I’ll definitely give that a try. If it keeps Jscheduler and my antivirus’s ads from interrupting my work, I’ll be extremely grateful to someone at Microsoft. (Already grateful to you for letting me know about the feature.)
Java update just do what you need to without installing additional software. AVG, no you may not install your malware in my browsers.
Same here. On Win10 Pro. Not only does it not feel “infested”, I see no ads.
Their market power certainly doesn’t enhance their desire to pretend to care; but(at least in my experience as a Windows-shop focused IT minion of some years), feeling threatened has actually caused them to fuck it up more blatantly than feeling powerful ever did.
Old school Microsoft, “Developers, Developers, Developers!”, may have charged too much and been dangerously interested in making you dependent on IE6 and activeX, or their freaky extensions to Java; but they also knew where their bread was buttered: Enterprise users might not like the licensing fees; but Microsoft really cared about backward compatibility and roadmap predictability, because enterprise users really cared about that; and while they wanted you to keep all your development on their platforms, they cared a lot about making that as easy as possible. Patch notes and MSDN documentation were often pretty good, just breaking stuff for being ‘legacy’ was rare and fairly serious, and so on.
Under the influence of iPad envy, by contrast, we got things like Windows 8(Hey guys, people basically like Windows 7, so let’s totally ruin the shell!), Windows RT(because who buys Windows in order to run the applications they care about, amirite?) and the various hamfisted attempts to shove WinRT(yes, that’s not the same as Windows RT, though Windows RT uses it; brilliant branding there guys) down people’s throats before they’d even managed to dogfood it on their own applications; and the like.
Now Nadella’s “Services, Services, Cloud, Services!!” stuff appears to be moving toward deprecating old stuff as fast as possible, basically undocumented gigantic rollup patches; absolutely insane episodes like the ‘let’s silently modify the behavior of the directshow/Windows Media Foundation image capture architecture so that Windows Hello can let you log in with your face’ escapade(I can dig up some links, that was quite the fiasco, not in a good position to do so now); and an attempt to tie everything to a nice Microsoft account, have Cortana staring over your shoulder, and assess a subscription fee.
Monopolist-Microsoft was sort of like the cheaper, more user-accessible version of Monopolist-IBM: abusive and expensive; but knew that people used their stuff to get real work done; and weren’t dumb enough to pointlessly interfere with that. Overbill? Sure. Engineer lock-in? Hell yeah? Just break stuff because of some passing fad or a desire to sell apps? Not so much.
You don’t need Pro for the RDP client, only the host, so if you aren’t RDPing into your own box you probably upsold yourself.
Except Windows 7 is NOT past End-of-Life; not even close. It’s utter bullshit.
I have Pro and it just asked again about OneDrive and some other stuff last night because Patch Tuesday. Since I have Office 365 I should shut it up by installing it. 
(I do most of my writing, etc. in other tools so I haven’t gotten around to moving it off my decrepit W7 laptop.)
I intentionally kill explorer.exe on occasion (Win10 Pro, and sometime old, moldy games won’t run under Explorer) and have NEVER lost any open programs. Not once. You have another issue.
#In a world, wracked by Windows throwing Innocents under the bus, a rag tag group comes together. Not because they want to, but because of Group Policy.
#Meet
It’s a change, but not that surprising of one in the current climate of free OS upgrades and competition. Unlike with Apple, with Microsoft it’s always been the wild west in terms of the variety of cpu/gpu/misc. hardware combinations they have to test old OSes against–it’s not trivial. Even if they’re still providing security updates, I don’t think it’s incumbent on them – or really in their interest – to provide updates for new hardware so people can maintain old versions of their operating systems. Love it or hate it, Windows 10 is what they want to see on everyone’s computer and this is just keeping in line with that strategy.
Apple is both uncooperative in supporting new hardware with their old operating systems, and old hardware with their new operating systems. Microsoft has always been much more flexible – they shouldn’t be bashed too much for doing (in a limited way) what Apple has gotten away with for its entire existence.
I can respect anybody making an unpalatable choice, but it gets silly when they try to excuse it as not actually being a choice that they can take responsibility for.
Artists use whatever they choose, but appeals to an industry standard frame one as a cog in a content sweatshop mill - not that there is anything shameful in choosing that vocation. But it IS a choice.
I very much doubt if the new Windows 10 Cloud could be anything like that…
Control Panel > Java > Advanced Tab Check Suppress sponsor offers when installing or updating Java
Also Update Tab if you want to disable updates
I am aware. It’s the RDP service that was a must. 
Largely the same. I’ve been getting the office notifications. Ads on the lock screen. And those promoted apps at the bottom of the start menu. That’s about it. But all of those can just be turned off. As can all or nearly everything else mentioned here. This post actually just reminded me to finally do that. Took about 2 minutes.
Now its not great that its there to begin with, that its opt out. And some of this stuff (and new stuff) will crop back up with system updates. But point being even when it is annoying and obtrusive. You can turn it off.
I’ve never had to do it on W10 before. We’ll see if the issue comes up again.
Win 7 came out in 2009. 8.0 came out in 2012. MS stopped offering mainstream support in early 2015. The only thing “active” about 7 from MS’s point of view it is that they have committed to security updates until 2020. Microsoft gave free updates to millions of people to update to their latest OS, and have warned people for years that they should upgrade.
“End-of-Life” can be a vague concept, but once the vendor stops selling a product, stops supporting a product, and the product no longer works on new hardware, it’s arguably “End-of-Life” whether you think so or not. It’s EOL because MS says it is–and that’s their call and it’s certainly less draconian than what Apple – their main commercial competitor – has done with their operating systems forever–even though one version of OSX is substantially less different from another than say, Win 7 vs Win 10.
Sorry, but both you and M$ are going to have to face the fact that no one decides “End-of-Life” but the consumer. Nor is WIndows 7 even officially at EOL (Vista just passed into EOL this month).
Try again?
Something that can happen, especially with older apps, is that they lose “screen presence” but still remain running when Explorer is closed (on any version of Windows). You can sometimes get back to these via Task Manager, selecting Task View, and using “Bring task to the front” (wording may be a little off, but you get the idea).
I simply don’t understand what you are saying.
I was suggesting unkindly that the “free” apps you get along with the telemetry and the ads are considered to be a benefit to you by Microsoft whereas actually they are such a nuisance that, because I still need Windows to update my satnav (!) and back up some of my older phones, I might put it on a little NUC or similar that only needs to be turned on once a month.
But W10 has never been free to use in any way that I am aware of, and I can’t imagine anyone thinking it was. A service pack for Windows 8 doesn’t qualify.
I very much doubt that Windows 10 cloud will be that successful in education. Chrome OS has an awful lot of administration friendly features for education. Microsoft won’t do that because, unlike Google, they have a server and networking division which will want to keep selling expensive servers and client licenses. It was basically why IBM lost its monopoly of the DOS world - its own minicomputer division wanted DOS computers crippled. And I remember when we costed out running certain applications on Compaq hardware versus AS/400, we knew why.
