Welcome to /fwt/ - Friendly Windows Thread

can I get away with a 4GB usb for a bootable LTSC media or should I just scavenge for an 8gb?

Just turn Windows firewall off entirely. Every router and gateway from the past 10 years has a firewall built in anyway.

Why don't you try it?

My 10 installer takes 3.87GB.

Hey, does anyone have a list of the Scheduled Tasks one could safely disable for a home PC?
I've been using this list of services for a while and everything's working correctly so far.
pastebin.com/H9cCBZ2D

ESD format compression will get the fattest WIM under 4GB. It just takes a while.

havent updated my windows 7 in many months, is it fine if I just select all of the important updates in pic related?

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>many months
>security updates from 2014
Um... might be an idea.

CUTE

>64bit torrents

Nixfag here, my life is a living hell.

What do I do.

Windows LTSC.

>windows 7 updates to avoid
>KB2970228 - Update to support the new currency symbol for the Russian ruble in Windows
What have you got against rubles, OP?

Is it possible to completely disable all the tracking in Windows 10?

Russian botnet.

I firewall the system services in question. Simple and effective - I don't know why it's not suggested more often.

yeah i'm sticking with windows 7.
i'd rather just make a new build for games.

See ya in five months, then.

I've done some testing myself.
In a linux VM, I captured packets for the following:
I ran the Optimize Win10 script on W10 Enterprise ISO (non-LTSC)
Used WPD, disable and block everything
Disable Background apps and Game Bar.
Test:
Left it running for 72 hours while idle.
It attempted to connect to outside servers, which belong to MS and/or akmai about 300 times (down from 4000+ when I did the test with regular W10 without WPD, telemetry set to basic)
I ran some W10 programs like paint, onenote, calc and Office apps after idling.
Every attempt to connet failed, blocked via firewall so I consider it adequately blocked.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence so believe what you will, though you could easily run a similar test yourself.
I don't like W10 for many reasons but I don't consider it a privacy risk when set up like I did.

>which belong to MS and/or akmai about 300 times
Most of those would be fishing for Windows updates.
This is why I still like MS NetMon 3.4 - you can see which processes/services are generating the packets, and firewall them if you don't like what you see.

>Most of those would be fishing for Windows updates
Maybe, though I did completely disable automatic updates via group policy, as well as delivery optimization and defender sample submission.

>completely disable automatic updates
>via group policy
Like telemetry, it doesn't work like that.
Completely killing BITS (as long as nothing else is using it) and WUAUServ is a much better choice.

I see.
Though telemetry never claimed to be able to be disabled in the GP descriptions, the wording is confusing but it's always going to be either Basic for non-enterprise and Securtiy for enterprise, whereas Configure Automatic Updates does claim to disable it, and if you launch the update app it says automatic updates are turned off.

In my experience, Windows is able to "remediate" disabled Windows Update. I'm not sure how though, I recall seeing somewhere it's a Scheduled Task. But since I don't disable WU in the main, it's not been a high priority for research.

probably connectivity test. it loads a txt from ms servers to detect free wifi pages and the like automatically, like how android does

Why did the new Windows update just shit all over my pc?

Because you didn't do it from a nice ISO, or back up first. Nor did you have:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"DisableOSUpgrade"=dword:00000001 in your registry, so it just trucked over the top of you.

Because W10 updates do nothing but break things.

Should have thought of this one. It pokes msftconnecttest.com every 60 seconds or so IIRC - so there's your 300 hits overnight.

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Ah, that probably is the case. Good to know that it isn't trying to do anything malicious, even if it was being blocked anyway.

Best part? This also has Group Policy options to control it.

and if you happen to have a server and a domain you can also host your own connectivity test server, and make windows use it with registry keys

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does a linux host run a windows vm faster in terms of disk speed/program execution speed? or is it the other way around?

How to stab it in the throat:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NlaSvc\Parameters\Internet]
"EnableActiveProbing"=dword:00000000
Note that it will make the Network icon in your taskbar tray go a bit odd, reporting "No Internet access" from time to time - this is a (rather obvious) side-effect of not letting Windows check.

