Microsoft is turning Windows 11's Start Menu into an advertisement delivery system

[GoldenTiger]

No, before 22H2 if you enabled the 'turn off defender antivirus' in group policy, Windows Defender Antivirus remained permanently off forever without doing anything else at all

Now with 22H2 if you do the above it reenables itself automatically after a set amount of time - IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2 DO YOU UNDERSTAND, IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2, I REPEAT IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2

This is like the 500th this has been explained to you

In what language is that 'exactly the same functionality'

You clearly aren't understanding his point... By the way, why on Earth would you want to disable it permanently anyway?

 

[staknhalo]

You clearly aren't understanding his point... By the way, why on Earth would you want to disable it permanently anyway?

Then help explain it to me - because he says it functions exactly the same as before

How is this

before 22H2 if you enabled the 'turn off defender antivirus' in group policy, Windows Defendiser Antivirus remained permanently off forever without doing anything else at all

and this

Now with 22H2 if you do the above it reenables itself automatically after a set amount of time

exactly the same functionality? Please, by all means make that make sense if you can.

And I don't need antivirus, and it gets in my way running automated scans bogging things up when I'm trying to do other things. I have virtual machines if I want to install something dodgy. I haven't used antivirus since XP.

 

[Lakados]

No, before 22H2 if you enabled the 'turn off defender antivirus' in group policy, Windows Defender Antivirus remained permanently off forever without doing anything else at all

Now with 22H2 if you do the above it reenables itself automatically after a set amount of time - IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2 DO YOU UNDERSTAND, IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2, I REPEAT IT NEVER DID THAT BEFORE 22H2

This is like the 500th this has been explained to you

In what language is that 'exactly the same functionality'

If you disable windows defender in 22h2 it remains off until you do something that requires it to be on then it turns on. 22h2 added a dozen new security features that are part of windows defender. Disabling windows defender alone does shut it down completely and it will remain off forever until you run a feature that requires it and it will turn it back on.
It did this in windows 10 if you were running any of Microsofts Enterprise security packages, it did this on the launch of Windows 11 (21H2) if you had it paired with any of their A5 Azure security packages, and now that they have rolled those security features down from the enterprise packages to being part of the standard build in 22H2 it does it there too.

So...
IT DID THAT BEFORE 22H2 DO YOU UNDERSTAND, IT DID THAT BEFORE 22H2, I REPEAT IT DID THAT BEFORE 22H2
Disable the security features that use Windows Defender as a dependency and it stays off.

 

[staknhalo]

Disabling windows defender alone does shut it down completely and it will remain off forever until you run a feature that requires it and it will turn it back on.

Again, no. It reenables itself without the user calling on any dependencies beforehand

 

[Lakados]

Again, no. It reenables itself without the user calling on any dependencies beforehand

Now I know you are just being a troll and not being stubborn.

 

[staknhalo]

Learn the meaning of the phrase 'exactly the same behavior' before you rattle off like that

People are welcome to try this on 22H2 and another previous build/version themselves, and see who the real bullshitter here is

 

[Lakados]

Learn the meaning of the phrase 'exactly the same behavior' before you rattle off like that

People are welcome to try this on 22H2 and another previous build/version themselves, and see who the real bullshitter here is

In Windows 10 if you turn it off and then have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.
In 21h2 if you turn it off and have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.
In 22h2 if you turn it off and have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.

22h2 just has more default security features that require Windows Defender, Turn them off too.

 

[staknhalo]

In windows 10 if you turn it off then have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.
In 21h2 if you turn it off and have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.
I’m 22h2 if you turn it off and have a security feature that requires it, it will turn it back on.

22h2 just has more default security features that requires Windows Defender, Turn them off too.

