There is presumably a way to restore your computer to it’s original shipped image with Win 7. Usually a recovery system is on a separate partition and you have to hit a specific function key during boot up to bring up a menu which offers the option of restoring. If you have such an option and if you have backups of all your personal files and data then it sounds like it would be worth doing.
Good grief! 
We’re talking about an operating system to run programs on here, not a mind control machine as some conspiracy theorists might see it.
Actually we’re talking about a computer platform which is far more than just an O/S. It is tracking your movements at every turn and doing its level best to prevent you, the honest user, from blocking that tracking and spying.
Ever had a computer crash and tried restoring with a new hard drive? yes putting back a windows program is a piece of cake ,but try putting back everything else. pictures - printers - letters- and anything else is a nightmare
Same if an upgrade to Windows 10 fails. I honestly can’t see any point in the upgrade, windows 7 is going to be supported until 2020, and even after that any antivirus program will protect a computer
I have left my old W7 laptop alone for that reason. Also, I can directly compare that and W10 on my new laptop directly.
I read that Windows 10 now has 270 million users. I really can’t think that any one of those users (including me) will be singled out for spying on. I’m sure my computer usage will be monitored collectively for statistics or feedback on any faults (or lack of them in my case) but I believe this is different to ‘spying’. Spying is when a person, group or body of people get singled out for special attention.
As regards tracking, I made a bit of a study of this a while ago using a Firefox extension called ‘Lightbeam’. It gives a graphical representation of how we are being tracked. Below shows the trackers present from perhaps 7 or 8 sites visited:
http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u78/Mart44/marts-graphics/lightbeam_zpsnnphwckq.png
Anti-tracking measures such as Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe were used but I found that it was difficult to stop all tracking even so. Thinking on this, if just one tracker isn’t prevented, does this one communicate in the background with all the others anyway? Maybe, maybe not. If it does though, there wouldn’t be much point in trying to avoid any tracking apart from the feel-good factor it may give.
In any event, I choose to keep up all the Windows releases and not to worry about Microsoft’s data gathering or Internet tracking. I haven’t worried too much about these for many years. If such practices were harmful, something detrimental would have happened by now. The fact is that nothing has, or at least it hasn’t so far. About another ten years (maybe less) and I think I’ll have got away with it entirely. 
Others won’t agree of course but I promise not to use words such as: naïve, silly or madness if they don’t.
For the past 5-10 years spying and tracking has not been about singling people out. That’s a quaint old notion you have picked up from watching 70s/80s detective TV series where the local cops stake out a suspect’s house and bug their phone.
In today’s world it is about mega-data warehousing. Collecting absolutely masses of data about people and having sophisticated heuristic algorithms which can process it all and make links between all the connections. They make links to all the people you know and have ever communicated with and links from those people to their friends. They make links between all the outlets you buy products from, insurance, utilities and the like and of course all the websites you ever visit. The amount of data is vast and it’s potential for abuse equally vast.
The fact that, thus far, such data about you appears not to have affected you in your eyes is not a suitable excuse for ignoring the situation. Similarly, just because I have not been burgled doesn’t mean I shall refrain from taking every precaution I can to ensure I won’t be burgled in the future.
Goolge, Amazon, Facebook and many others are invasively tracking everyone’s movements, except those people savvy enough to recognise it and do something about it. There will come a time, especially for younger people, where the masses of info they naively splurged all over the internet, will come to affect them, whether that be some rating status, their ability to gain jobs or whatever.
I’m very happy for you to lay down and go quietly into the night, bagged and tagged and monitored at every stage. I on the other hand, much like Patrick McGoohan, refuse to be just another number. I shall protect my privacy and identity for as long as humanly possible.
Don’t forget to try and hide all of what local and national Government knows about you, all on computers and related to your name and address. Maybe that wouldn’t matter though. I expect if anyone was really interested in you specifically as regards way of life, your job record, medical history etc, they would go to the trackers or Microsoft instead to find out.
Rest easy that nobody will come to get you and I’ll do the same.
Well, what a time I’ve had !
two wasted week-ends and more, and plenty of virtual headaches.
I finally isolated the problem that was causing the trouble with my W7 laptop after my unsuccessful dances with W10.