It'll also stop the automatic start of your browser if you connect to (say) wi-fi with a captive portal on it.

ok anons
I installed Debian as dual boot on my ssd drive with win10 and I don't like it anymore.
Can I boot windows install disc and let it fix mbr so grub no longer loads? I want to delete old linux partitions and resize ntfs to original state. will windows fuck this up or no? I am too lazy to make clonezilla backups

You are exactly correct. You may have to do it at the PE command line though - something like
X:\>bootsect.exe /nt60 c: /mbr
will do the job. Once that's done, boot into Windows, delete the "unknown" partitions, and resize.

thanks

Here's my question as a Windows noobie:

Why the fuck would you ever use Windows?

Note that your C: drive has a tendency to move around in WinPE. Make sure you're targeting the right drive.

I'm running Win 7 POS Ready and I want to pair my PS4 controller to it. How do I achieve this via bluetooth? It seems that POS Ready doesn't even have the bluetooth application.

So "System" ie ntoskrnl.exe is randomly hogging most of the CPU. How do I troubleshoot this problem? I've already applied win10debloater script on windows 10 enterprise and disabled win defender; since it has no specific name unlike windowstelemetry.exe or defender.exe I've no idea where to start

check if you can install the bluetooth component
theres that windows select features and components thing

could be a driver, or a program that invokes syscalls that are ran in System context... Basically you're on your own.
You can use Process Hacker to see a stacktrace of kernel threads

not in POS Ready, it just says the administrator disabled Features. was I meme'd by Jow Forums into installing this shit?

tfw no email field

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There are third-party Bluetooth stacks.
Windows Server doesn't have a (complete) Bluetooth stack, so I used Toshiba's stack. Give that a shot.

set `HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Programs\NoWindowsFeatures` to 0

try elbacom.com/manually-adding-feature-packages-to-posready-7/
you'll probably need winemb-wireless.cab

is there something like SmartSteamEmu for those windows store xbox whatever games?

I'm about to install Windows 7 Professional.
Do I need to enable any updates? Will be using 3rd party anti-virus.

What was that site with all the links to Windows ISOs on that site in New Zealand?

use enterprise atleast
and yes, security updates are really important

Why the fuck can't I remove the US keyboard layout?
I'm from the UK I don't NEED the US layout. I've removed it from the layout from the settings but it still randomly decides to swap to the US layout and I can see both UK and US listed if I windows+space.

This is seriously driving me nuts.

What happened to The Eye, why is it so unreliable now?

is LTSB good? I want to use it to reduce bloat

You sure it's not the ISP blocking p2p?

help. why the fuck is windows freaking out about file associations all I did was install ltsc.

so I run a OMV home server and just yesterday built a new pc, had to install w10 on it
yesterday it hooked up fine with the omv, but today it doesn't see it in the network at all HOWEVER I can still use files from it, like music in the player is all from OMV and it works, if I choose a song and go to open containing folder I can open OMV location and from there browse OMV smb shares just like I normally would.
Why isn't the server appearing in wondows network explorer? Did two windows reboots so far and it haven't clicked yet.
Or is SMB fucked like it was in w7?

Never mind I finally got ti to stop. Had to copy user settings to new accounts and welcome screen. Can't even get windows+space to swap layouts anymore.
So god damned stupid.

I'm following the LTSC optimization guide in the OP and when I try to target the .iso's folder using W10UI I get an error saying "Specified location is not valid"
Any idea what's causing this? I have the path typed correctly, and it works when I target the updates folder for the updates option. Sorry if this is a simple fix, I'm not too great with this stuff.

Not him, but would Ultimate be okay too?
I've already downloaded it and some Daz shit -- I just need to pick up a HDD.

ah fuck nevermind, I forgot to extract the .iso like a retard

How hard would it be to force reloading HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map without reboot?

read OP paste, daz shit doesn't work with UEFI, and ultimate doesn't support KMS
ofc if that's not a concern because you're installing BIOS, then it will work fine, features are the same

You confused me for a second...
I was just wondering about the features of Ultimate vs. Enterprise. I know the activation methods would be different between the two and that I got Daz for the Ultimate version.