In every build of Win 11 before 22H2 and Win 10 prior if you enable the 'turn off Defender Antivirus' setting in Group Policy, Defender Antivirus would stay disabled forever unless you manually reenabled it - no matter what else you clicked on your computer afterwards and no matter how many things you went around clicking

Starting with 22H2 it will turn itself back on automatically regardless of whether you even run any apps or not after 'disabling' it - it's either upon reboot or set amount of hours (or both, can't recall ATM)

"bUt ThAtS eXaCtlY tHe SaMe!!!1!!!111!11!!!" 👍

 

[Lakados]

In every build of Win 11 before 22H2 and Win 10 prior if you enable the 'turn off Defender Antivirus' setting in Group Policy, Defender Antivirus would stay disabled forever unless you manually reenabled it - no matter what else you clicked on your computer afterwards and no matter how many things you went around clicking

Starting with 22H2 it will turn itself back on automatically regardless of whether you even run any apps or not after 'disabling' it - it's either upon reboot or set amount of hours (or both, can't recall ATM)

"bUt ThAtS eXaCtlY tHe SaMe!!!1!!!111!11!!!" 👍

Yeah, but there's the catch. In Windows 10 or 11 (21H2), if you say enabled Core Isolation Memory Integrity via group policy or otherwise and you had Windows defender disabled, it would re-enable Windows Defender when it created the VM container for the application and it does not shut it back off afterward. Core Isolation Memory Integrity is on by default in 22H2, this is the same for Enhanced Phishing Protection, and a bunch of other features.
It was a major pain in the ass for us Enterprise clients because there was a week or so when it was broken completely and it would re-enable Windows Defender even it if was off because of a 3rd party AV solution being installed on the system, now Microsoft patched that up relatively fast but it was a major headache diagnosing that one when suddenly the machine just shat itself because of the competing AV solutions causing applications to take way too long to start assuming they didn't just give a memory error and BSOD the machine.
But anyways, features that were only present in Windows 10, and 11 Enterprise or were disabled by default for all but Enterprise editions were rolled down to Home and Pro users in 22H2, so it just happens to be a new issue for you if you because the ven diagram of somebody who would want to manually disable windows defender but also manually enable the advanced security features are two separate circles. For Enterprise it was always a thing, and it was for general consumers too, you just didn't get that use case very frequently.

EDIT:
For the BSOD'ing machines, it was a nightmare because on reboot it would start back up with Windows Defender disabled again, eventually, one of the affected machines didn't BSOD and just hung for a long long time and eventually launched and we could then see what had happened when suddenly Defender popped up to inform us it hadn't run a scan in a very long time, but yeah figuring out what the hell happened there made for a bad day. because then we had to figure out which update was causing it, and get that reported and blah blah blah, not fun times.

Ended up being fixed with an urgent bios update from Dell and an update to the Intel system drivers. So not technically a Microsoft problem but that was the worst windows update issue I had had in a good long time.

 

[staknhalo]

Nope, I disabled Core Isolation and all that too, I've done and tried many things trying to keep it disabled always like it once was, not related to any of that even with that stuff disabled Win 11 Antivirus will always reenable itself on 22H2, and wouldn't on builds prior, it's literally as simple as that even though you don't want to believe it

 

[Lakados]

Nope, I disabled Core Isolation and all that too, I've done and tried many things trying to keep it disabled always like it once was, not related to any of that even with that stuff disabled Win 11 Antivirus will always reenable itself on 22H2, and wouldn't on builds prior, it's literally as simple as that even though you don't want to believe it

Have you disabled hardware virtualization in your BIOS, if you are running an AMD system you need to disable SVM mode and for Intel, it is the VT mode, otherwise the system drivers could be turning it on when applications make use of the hardware virtualization, emulators and VM are notorious for doing that.

 

[staknhalo]

Have you disabled hardware virtualization in your BIOS, if you are running an AMD system you need to disable SVM mode and for Intel, it is the VT mode, otherwise the system drivers could be turning it on when applications make use of the hardware virtualization, emulators and VM are notorious for doing that.

yes i disabled virtual machine functions in the bios too prior to clean install, not it

 

[Lakados]

yes i disabled virtual machine functions in the bios too prior to clean install, not it

Have you tried holding down W, F, 2, SpaceBar, while typing out "Ganesha is Great!" and pounding on the Esc key for 20 minutes?

