anyone else sticking to windows 7?

[Murphy]

I was curious installed Windows 11 Superlite Ghost Spectre a year ago on VMWare Workstation, it did not contained virus, malware or something dodgy.

And you know this because you personally looked through every registry key, every COM/DCOM object, every Task Scheduler task, every service, and hashed every file that was included against those from a known good source to check nothing had been tampered with, yes?

I figured out why Ghost Spectre generated mediafire link with extension to x005, x006, x007 etc is an attempt to evade mediafire free account 10GB download limit a month, not virus scanners. Ghost Toolbox contained exe tool with wget command line to download and install 7zip, Microsoft Store, browsers, drivereasy etc from Ghost Spectre toolbox menu.

Another good way to avoid that is to simply distribute the files you need to add to a known good ISO that people have downloaded from Microsoft.

Both JKLW11SV2WPE%252BU6X64.X006 and Ghost toolbox files was been scanned on VirusTotal all total clean by virus scanners.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/a715b3980ac0e43cd55f0c305cc253e28486e527b3f679c750339a79119d3894 0/90
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/02b76bb22c8278855e44173c4839dafc65ed2d774af8cffb7dc0a3ce271171ac 0/94

Pretty much irrelevant considering it can or could download anything anytime it wanted to.

If you want a lesson in what sort of files to avoid on the internet, you can use below link to get virustotal to scan files to see if it clean or flagged as malicious from many virus scanners before download the files.

VirusTotal

VirusTotal

www.virustotal.com

If people are uncomfortable about download Ghost Spectre iso then that fine then they can use NTLite or MSMG Tool kit to do debloat themselves instead.

Having to scan your entire OS every hour with an online virus scanner sort of defeats the point of 'Superlite' does it not, yes people can and IMO should use something like NTLite (although since they went down the freemium route NTLite wouldn't be my choice unless you've paid for the full version) or MSMG Toolkit, or better yet just write your own scripts to do what they do. At least that way you know what has or hasn't been done to the OS.

 

[Rroff]

The fact you have to take a closer look to verify certain behaviours, etc. aren't dodgy, even if in this case there isn't anything dubious, demonstrates the problem and how much MS need to pull their heads out and make a better OS.

 

[AthlonXP1800]

I never have a problem gaming on my 7 systems - as long as you have sufficient cores and RAM the impact of background processes and things like web browsers idle in the background is less than 10/11 - while not a perfect comparison due to hardware differences/features I get lower system latency gaming on the Xeon w/ 3070 with 7 than a 10th or 11th gen Intel CPU w/ 3070 on Windows 10/11.

I never had a problem gaming on my 10/11 systems over the last 8 years. Yesterday I left skype, notepad, file explorer and browsers with hundreds tabs opened with 400 processes idle in the background while played Forspoken demo, scenes loading times was amazing as low as less than 1 to 3 secs on NVMe with DirectStorage compared to 6-10 secs on SATA SSD and 2 mins on SATA HDD.

I had doubts at your claim that Windows 7 get lower system latency in games than Windows 10/11. I think Windows 10/11 has same latency as Windows 7 because in games they all performed about the same framerate and frametime but I investigated weeks ago found that Geforce Experience has build in system latency and mouse latency stats on overlay. I installed Geforce Experience and ran a game but system and mouse latency did not showed on overlay. I investigated further discovered these both features are only available on new G-Sync monitors with build in hardware Reflex Analyser and Reflex compatible mouses running Geforce Experience overlay.

NVIDIA Reflex: Supported Devices

Find displays, mice, games, and more.

www.nvidia.com

Windows 10/11 system latency as low as 12ms. There is a screenshot showed mouse latency 2.0ms but many videos on youtube showed much lower mouse latency as low as 0.1ms on Windows 10/11.

Play on GeForce RTX 40 Series Graphics Cards

Frames Win Games. Get the competitive edge at 144+ FPS.

www.nvidia.com

These new G-Sync monitors with Reflex Analyser and drivers are only compatible with Windows 10 and 11 but Reflex Analyser not worked with Windows 7 and 8. Windows 7 users cant get Reflex Analyser to worked so however someone on youtube claimed he got Reflex Analyser worked on Windows 7 played OverWatch I think which showed system latency as high as 72ms bragged king of mouse input latency at 3.7-8.2ms? But that too high with hacks compared to as low as 0.1ms on Windows 10/11 on many OverWatch videos.