Have you considered the Surface Go?

who /cmd.exe/ here? I find Powershell to be very bloated, confusing and slow. I guess it's better for scripting (cmd was never good for automation besides very simple scripts), but for interactive use I find it much less comfier.

You mean turn it off entirely... TO TROUBLESHOOT.

see if yiu turn the whole thing off, then the software works you've found your problem. Add the proper rules then re-enable the firewall. If you disable it and see no change the issue is something besides the firewall. There's no need to retardedly disable components. "windows is dumb just disable it" and then you'll be back in here bitching AD doesn't work BITS doesn't work WIM doesn't work, it's all part of a network stack. You'll get similar issues disabling IPv6.

Easiest way to free up space without having to go through files individually?

Disk clean up... Windirstat has a GUI to Identify large directories.

Do a blank search that will return everything, then sort by size.

in powershell, is it not possible to set alias for a command with arguments or a one liner script for example
alias for a command like "python shit.py"
it seems like I can only set alias for simple commands without any arguments and stuff.
for now what I do is, I put all that one liner in a .ps1 script file and set-alias to that script file, that works but is inconvenient.

just make a function?

yeah I did some googling again, that alias in powershell are indeed not like bash alias
and functions are the way to go,
but like bash functions are still not like that, for example in bash if you
alias PENIS=ls
you can easily do penis -a
but in powershell functions I would have to handle arguments myself that sucks but maybe I am wrong

Give to me straight, is windows 10 even worth upgrading from windows 7?

Which version of windows 7 is the best? Home basic, home premium, professional or ultimate?

depends on how you acquire it

What causes stuff to appear in "recent files?" It seems pretty random.

Can you elaborate?

the thread that killed /fwt/

I have a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro, on the Xbox(Beta) app, when an achievement unlocks, it shows the notification but doesn't show the achievement image upon unlocking. How do I fix this?

bump

Does anyone know any small portable program to combine multiple png files into a gif?
Nothing too bloated like Photoshop or GIMP, if possible.

Starter and Home Basic are for shitbox laptops and desktops respectively.
Home Premium is a subset of Professional, which is a subset of Ultimate.
Notable features of Professional are domain join, Group Policy editor, Remote Desktop hosting, and Windows XP mode (intended for line of business applications). Professional also adds support for low end server hardware (two physical processors and over 16 GB of RAM).
Ultimate is basically the retail version of Enterprise. It's not terribly beneficial outside of a corporate environment unless you have a laptop that you really want to secure with BitLocker, or you need a language pack because you can't find a copy of Windows in your preferred language for some reason.
In summary, unless you're a fucking nerd who likes to role play as an IT professional in their spare time, you probably only need Home Premium, although definitely get at least Professional if you have over 16 GB of RAM.

I'm pretty sure ffmpeg can do that.

good thread

Cancer thread

Here's your (You).

I was following the Optimize-LTSC guide and I got these errors when it got to the enable/disable windows features section

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature : The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
At A:\Optimize-LTSC\Optimize-LTSC.ps1:941 char:5
+ Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Path $MountFolder | Select-Object -Pr ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-WindowsOptionalFeature], COMException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Dism.Commands.GetWindowsOptionalFeatureCommand

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature : The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
At A:\Optimize-LTSC\Optimize-LTSC.ps1:872 char:5
+ Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Path $MountFolder | Where-Object Stat ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-WindowsOptionalFeature], COMException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Dism.Commands.GetWindowsOptionalFeatureCommand

Get-WindowsOptionalFeature : The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
At A:\Optimize-LTSC\Optimize-LTSC.ps1:851 char:6
+ If ((Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Path $MountFolder -FeatureName *SMB1 ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-WindowsOptionalFeature], COMException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Dism.Commands.GetWindowsOptionalFeatureCommand

I'm not sure what process would be using the file since optimize-ltsc was the only thing running. Everything else worked fine except the features though.
Is there a way to fix this or change the features on a live version? Also, I don't know if this matters but I ran all of this on a win10ltsc vm.