#Remove bloatware

[mtariqniaz]

How to Offer Tech Support to Your Older Relatives

We’ve all been there. The phone rings, you answer it, and the next 45 minutes of your life is spent trying to talk your grandparents through how to set up a Zoom account on their PC or install WhatsApp on their mobile device. By the time you’re done with the experience, you either failed to resolve the issue, or you successfully fixed the problem and now your elderly relatives see you as a CIA…

[lesbian-gamer69420]

day 3 of having moved back to windows 10:

1. dear god help me

2. yay!! no more compatibity issues!

3. bill gates can suck my ass I'm gutting this operating system so it'll bend to MY will.

that all said, it connected to my microsoft account and threw in a whole bunch of garbage folders and such, I dont know how or why. It also should NOT have been able to do that, I wanted a clean installation and did not get it which is lame, but also... were my files IN the cloud? without my permission? or consent?? windows really is a privacy nightmare no matter how you cut it

[imsodishy]

is this supposed to be a solution to my problem?

'hey, you know that app you use a lot? it's not working good 🫤 I dunno, you should probably stop using it'

what ever happened to troubleshooting?

[randombitsofrandom]

Reblogging incase I need it one day

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

[hawkelf]

The absurdism of "if you buy our newest phone we'll buy back your old phone for $400" immediately followed by "if you buy this (one model older than newest) phone we will not take your ancient, nasty phone >:("

[throwawaytabs]

im so hilariously bad with computers holy shit dude

[barrymccaulkinem]

i get so fucking angry having updates forced on me. i own this thing. im happy (enough) with the code it has. fuck all the way off. why the fuck would i ever believe it will contain an improvement? when was the last time anything got better?

[rainbowgod666]

(Sharply inhales) A-

Conservative: Capitalism gives us so much freedom!

Capitalism: Pay to eat

Capitalism: Pay to drink

Capitalism: Pay to have a roof over your head

Capitalism: Pay to get medical help

Capitalism: Pay to have a social life

Capitalism: Pay. To. Stay. Alive

Conservative: I'm so fucking free, y'all.

[mey-rin-is-fabulous]

While I'm on the idea of surprising media giants that don't have their own independent wikis. Independent meaning not affiliated with that fandom wikia crap.

Trekkies what the hell are you guys doing over there there's only one independent wiki and that's for Star Trek Online.

[mobile-services-center]

No doubt that you need to know how to remove bloatware from a rooted Android device. Bloatware, also known as pre-installed or system apps, are applications

[mclalan]

Can you share what your art-making process is? What software and tools do you use?? I'm falling in love with your work!!

Thank you, I'm so happy you like my work and are interested in the process. The short answer is I mostly use Adobe Animate.

I hate how I'm using an Adobe product (although I still regard it as a MacroMedia Flash product), but there's just no other software that compares to its jankiness. Perhaps it's just my long familiarity with the program, but nothing I've experienced matches how it simultaneously feels like drawing in MS Paint and using Microsoft PowerPoint vector shapes. The result is something that feels in-between the two; handmade yet computer-generated.

Typically, I'll start with a hand-drawn sketch, often beginning as a thumbnail done with pencil and paper.

I'll then do a mix of hand drawing and vector shape tool rendering. I use the Paint Brush tool to hand draw strokes, and the line and shape tools mixed with transform to make more geometrically accurate shapes. The design is rendered into divided closed loop shapes, ready to be filled with a solid. The strokes are kept or removed depending on the design.

These fill shapes are then either coloured and rendered in Adobe Animate, using fills, gradients, or a more complex process of masks and effects.

Alternatively, I'll bring all these vector shapes into Photoshop and use them as clipping masks. The vector shapes act like masking taped areas or shields to maintain sharp edges, while the brush is like an atomized airbrush used to build soft volumed forms.

Please excuse all that horrible Adobe Cloud and AI bloatware...

And there we go!

Variations in the process include just using MS Paint, index color in Photoshop, or 3D programs.

Very old works of mine were almost abstract, just exploring digital mark-making, which was a trend I was following in the mid 2010s that I loved. This kind of stuff.