System latency as low as 6.7ms and mouse latency as low as 0.6ms.

How to use the NVIDIA Reflex Analyzer

Gettings started, tips, tricks, and frequently asked questions to help you get the most out of the NVIDIA Reflex Analyzer

www.nvidia.com

I find 10/11 get far too busy in the background periodically despite having superior features in terms of managing idle background processes due to the pants on head approach MS devs have taken and while relatively rare there are times in 10/11 where stuff updates or does maintenance tasks in the background even when gaming resulting in slight stutter, sometimes the blue circle cursor appearing or even loss of focus from the foreground game - that never happens, ever, on a normally working 7 system.

I found 10/11 never get far too busy in the background periodically while done stuff updates or maintenance tasks in the background when I played games without resulted in slight shutter and never saw blue circle cursor appeared that never happened ever on a normally working 10 and 11 system over the last 8 years.

Interesting you mentioned blue circle cursor brought back old memories.

Back in 2004 I searched ebay for second hand laptop with SSE2 CPU and bought my first laptop Advent 6421 laptop with 512MB RAM for about £450.

UKT Support - Advent 6421 Laptop

Contains Information on the Advent 6421 Laptop

www.uktsupport.co.uk

I remembered booted first time found it was loaded Windows XP SP1 OEM then updated to SP2 but I thought 1.2GHz Celeron CPU was powerful enough to run Windows XP SP2 but shocked to see it get far too busy in the background all the time and took long time to opened Internet Explorer 6 to browsed internet and then I saw that familar circle cursor appeared every few mins everytime I visited websites. Days later I cleaned installed Windows XP SP2 after removed Advent Windows XP SP1 OEM with all bloats but still had same issue then I tried NLite to created custom XP SP2 removed all compoments I dont needed. After cleaned installed custom XP SP2 and booted it, it ran much better and no longer saw busy circle cursor in Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

My old Samsung Q1 UMPC with Celeron M 353 900MHz and 512MB RAM had no issue ran original XP SP2 Tablet Edition because Celeron M 900MHz launched in 2004 was about twice faster than old 1.2GHz Celeron CPU launched in 2002, it ran Vista just fine but shame Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 GPU cant run Aero glass.

In 2009 I tested Windows 7 release candidate builds ran fine on desktop PC with Phenom II X4 940 and 8GB RAM as well on my old laptop. RTM Escrow build 7264 compiled on 22 June 2009 was the last and stable build I tested but hours after installed build 7600.16384 compiled on 10 July 2009 I noticed things far too busy in the background periodically, I left Internet Explorer opened and ran a game and 30 mins later I saw busy circle cursor in middle of game then few secs later BOOM I got Memory Management BSOD. I had same BSOD everyday, believed this build got bugs and unstable then found Microsoft signed off build 7600.16385 compiled on 13 July 2009 as RTM and I downloaded and installed it assumed Memory Management BSOD was finally fixed but it never fixed nasty bug so I thought maybe it will patch the bug on release day on 22 October 2009 but the update did not fixed the bug I still experienced Memory Management BSOD everyday with 100% CPU usage everytime caused by searchindexer.exe, ran BlueScreenView found every BSODs was caused by ntoskrnel.exe.

Windows 7 RTM build 7600 was the worst build I tested, it was been 6 months of nightmare hell troubleshooted that unstable build, I and dad had lost hours of productive daily. Tried cleaned installed with just latest drivers and 1 game but no apps installed and also created custom iso from NTLite with all compoments removed still caused Memory Management BSOD and searchindexer.exe caused 100% CPU usage. After that I retested build 7264 never caused Memory Management BSOD and searchindexer.exe ran fine did not caused 100% CPU usage so everything ran fine. I reinstalled Vista and everything ran fine without BSOD too. When build 7700 leaked on 22 January 2010, I tested it and surprised to found it never too busy in the background periodically while done stuff updates or maintenance tasks in the background, there was no busy circle cursor, no 100% CPU usage caused by searchindexer.exe and no Memory Management BSOD. I was absolutely very relieved the nasty bugs was finally fixed in build 7700 and used it on production machine everyday fulltime.

But later I discovered build 7652 was really not the very first Windows 8 build accorded to betawiki.net. I searched builds imported from old buildfeed database found build 7650 was in fact was the first Windows 8 build compiled on 17 September 2009.

