The past few months I've painstakingly rebuilt 3 of my most used work computers that had turned into molasses-speed slugs and are now 2 lightning-fast Win7 Ultimate-64's and an almost equally as fast Win 8.1-64 of all things. I've also painstakingly done everything I know possible, short of no internet whatsoever, to keep Microsoft out of them.
What I've done includes:
Disabling Windows updates--
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No Windows AV's, I'm using AVG--
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And most times I'm not online, I disable the internet in my router. All computers are offline from 1am to 9am...
So yesterday I added a program to my 8.1 that required a restart, and I was greeted with the "update and restart" option-- UPDATE?
Then last night my Dell T5400 started acting bonkers, my wireless mouse & keyboard's 'radio' driver quit working, and switching to it via remote desktop I found no access to any files, which are on drives connected to it that all the other computers COULD still access- It wouldn't even shut down normally, had to do a hard shutdown.
So I boot up this morning, and go into the event viewer, and in the 'setup' log files I find 'information' logs as to successful program update installs--
So in control panel/programs and features/view installed updates, I find these:
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Seems I've failed at keeping Microsoft out...
At the moment I'm uninstalling all but the 12 year old one, which I'm assuming may be Service Pack 1...
I 99% know for a fact (based on what I've been told by much smarter than me computer whiz's) that Microsoft is the reason all my computers turned into slugs--and the fact my fresh rebuilds worked better than I could've hoped for, seem to bear that out.
So unless I can figure out what web addresses (or anything else that may work) to ban from my router, I guess I'm just doomed to spending a few minutes one morning a week uninstalling updates... banghead.gif
If I could use newer computers, I would. My old machines and the programs that run them make that impossible...