 

[somebrains]

You're advocating for ways so users can see ads? Tech Jesus Christ.

I’m stating a factual daily thought domain of data engineering, application dev, user intent centric ML workflow.

 

[somebrains]

Nope, I disabled Core Isolation and all that too, I've done and tried many things trying to keep it disabled always like it once was, not related to any of that even with that stuff disabled Win 11 Antivirus will always reenable itself on 22H2, and wouldn't on builds prior, it's literally as simple as that even though you don't want to believe it

Yeah, another factual example of why I took a turn down the Dev route for a bit.

I was getting sick of the basic sys admin view of how to secure a system. If you ignore software, you aren’t securing anything.

Obviously that ship has long sailed because I can think of instances like this one that were on virtual post its.

 

[reaper12]

yes i disabled virtual machine functions in the bios too prior to clean install, not it

Try this:

Open Powershell as an admin.

Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true

 

[staknhalo]

Try this:

Open Powershell as an admin.

Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true

I'll give that a shot and keep an eye out for it turning back on, thanks 👍

Even ensuring this was configured in Group Policy made no difference BTW

 

[somebrains]

^ makes me wonder why Windows never got a tool similar to modprobe.
I know the desktop engineers use pre deployment scripts to ensure state on laptops.

Usually it results in the opposite of this problem, where someone can’t use virtualization reliably.

 

[DPI]

Nope, I disabled Core Isolation and all that too, I've done and tried many things trying to keep it disabled always like it once was, not related to any of that even with that stuff disabled Win 11 Antivirus will always reenable itself on 22H2, and wouldn't on builds prior, it's literally as simple as that even though you don't want to believe it

In the time you spent playing cat and mouse and MS denying you more control over your own PC, you could've rolled a debloated install ISO with MSMG Toolkit or NTLite and ripped it out by the roots so it couldn't reinstall even if it wanted to.

This is the minimal Windows 11 22H2 I use for VR and a handful games. 48 running processes after boot instead of over 200.

No Cortana, Edge, Apps, Windows Telemetry, Nvidia telemetry, Microsoft account, Defender/Smartscreen, Xbox anything, Teams, forced updates, widgets, ads, popups/notifications, MS Office upsells, shopping, entertainment news, Candy Crush. A local account and that's it.

 

[sleepeeg3]

That is a premium price for an OS when there are excellent free alternatives out there (Linux), which do everything just as well these days.

So switch. Most don't.
I found Linux Mint similar to Windows, but there was an odd driver or two issue that took some serious time to fix that the average user won't put up with. It got corrupted, too.
Linux needs more resources thrown at it to support setup/maintenance.
MS pulling stuff like this will hopefully encourage that.

 

[staknhalo]

In the time you spent playing cat and mouse and MS denying you more control over your own PC, you could've rolled a debloated install ISO with MSMG Toolkit or NTLite and ripped it out by the roots so it couldn't reinstall even if it wanted to.

This is the minimal Windows 11 22H2 I use for VR and a handful games. 48 running processes after boot instead of over 200.

No Cortana, Edge, Apps, Windows Telemetry, Nvidia telemetry, Microsoft account, Defender/Smartscreen, Xbox anything, Teams, forced updates, widgets, ads, popups/notifications, MS Office upsells, shopping, entertainment news, Candy Crush. A local account and that's it.