6.1.7650.0.winmain.090917-1843 | MSFT BUFFET DATABASE

Build: 6.1.7650.0.winmain.090917-1843; Source type: Private leak; Build time: 2009-09-17 18:43:00

msbuilds.rg-adguard.net

It took Microsoft 2 months to fixed critical bugs I experienced but I dont know why they patched it in build 7650 but not windows update 1 month later on 22 October 2009. I decided to used google tools to searched for Windows 7 critical bugs between July and October 2009 and found something.

A killer Windows 7 bug? Sorry, no

The blogosphere is abuzz over a newly publicized bug in Windows 7. It's being called "nasty," "critical" and even a "show stopper." After a couple hours of testing, I've concluded there’s much less here than meets the eye. The idea that this bug is reproducible 100% of the time is incorrect, and...

www.zdnet.com

Windows 7 RTM - Page 4

Originally Posted by dangel Panic over it seems! Great ain't it, 40 test machines and half a dozen chipsets and hardware missing and this has been &quo

forums.hexus.net

Microsoft Promotes Steven Sinofsky to President, Windows Division - Stories

Tami Reller to lead Windows Marketing and Finance.

news.microsoft.com

Microsoft promoted Steven Sinofsky to President of Windows Division on 8 July 2009, he was the guy who decided to rushed out build 7600 compiled on 10 July 2009 and then decided to signed off build 7600 as RTM on 13 July 2009 BUT he decided not to send RTM build to testers because he did not wanted to derailed the launch. Thousands of testers included me tested the leaked RTM build found critical bugs and reported to Microsoft. Steven Sinofsky said Microsoft would not able to reproduced bugs overnight after stressed tested RTM build ran on 40 machines overnight!!! 40 MACHINES??? What 50,000 employees were doing at Microsoft campus at the time??? They SUPPOSED to stressed tested RTM build on 50,000 MACHINES on 13 July 2009!!!

It was all Steven Sinofsky faults for screwed up Windows 7 RTM rushed from build 7264 to 7600 in 2 weeks. They would had spotted the bugs in 24 hours if ran on 50,000 machines then Windows 7 RTM build 7600 would been very stable as good as Windows 8 build 7700 I tested.

While I've not had it happen lately, possibly due to not gaming as much, I've even had instances where I've left a game idling i.e. MMO type games such as Eve Online, when I used to play it, where I might be waiting in in game events, etc. where older builds of Windows 10 have decided to reboot for updates.

After used Windows 10 on my devices over the last 7 years I left games for 1 hour to made lunch, dinner and supper but Windows 10 never been rebooted for updates after downloaded and installed but it was just sat on desktop waited for me to click on restart button. I think one or some of programs installed on your systems caused to triggered Windows 10 decided to gone rogue to reboot for updates.

I remembered back in 2002, I and my friends was played Age of Empires 2 online and Windows XP decided to popped up dialog to warned me I have 15 mins to save things before forced to restart PC, I clicked restart later but it was greyed out. Same things happened on Vista, 7 and 8. Thankfully Microsoft decided to removed forced restart dialog in Windows 10 due to complaints because it was very annoyed and very disruptive.

This is one of the problems with 10/11 - you end up tweaking it to something useful but then always at the mercy of potential changes in later updates which break that, sometimes having to update the tweak software and making sure changes are re-applied, etc. which might not seem a big issue if you just have say 1 desktop system but is an utter pain in the behind when you run a dozen systems.

This is not one of problems with 10/11, it been going on for 23 years since Windows 2000.

 

[Armageus]

After used Windows 10 on my devices over the last 7 years I left games for 1 hour to made lunch, dinner and supper but Windows 10 never been rebooted for updates after downloaded and installed but it was just sat on desktop waited for me to click on restart button. I think one or some of programs installed on your systems caused to triggered Windows 10 decided to gone rogue to reboot for updates.

I remembered back in 2002, I and my friends was played Age of Empires 2 online and Windows XP decided to popped up dialog to warned me I have 15 mins to save things before forced to restart PC, I clicked restart later but it was greyed out. Same things happened on Vista, 7 and 8. Thankfully Microsoft decided to removed forced restart dialog in Windows 10 due to complaints because it was very annoyed and very disruptive.





This is not one of problems with 10/11, it been going on for 23 years since Windows 2000.

