I went to Asus. They
> had no driver, but did have an Intel display app... But it was actually
> some kind of Metro cr-app at the Windows Store. It would require getting
> an account!
>
> After some research, figuring out exactly what CPU I had and so on,
> I found a driver at intel.com that looked like it should work. Sure enough,
> it worked fine and I was able to switch the display to 1600x900. They
> also have a silly skin-on-the-desktop app for adjusting brightness,
> contrast, etc. Maybe that's the Metro app. I don't know. I've never
> actually seen a Metro app before.
>
> So I bought an Asus laptop with no way to adjust display, with a
> device manager that said it was a generic Microsoft display. And it
> turns out that both Asus and Intel are cooperating with Microsoft,
> screwing their own customers, in order to coerce people in various
> small ways to sign up for a Microsoft account.
>
> Maddening sleaze. Yet it was a pleasant surprise that all these
> problems had workarounds. I'm almost tempted to switch out my
> main box for Win10. Though there are probably 200 other small issues
> to be dealt with, like removing restrictions on files, adding Run as
> Admin to VBS right-click, tricking Visual Studio 6 into installing...
> Those are just a few issues I know about starting out.
>
> If anyone has done extensive research on stopping all MS calling
> home then I'd be interested to hear. Have I succeeded with
> Simplewall?

Right-click the desktop gives "Display Settings" in the context menu.
It's possible even Linux does this.

The OS starts off with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter,
which is really a VESA frame buffer driver lacking hardware acceleration.

After a couple reboots, Windows is populating drivers, and it
should populate the proper video driver. The NVidia driver is
slow to show up, because it's a 500MB download for a "jumbo driver",
instead of a slim 20MB thing per card.

Changing the display resolution to non-native, requires *something*
to handle the differences. On a separate LCD display, a circuit inside
the display converts 1440x900 to the native 1920x1080 the display
might have. This can cause jagged text. On a laptop, the panel
is likely declared as being non-multisync, so the OS uses a different
method to handle requests. On a laptop, the BIOS reports "something"
to the OS, and if you fit the wrong replacement panel, hilarity results.

You can leave the Display settings at Native, and use control-scroll
to set the desktop "Scale" factor. No, control-0 does not return the desktop
to nominal scale. You have to use your eagle eye when using the
scroll wheel, to put it back where you left it. Control-0 was something
Adobe invented long ago. Occasionally, you might be using control-scroll
within GIMP, and the input "leaks out" and your desktop is at the wrong scale.

In Settings : System : Display, you will find

Scale and layout

100% (Recommended) <=== fiddle this one to make "screen big enough"

Display Resolution

1920 x 1080 (Recommended) <=== leave res at native for best result

It's really too complicated for me, to tell you which
controls scale which items. Some graphical elements are
proportional to control-scroll times ScaleAndLayout.
Metro Apps scale by ScaleAndLayout.

Windows 10 Notepad, control-minus and control-plus scale the text,
although you might change a preference setting to get bigger text.
Control-scroll isn't working for me there. Windows 11 Notepad,
plus, minus, and scroll-wheel all work, with the control key,
to scale Notepad text. One of those is non-Metro, one is Metro.

Windows has three ways of rendering fonts on screen. ClearType,
some-GrayScale-thing, and ordinary bitmap scaling. And it can
mix all three elements in one screenshot. When you change a scale
setting, I expect all three will be affected, with some
looking more ghastly than others.

Welcome, to the developers armpit.

Just imagine what Windows 12 will be like.

*******

As far as network behavior goes, use your imagination :-)

If your job depends on scraping customer info, then how
will you design things ?

Network tracing can be done with Wireshark.

Network tracing can be done with ETW (Procmon parses that ETW type now).
When I looked at a trace one day, all the packets in Procmon were
"going to Akamai" and someone did not want me to know where they
were going. You use Akamai CDN to obfuscate your footprint. Since I
was not web surfing at the time (browser not running), you can kinda
guess who is doing that. It's malware of course. The worst kind of malware :-)

Paul

"Paul" <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote

| Right-click the desktop gives "Display Settings" in the context menu.
| It's possible even Linux does this.
| | The OS starts off with Microsoft Basic Display Adapter,
| which is really a VESA frame buffer driver lacking hardware acceleration.
|

That's not what I meant. The driver was installed at the factory.
But it shows up as generic. Asus had no driver to offer. Windows
showed no driver. This is my laptop I'm talking about in this case.
I bought it a year or two ago.