View attachment 532161

I used to use it back in the nLite/vLite days, I got tired of ripping something out that would then break when updating, and the endless trial and error with reformatting, just not my cup of tea anymore, I'd rather leave intact and just disable if possible

still have to try the above suggestion from before, have had the main rig encoding a lot so haven't been really using it

edit: to give credit to Microsoft for something new that I think is useful - check out the Windows Sandbox feature - everybody has a quicklaunch lightweight Windows VM to test software and stuff baked in now for Pro, but only if your machine also supports virtualization/you leave virtualization enabled

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...tion/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview

 

[DPI]

I used to use it back in the nLite/vLite days, I got tired of ripping something out that would then break when updating, and the endless trial and error with reformatting, just not my cup of tea anymore, I'd rather leave intact and just disable if possible

I hear that, which is why I put it off for a year, to leave room for trial-and-error time and because fresh installs are a headache if you have a lot of third party to reinstall. I used MSMG for Win7/Win10 debloats, but bought NTLite for $40 to see if a paid program made things easierMSMG, and then regretted since it broke certain things, and the UI is needlessly confusing.

Back to MSMG Toolkit, and the minimal Win11 Pro image I built worked perfectly first time. I learned long ago not to remove Windows Update from source, but leave it in and blocked, then evaluate and install updates with a separate tool since MS will tend to sneak undocumented shit into benign sounding KB's, sometimes auto-reinstalling things you explicitly already uninstalled (i.e. "KBXXXXXX addresses Kerberos.dll status_exception error", but will also stealth-reinstall Edge for you".

Alternatively for people that already have Win11 installed and want to reduce bloat without the hassle of a clean install, there's ThisIsWin11, and a video walkthrough is here.

 

[DPI]

edit: to give credit to Microsoft for something new that I think is useful - check out the Windows Sandbox feature - everybody has a quicklaunch lightweight Windows VM to test software and stuff baked in now for Pro, but only if your machine also supports virtualization/you leave virtualization enabled

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...tion/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview

There are definitely some nice improvements in Win11 that MS deserves credit for, despite the removal of user choice in other areas. Some of the aesthetic changes are great, the cleanup of the disjointed control settings left over from the metro era, new icons, dark themes, QoL stuff. Sandbox existed in Win10, but got better in Win11 with the ability to make it persistent across reboots. Definitely great for testing anything in a quarantine environment without the ten extra steps of Hyper-V.

 

[zamardii12]

So switch. Most don't.

No. Just reporting on this. I'm not switching the convenience and established compatibility for my games for something else. Only thing I use my computer for is gaming mostly nowadays.

 

[pillagenburn]

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/11/21/m...t-menu-into-an-advertisement-delivery-system/

I'll never understand the move to dilute the user experience on core products. Apple is doing it with App Store, and even subscription services like News+ - Microsoft is doing it with the Start Menu; literally where you click to do everything... Windows 11 is ~$150 OS. That is a premium price for an OS when there are excellent free alternatives out there (Linux), which do everything just as well these days. Most of what people do is in the browser now anyway. Apple pairs its Operating Systems with premium cost devices. Can't get MacOS unless you buy a premium laptop. Can't get iOS unless you buy a premium phone. Yet, Tim Apple is not content to sit with a $2T+ valued company. Why are companies trying to squeeze the consumer so hard now?

So, okay - you bump profits slightly this quarter to appease your shareholders in the next financial report. Where do you go next? More ads, in other locations? Maybe the infinite growth model doesn't work, and companies should look to payout dividends on a steadily growing stock rather than trying to strike gold every year for their Shareholders. Paid experiences should not be supplemented with Ads, unless the paid experience is so damn dirt cheap that the manufacturer is only covering costs. For instance, I understand ads on a $200 Walmart TV. I DONT understand ads on a $2k+ OLED LG in WebOS.

Shitty times we live in as a consumer, honestly. We barely own anything these days with all the subscription models; and now we have to contend with targeted ads in literally every corner of our lives.

Because someone has to pay for all of those stimulus hand-outs.

 

[sadsteve]

https://www.stardock.com/products/start11/download It's $5.99. less if you own start8 or start10 already. I already upgraded to Start11 even though I am still running Windows 10. So I'm good whenever I eventually upgrade.