Except on Windows 2000, XP and 7 and 8 you had the choice of "never install updates" - so never had to see those dialog boxes anyway

Windows 10 doesn't nag you to restart, it just restarts anyway when it thinks you aren't using the PC (active hours) - unfortunately not any good for people whose PCs are active 24/7, and don't have any inactive hours

 

[AthlonXP1800]

10/11 are sure taking their time "maturing" the whole culture behind developing the OS is rotten to its core, I don't see any potential for improvement without a good house cleaning.

I used to spend quite a bit of time on the feedback hub but it became apparent they only wanted to see the things they wanted to see and it was only ever after high profile pressure such as streamers with millions of followers being impacted and complaining that anything else would change and even then it was an awkward specific case fix rather than tackling the whole problem - hence ending up with the stupid active hours implementation as if everyone lived very rigid lives.

Yes I read about Windows 10 version 1703's active hours implementation caused people PCs lose works by left PC on standby for few hours. It happened to me too after 1703 update, I found my PC woke up and restarted on Thursday 5pm 2 days after Patch Tuesday lost all opened windows on desktop and browsers tabs. I reminded myself to restart PC when finished update on Patch Tuesday.

I thought Windows 11 was the same thing with Windows 10 but 2 months after launch I decided to leave everything opened on desktop and put PC on standby everyday after read about Windows 11 seamless update feature. On Thursday at 5pm 2 days after Patch Tuesday PC woke up and I logged in to found everything still opened on desktop but noticed updates was successfully installed on Windows Update history and saw Task Manager uptime was not in minutes but 30 days! Realised PC was not restarted because Windows 11 now has seamless update feature that do not need to reboot after installed Windows Update. In the last few months my PC uptime was 90 days but Norton Security patch updates did not supported seamless update and cannot close Remote Procedure Call service so I need to restart PC everytime to patch Norton Security.

People no longer have to worry about Windows 11 active hours if they leave PC on standby anymore.

 

[Rroff]

I never had a problem gaming on my 10/11 systems over the last 8 years. Yesterday I left skype, notepad, file explorer and browsers with hundreds tabs opened with 400 processes idle in the background while played Forspoken demo, scenes loading times was amazing as low as less than 1 to 3 secs on NVMe with DirectStorage compared to 6-10 secs on SATA SSD and 2 mins on SATA HDD.

I had doubts at your claim that Windows 7 get lower system latency in games than Windows 10/11. I think Windows 10/11 has same latency as Windows 7 because in games they all performed about the same framerate and frametime but I investigated weeks ago found that Geforce Experience has build in system latency and mouse latency stats on overlay. I installed Geforce Experience and ran a game but system and mouse latency did not showed on overlay. I investigated further discovered these both features are only available on new G-Sync monitors with build in hardware Reflex Analyser and Reflex compatible mouses running Geforce Experience overlay.

As I noted last time overall system latency and/or button to pixel latency has a relationship with frame rate and frame times but won't necessarily be reflected in them.

Windows 10/11 potentially could have better latency than 7 - but you really have to go to town stripping stuff out and/or disabling it - over say a 2 hour gaming session Windows 10/11 is not as consistent for overall latency though some people will notice it more than others - coming from a very tuned setup it is much more apparent to me than it might be to people in general.

This is not one of problems with 10/11, it been going on for 23 years since Windows 2000.

Never had too much issue with that - some earlier updates for XP, etc. could break tweaks but mostly with older OSes you can tweak a lot of things through built in options to make the OS work how you wanted while with 10/11 you are much more reliant on 3rd party programs doing non-standard things.

People no longer have to worry about Windows 11 active hours if they leave PC on standby anymore.

11 improved it in some ways but it is still a long way from ideal - you will get instances where updates aren't just seamless.

 

[Blackjack Davy]

I never have a problem gaming on my 7 systems - as long as you have sufficient cores and RAM the impact of background processes and things like web browsers idle in the background is less than 10/11 - while not a perfect comparison due to hardware differences/features I get lower system latency gaming on the Xeon w/ 3070 with 7 than a 10th or 11th gen Intel CPU w/ 3070 on Windows 10/11.

I find 10/11 get far too busy in the background periodically despite having superior features in terms of managing idle background processes due to the pants on head approach MS devs have taken and while relatively rare there are times in 10/11 where stuff updates or does maintenance tasks in the background even when gaming resulting in slight stutter, sometimes the blue circle cursor appearing or even loss of focus from the foreground game - that never happens, ever, on a normally working 7 system.