It's not the one I built. I found the Intel driver for the display, but
they didn't want me to find that and Asus wasn't offering it. They
only offered a Metro app from the Windows Store to get display
settings, which I would have had to have signed up for. Asus offered
drivers for audio, chipset, etc, but not for display.

| In Settings : System : Display, you will find
| | Scale and layout
| | 100% (Recommended) <=== fiddle this one to make "screen big enough"
|

Yes. That's junk. It just blows everything up. Worse, some
things don't get blown up, so some text goes fuzzy, some labels
overrun, etc. I discovered that writing VB6 software. I had to
leave extra space on all text labels because Windows would zoom
the text and not the window or label.

| Display Resolution
| | 1920 x 1080 (Recommended) <=== leave res at native for best result
| Yes. But 1600x900 looks very good. I know that some resolutions
won't look as good, but this does in this case. And 1920x1080 on
a 17" screen is just too small for me.

|
| Network tracing can be done with Wireshark.
| I tried that, but it doesn't seem to have an option to ID
processes. Nirsoft's tool is simpler and seems to work well.

| Network tracing can be done with ETW (Procmon parses that ETW type now).
| When I looked at a trace one day, all the packets in Procmon were
| "going to Akamai" and someone did not want me to know where they
| were going. You use Akamai CDN to obfuscate your footprint. Since I
| was not web surfing at the time (browser not running), you can kinda
| guess who is doing that. It's malware of course. The worst kind of malware
:-)
|

Akamai is hosting about 30% of the Web, last I heard. Even
MS use them for load balancing. Unfortunately, the standard
CDN connection seems to be some kind of passthrough. The
connection gets rooted to Akamai but it can't be stopped by
HOSTS because the browser only see the destination URL.
And Alamai ammounced many years ago that they intended
to sell personal data. So that's a big privacy hole that most
people are not aware of.

I'm just trying to deal with things I can manage -- specifically
to make sure that nothing from MS is getting through the firewall.
And nothing else I didn't OK, for that matter. It seems that
almost every program these days tries to call home without asking.
During my test I saw only Firefox and DNS calls. So I'm encouraged
by that. Though I've shut down Windows Update, telemetry and
various options provided by Privacy Win10. So there shouldn't
be much of anything trying to go out.

On 2/2/24 03:05 PM, Newyana2 wrote:
> | Display Resolution
> |
> | 1920 x 1080 (Recommended) <=== leave res at native for best result
> |
> Yes. But 1600x900 looks very good. I know that some resolutions
> won't look as good, but this does in this case. And 1920x1080 on
> a 17" screen is just too small for me.
My last laptop (15 yrs ago) had 1366x768. I never thought about larger res until I got a new laptop
at 1920x1080. I liked the 1366x768, it was great reading.
--
Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon
Al

On 2/2/2024 7:10 PM, Big Al wrote:
> On 2/2/24 03:05 PM, Newyana2 wrote:
>> |   Display Resolution
>> |
>> |     1920 x 1080 (Recommended)  <=== leave res at native for best result
>> |
>>     Yes. But 1600x900 looks very good. I know that some resolutions
>> won't look as good, but this does in this case. And 1920x1080 on
>> a 17" screen is just too small for me.
> My last laptop (15 yrs ago) had 1366x768.  I never thought about larger res until
> I got a new laptop at 1920x1080.   I liked the 1366x768, it was great reading.

I think there are still devices that get 1366x768 panels.
Time has not flushed that option away.

What's changed, is the equipment (scaler) can handle

1368x768
1366x768
1360x768

The first and third, are divisible by x8 . Vertical is divisible
by x2 (so you could do Interleaved or Progressive, 60i or 60p ).

Paul

"Big Al" <alan@invalid.com> wrote

| My last laptop (15 yrs ago) had 1366x768. I never thought about larger
res until I got a new laptop
| at 1920x1080. I liked the 1366x768, it was great reading.

I've got 1920x1080 on my main display, a 27" desktop monitor.
I still wear reading glasses, but it works well. I think there's only
one higher setting avaliable. The laptop is 17", so 1920 looks crisp,
but it's tiny.

It's odd, thinking about it. After all
these years, display drivers should be able to come up with a
set of recommended settings for any monitor, rather than only
one setting.

Newyana2 wrote:

> It's odd, thinking about it. After all
> these years, display drivers should be able to come up with a
> set of recommended settings for any monitor, rather than only
> one setting.

You rarely (never?) want to use a lower resolution that the monitor's
native, but yes you might want to use scaling so text/icons aren't too
small, but that way you're using more pixels per character, so still crisp.