Aww.. what are ppl gonna bitch about now?

lol

But you can do that as easily in 11 as you could in any version, except 8... lets's all just give a moment of silence for 8 the best forgotten OS.

And not like it was the best OS everybody forgot, as in the OS that for our collective sanity we should all forget.

I actually like that they came out with Windows 8, it got me to switch to Linux as my main OS. I just keep a Windows VM for gaming and the occasional photo editing session (I dislike gimp!).

 

[ManofGod]

I actually like that they came out with Windows 8, it got me to switch to Linux as my main OS. I just keep a Windows VM for gaming and the occasional photo editing session (I dislike gimp!).

So, you are saying you were able to get VFIO working successfully? Otherwise, gaming in a non 3d accelerated VM would be undoable.

 

[staknhalo]

Before I started using GameStream I had a dedicated gaming PC/HTPC from spare/old parts at my main TV - If I were gonna do something like that again I'd probably give Steam OS a try instead of Windows

 

[ng4ever]

Not on my watch.

 

[sadsteve]

So, you are saying you were able to get VFIO working successfully? Otherwise, gaming in a non 3d accelerated VM would be undoable.

I just did GPU pass through so the VM has a dedicated GPU (Nvidia 1070). Seems to work perfectly using Qemu/KVM.

 

[Lakados]

I just did GPU pass through so the VM has a dedicated GPU (Nvidia 1070). Seems to work perfectly using Qemu/KVM.

If you have an onboard GPU and a dedicated one it is easy to accomplish, you can assign the onboard to the host, and then it frees up the dedicated one for passthrough. Running the whole setup with a single GPU gets into some stability/performance issues but overall GPU passthrough works pretty damned well now.

 

[sadsteve]

If you have an onboard GPU and a dedicated one it is easy to accomplish, you can assign the onboard to the host, and then it frees up the dedicated one for passthrough. Running the whole setup with a single GPU gets into some stability/performance issues but overall GPU passthrough works pretty damned well now.

Yeah, if I was running with a single GPU, my gaming would pretty much be restricted to Linux game. My motherboard however, has 2 GPU slots where each can be setup as an 8x slot. So, I've setup ti up with the Nvidia 1070 for the Windows VM and an AMD 6600 for the Linux side. It works very well. It's much nicer than dual booting.

 

[Lakados]

Yeah, if I was running with a single GPU, my gaming would pretty much be restricted to Linux game. My motherboard however, has 2 GPU slots where each can be setup as an 8x slot. So, I've setup ti up with the Nvidia 1070 for the Windows VM and an AMD 6600 for the Linux side. It works very well. It's much nicer than dual booting.

Nice, I have mine opposite, windows primary with REHL in the VM, and the GPU there maybe suffers 3-5% overhead from the VM container it is nice and not really noticeable.

 

[staknhalo]

Try this:

Open Powershell as an admin.

Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true

No bueno, re-enabled after restart :/

 

[ZodaEX]

I actually like that they came out with Windows 8, it got me to switch to Linux as my main OS. I just keep a Windows VM for gaming and the occasional photo editing session (I dislike gimp!).

Just do like me and stay on Windows 7. I don't think any software ever required 8.

 

[mullet]

In the time you spent playing cat and mouse and MS denying you more control over your own PC, you could've rolled a debloated install ISO with MSMG Toolkit or NTLite and ripped it out by the roots so it couldn't reinstall even if it wanted to.

This is the minimal Windows 11 22H2 I use for VR and a handful games. 48 running processes after boot instead of over 200.

No Cortana, Edge, Apps, Windows Telemetry, Nvidia telemetry, Microsoft account, Defender/Smartscreen, Xbox anything, Teams, forced updates, widgets, ads, popups/notifications, MS Office upsells, shopping, entertainment news, Candy Crush. A local account and that's it.

View attachment 532161

MY HERO!!!!!!!!!