While my current work uses its digital material specificity as an intermediary to the subject in the illustration.

For example, #ersatz.world parodies clip-art and flash edutainment styles but imagines the characters living within that kind of world. The designs are meant to be cute, easy to read, light in computer processing, but also irreverent, janky, and generic too.

People typically regard this sort of clip art style as ephemeral trash, but I always found them charming. I use Ersatz World primarily as a satire vehicle, parodying educational formats to spoof corporate explainer content and digital media.

However, part of the problem with Ersatz is I've made it look too polished, complex, and I've grown too attached to the characters, which I imagine is a typical issue with overbuilding a world. So recently, I've made an even jankier Ersatz-like set of characters to play about with, using an even simpler style with less cohesion. I like to try and use slightly different styles and digital material styles to relate to the property at hand.

That’s why #autonymus has a bitmap digital material and a denser feel to it. Unlike Ersatz, Autonymus is not meant to be an overt semi-meta fiction. It’s not exactly pixel art, but the pixels are just about visible, as the intention is to create a digital expressionist depth to the setting. Although it’s still stylized and not realistic to our world, I definitely still want to evoke semblances of our world. That’s why there’s attention to landscape, plant life, and implied life beyond what you see in the frame with the characters, etc. But I'm still making a cartoon, and I still want it to feel at ease with itself being a digital material work. Characters are therefore flat, simple, stiff, and the speech style is like a bad Shakespeare parody. I like to balance between ugly and appealing, simple and complex, familiar and unfamiliar.

In regard to things like inspiration, references, and my relationship to aesthetic genres; these things certainly factor into my work, perhaps I'm even overtly dependent on them. My work can definitely be post-modernist in method; creating new, ironic, or fragmented interpretations through deconstructing a mix of various styles or methods. But at the same time, I'm still trying to make a digital gestural representation where the aesthetic is driven by my relationship to the software and techniques directly—not simply in an attempt to reference a style. For example, I like drawing lines in sweeping strokes, not to a point of geometric perfection, but just in a way where the curves are smooth and simple. But if I want perfectly curved or straight lines, I'll use the vector tools.

Working this way, you can sort of learn why certain styles and design choices in past vector aesthetics were made, as they would have also needed to make similar choices. That’s why I’m more mindful of using digital material specificity as a foundation to build narrative and subjects upon these days.

For example, genre references like cyberpunk clichés for #cyberhell or late medieval design for #autonymus or 2005 to 2015 era subculture fashion for #gradientgoblinz.

I think it’s important to take inspiration and reference from a wide variety of sources, but I think they’d mean nothing without having something to say or express. Autonymus, although it is a collection of tropes and clichés, isn’t just about that. It’s a story about the tensions of socially constructed systems and how that shapes faith, technology, and the natural world, or at least that's what I'm aiming for anyway.

But despite all that, I think there’s a danger of locking myself into the past by using these methods. For example, using nostalgia and references to past aesthetics can result in just recreating the past in a form of role-play. To avoid that, I try and evoke the past through a messy, inaccurate pastiche rather than caring to accurately re-enact anything. I’m probably not always successful at communicating the deliberateness of this, and it can certainly get very frustrating and pedantic. To be honest, I do kind of hate aesthetic labels (terms like Y2K, global coffee house, utopian scholastic designs from a pre-9/11 world).

I do not believe that a project aimed solely at mapping history through aesthetic styles is worthwhile. Sure, they can be handy for organizing style trends, but they can also be reductive and ahistoric. Who are these people to define the history of these design eras? The result is a kind of suffocating simulation of design history but removed from context, perfect for moodboardism. I wish it felt more tongue-in-cheek, less absolute of itself in its own practice. Instead, it acts to legitimize and engender those making these labels, almost giving them ownership of the design styles. It’s similar to the logic and process of generative AI and its databases in a way, just done manually.

I’m very inspired by artists like Oneohtrix Point Never in this regard, as I think he’s able to create an aesthetic portal to all kinds of memories, feelings, and worlds reminiscent of the past, while still being in the present. It’s more a reflection of how timelines are messy now, like a memory or dream, rather than an audacity to say the past was actually like that, or to try to actually map some kind of timeline.