While I've not had it happen lately, possibly due to not gaming as much, I've even had instances where I've left a game idling i.e. MMO type games such as Eve Online, when I used to play it, where I might be waiting in in game events, etc. where older builds of Windows 10 have decided to reboot for updates.

I'm not on 7 but only because of security otherwise I would be as its just lighter on resources thats always been the case going from XP to Vista just bogged down the PC I had at the time with extra processes running in the background and 10 was the same when I was forced onto it cpu was darn near 100% usage most of the time had to upgrade it to fix that problem its now a hand me down given to someone else and its now as slow AF it never had that problem on 7. Its always the same its either all the extra data its phoning home about you to MS or its planned obsolescence pick your conspiracy theory of choice. The amount of people who will defend MS like their life depends on it as if its a personal affront to their dignity is amusing though (its a faceless megalithic corporation they don't care what you think nor will you win any brownie points defending their honour against all comers)

The automatic forcing scheduling of updates is one of the most obnoxious things about 10 most of that can be disabled/controlled via group policy editor thankfully not sure if thats available on devices though.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

Half of these vulnerabilities require physical access to the machine. I doubt if someone got to my laptop would be wasting time to hack it if they can just pick the whole thing up and do a runner.

 

[Rroff]

The automatic forcing scheduling of updates is one of the most obnoxious things about 10 most of that can be disabled/controlled via group policy editor thankfully not sure if thats available on devices though.

Even with the professional edition disabling updates via group policies there is still some undesirable behaviour from the OS with regard to updates - the only way you can comprehensively stop that which I've found is with Windows Update Blocker - but then you are depending on 3rd party software with the considerations for security and updates to that software if needed with future Windows updates.

But you have to follow that up with Shutup10 really and even then there are various processes which will attempt to auto-update themselves - but at least that doesn't involve things like forced restarts.

Likewise I have no idea why anyone would stand with Microsoft with regard to this kind of behaviour, it is obnoxious and unnecessary and a symptom of clueless and careless developers - so no surprise there are so many security vulnerabilities with 10/11 which should not even exist in the first place.

Half of these vulnerabilities require physical access to the machine. I doubt if someone got to my laptop would be wasting time to hack it if they can just pick the whole thing up and do a runner.

There are few viable remote execution vulnerabilities if you have a half decent setup and those that do exist mostly require a level of effort which makes them unlikely to be used outside of nation state sponsored attacks, etc. but if someone does get one foot in the door i.e. if another local network user has a tendency to execute dodgy email attachments or uses dodgy software, etc. it can be another story again - for example if you aren't on the January this year security patches on 10/11 there are a couple of nasty EternalBlue style vulnerabilities recently discovered and known to be being exploited.

 

[Rroff]

Sigh and now my main Windows 10 laptop after recent updates is exhibiting the autopilot.dll issue causing system lag and crashing... what a shambles...

How anyone can support/defend the utter incompetence at MS blows my mind...

EDIT: Kind of fixed it but I think I need to do an OS reinstall - something isn't right somewhere since the last few updates and it has never been entirely right from the start with the full memory scanner bug - though not sure a reinstall will fix that seem to be a screw up on MS's part they've never fixed.

 

[Rroff]

This is annoying me - since a recent update my main laptop (not the one in my sig) about 1 in 3 startups the system process just sits there using all of one core forever until I restart, causing system lag and sometimes crashes, and I can't narrow down what it is, fairly confident it isn't malware though. Judging from event viewer it seems related to autopilot.dll and the Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant. Typically not a good time to have to reinstall the OS either.

 

[Phil2008]

10 is also quite obnoxious in the respect that if a system is idle for >15 minutes all kinds of background maintenance tasks will kick in causing elevated fan use on the laptops which is just annoying and the mini PCs will sit there using ~7 watt for prolonged periods instead of the sub 2 watts they'd normally use idle.

I have noticed this with win 10/11 , but it could be improving things? Plus win 10/11 doesn't do this all the time.

 

[Rroff]

I have noticed this with win 10/11 , but it could be improving things? Plus win 10/11 doesn't do this all the time.