The problems were being caused by AVG !!! :twisted:
I deleted the software (30 mins) re-installed it (30 mins)… same problems ! deleted again and manually removed any remaining traces of it.
I then D/L and installed Avast…easy peasy works a treat so far so good, computer running well again in W7 mode.
I agree with Realist about the updates. I run Vista on my desktop and W7 on my netbook. The first thing I did with both computers was to stop updates. They are still working just as fast as they did when I bought them and have not been a spot of bother. I would rather spend my days taking part in the cut and thrust of discussion on Over 50’s than fiddling about with my computer. These operating systems will stay where they are until it’s time to retire the computer when I will embrace the new technology.
My laptop will be " Upgrading to Windows 10" tonight at 11.30pm so i’ll be saying goodbye to OFF when i log off for the last time just before the Witching Hour.
I assume you chose to do the upgrade at that time so that you could leave it running overnight. I believe it can take some time.
I’ve found Windows 10 to be good, although when I first bought the laptop there were problems. The Toshiba people weren’t interested because it was a ‘software problem’, but they’d help me if I paid for the service - for a brand new computer!
Fortunately I had bought it from John Lewis, whose technical people sorted it out very quickly (at no charge!) over the phone. The problem? I had installed Avast anti-virus. Apparently, Windows 10 doesn’t like some anti-virus software and I was assured that the inbuilt Windows Defender, along with its firewall, was all that is necessary. The technical chap advised me to also use Malwarebytes, but that nothing else is necessary. No problems since.
I’m not anticipating any problems but if the worst should happen i’ll just bin it and start afresh. Well, you can’t take it with you right? There aint no pockets in shrouds!
A wise move my friend.
I don’t stop at Windows though. Absolutely EVERY piece of software on my laptop is purposefully configured to NOT auto update. It is, imo, important to be in control of your computers. You can not be in control if you have given a myriad of software suppliers authority to go off hunting for updates and then auto-updating your computer.
We wouldn’t allow that in any other aspect of our lives imo.
Imaging waking up one morning and finding a car mechanic under the bonnet of your car and when you challenge him he says “Oh don’t worry sir, we have a new version of the car’s Electronic Management System so we’re installing the new version for you” !
The “Latest” is not necessarily “The Best” and neither is it necessarily a good thing for your own personal collection and configuration of software applications. There is always a perilously balanced situation with software providers and Windows OS and all the associated drivers and DLLs that go with it.
Just because Windows issues some update, doesn’t mean that other pieces of software you have will be compatible with it, equally no guarantees that your applications won’t fall over in some way.
My advice is never accept ANY update to ANY piece of software unless:
- YOU know exactly what is in that update
- YOU have a genuine reason to need/use that update
- YOU know that the update will not adversely impact any of the other software on your computer.
Stay in control. You will save yourself a ton of heartache and hassle, save yourself lots of broadband bandwidth and lots of computer performance degradation and delays.
Trouble is, I don’t think you can turn off Windows 10 updates.
Can you?
That’s fine advice if you’ve only 1 old PC which only runs a few old programs and you have the time (and expertise) to check all updates to the software (a bit like running an old mainframe system) but many people run multiple systems on multiple media devices and just don’t have the time to acquire the technical expertise to check one device and all its software let alone half a dozen or more devices …
There is no user setting as such but it can be done if that’s your preference.
Option 5 would probably be the easiest.
Thanks Mart.
That looks very helpful.
As you say, Option 5 looks pretty straightforward and can provide for turning on if and when we want to download updates and then off when we don’t. Particularly useful.
The very fact that Microsoft are making it so difficult to stop Windows Updates underpins my concerns about their tracking and spying activities. They are essentially making it impossible for the millions of “ordinary” users who are not technically minded.
Myself, I would find out the IP addresses of the Microsoft update servers and just block them in my firewall. Job done.
edit: just read that Microsoft purposely continually change the IP addresses of their servers for (cough cough) security reasons lols. You see how divisive this all is.
There’s a Microsoft page here describing updates. I can’t say I came across any of the issues mentioned but on the other hand, I can’t see any reason to block the updates:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/update-history-windows-10