In that respect I don't see anything where it improves things over Windows 7 which rarely does that kind of thing and is much easier to take control over maintenance tasks, etc. a lot of it seems to be diagnostics/compatibility telemetry deep scanning, preparing for updates, etc. which in theory might improve things down the line but IMO a lot of it wouldn't be needed if they got things right in the first place.

Part of my irritation though is due to a mixture of how often these things go wrong vs how MS have embedded the functionality into the OS - I run around a dozen Windows 10 systems and when stuff is working properly it isn't too bad but there almost always seems to be one system which breaks after an update and starts getting silly busy in the background, etc. (not just post update optimisations - but stuff stuck in a loop, etc.). Probably less annoying for people who have 1 or 2 systems but I spend far too much time trying to troubleshoot issues with 10.

Also annoying how just generally active Windows 10/11 is in the background - my Windows 7 systems have 1/10th the background activity levels at idle compared to when booted to 10 and without a cocktail of programs like Shutup10 it does have an impact on the overall system responsiveness, stability and energy consumption - I have a mini PC with Windows 10 Pro I use for syncing files/cloud backup type stuff and with Windows 7 or Linux on there it idles at 2 watt (or less), with Windows 10 it regularly sits there at 7 watt for prolonged periods unfortunately need 10 on there for the job it does and full hardware compatibility though.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

I have noticed this with win 10/11 , but it could be improving things? Plus win 10/11 doesn't do this all the time.

This may be the .net Framework compiler going at it when idle. What i do once windows is installed and fully updated is to manually run ngen.exe executequeueditems command and have it do all the compiling in one go. Then no more random cpu usage. I run that command after doing windows updates once every 2 months or so. I got auto updates disabled so manually run it once in 2 or 3 months

 

[Rroff]

Spotify now nagging on my Windows 7 systems that the OS is too old LOL... no **** but until MS make an actual good OS I'm in no hurry to upgrade them.

 

[Phil2008]

I have just reinstalled win10 from 11, as I couldnt get apps or Task Schedular to wake up my computer. But I must say windows 10 feels more polished(less anoying small bugs and stuff), plus I have the "never combine taskbar but hide labels" back and a small app that centers the apps on the taskbar.. Being able to the centred the apps, are really useful when you have a ultrawide monitor...

So its not much of a downgrade if anything going back to windows 10, its just not the latest OS....

 

[bledd]

Old hardware, install Debian.

New hardware, jump to Windows 11.

 

[Murphy]

Old hardware, install Debian.

New hardware, jump to Windows 11.

Personally I'd go for a distro that uses KDE but yea, i understand using W7 for legacy software reasons but why anyone would use an unsupported OS when there's Linux is beyond me.

 

[Rroff]

Sigh... so I'm running my backups using a Windows 10 device... when it halts on this file...



This is a file I've compiled myself from source, been copied a few times for backups in the past without flagging this and hasn't been modified (since 2001...), I've verified the file against a newly compiled one just in the unlikely case it had somehow become infected somewhere along the line with a previously unknown threat...

As far as that goes I don't have a problem... but Windows 10 has of its own accord completely erased the file, doesn't exist in quarantine, using the restore option does not make it reappear. Fortunately in this case it is something I can just recompile from source.

Give me Windows 7 any day.

I'm kind of curious what is triggering it as that is mostly stock Quake 2 game logic source code with a few dozen lines of modifications creating new game entities and a bit of vector maths - I don't think it does any external calls/file access at all off the top of my head though it is a long time since I've touched it.

EDIT: Same with the potentially unwanted app allowed - a script I'd created myself which is not malware albeit some behaviour might be seen as such by dumb AI analysis... MS doesn't like me LOL.

EDIT2: And the irony is if I wanted it to be a malicious program...

EDIT3: Had to disable realtime protection temporarily - it is detecting every instance of gamex86.dll that isn't the original versions as shipped by id as a virus despite the fact they are not infected...

 

[Rroff]

Gah just grabbed one of my tablets to do some diagnostics on a vehicle and... ambushed by Welcome to Windows screen with a couple of extra steps compared to previously to skip?!? guess I'm going to have to block updates, etc. on these as well even though as portable devices I try to stay abreast of security updates.

And now it is busy in the background as well making the software I'm trying to use stuttery...

EDIT: For a miracle looks like by the time I'd typed that post out it settled down in the background - often with these situations it decides to sit there for like 30-40 minutes chewing resources...