I think the benefit of this process is how it avoids the other side of the spectrum—being locked into chasing the cutting edge of digital processes. I don't necessarily think using an old digital process means your work inherits the semiotics of old aesthetics. Non-digital mediums don’t have this issue to this degree, as you can still paint in oils and be considered contemporary, or at least it's not frowned upon to such a degree. And I also don't think anyone in the heyday of Flash ever made work the same as I do, especially as computers are more powerful now so can handle more. I probably shouldn't boast too much about that though, as artists at the time probably just had more sense than to use Flash like a painting program! So then, why is my use of Adobe Animate critiqued as obsolete and an aesthetic dead-end? Because to whose standards is this process obsolete? If you value digital aesthetics as an apparatus in industry practice, then sure, my work is redundant.

But as wonderful as the latest tech can be in creating new aesthetics, I do feel it can be overtly dependent on the trends and directions of tech corporations, and therefore act as an indirect propaganda tool to their hegemony over digital aesthetics, such as the ever-demanding processing power needed for simulated realism. If anything, work that does follow in the direction of the latest tech trends is ironically the quickest to date once the trends move on.

I've noticed I've not really described what my work is about, just the process, in this text. But I don't know, maybe I like Flash because it is regarded as redundant. No one really cares about it, so I feel free to make whatever I want, and can decide on form myself, to my own standards, the quality of my work. As fun as making images is, I find it difficult to put into words what it is exactly I'm expressing in my work, and perhaps that would spoil it anyway.

[carro179]

If the problem is cause by Microsoft themselves and I can't bypass it their offices WILL explode, personally

With each passing moment I spend having pc problems I bet 0.0001% more annoyed at Microsoft. When it reaches 100% their office will explode. This will not take as long as it might seem

[dragonmarquise]

How to Deal with Windows 10/11 Nonsense

This is more for my own reference to keep all of this on one post. But hopefully others will find this useful too! So yeah, as the title says, this is a to organize links and resources related to handling/removing nonsense from Windows 10 and Windows 11. Especially bloatware and stuff like that Copilot AI thing.

First and foremost, there's O&O Software's ShutUp10++ (an antispy tool that help give you more control over Windows settings) and App Buster (helps remove bloatware and manage applications). I've used these myself for Windows 10 and they work great, and the developers have stated that these should work with Windows 11 too!

10AppsManager is another bloatware/app management tool, though at the moment it seems to only work on Windows 10.

Winaero Tweaker, similar to ShupUp10++ in that it gives you more control over Windows to disable some of the more annoying settings, such as disabling web search from the taskbar/start menu and disabling ads/tips/suggestions in different parts of the OS. I think ShupUp10++ covers the same options as this one, but I'm not entirely sure.

OpenShell, helps simplify the Start Menu and make it look more like the classic start menu from older versions of Windows. Should work with both 10 and 11 according to the readme.

Notes on how to remove that one horrible AI spying snapshots feature that's being rolled out on Windows 11 right now.

Article on how to remove Copilot (an AI assistant) from Windows 11. (Edit 11/20/2024) Plus a post with notes on how to remove it from Windows 10 too, since apparently it's not just limited to 11 now.

Win11Debloat, a simple script that can be used to automatically remove pretty much all of the bullshit from both 10 and 11, though a lot of its features are focused on fixing Windows 11 in particular (hence the name). Also has options you can set to pick and choose what changes you want!

Article on how to set up Windows 11 with a local account on a new computer, instead of having to log in with a Microsoft account. To me, this is especially important because I much prefer having a local account than let Microsoft have access to my stuff via a cloud account. Also note this article and this article for more or less the same process.

I will add to this as I find more resources. I'm hoping to avoid Windows 11 for as long as possible, and I've already been used the O&O apps to keep Windows 10 trimmed down and controlled. But if all else fails and I have to use Windows 11 on a new computer, then I plan to be as prepared as possible.

Edit 11/1/2024: Two extra things I wanted to add onto here.

A recommended Linux distro for people who want to use Linux instead of Windows.

How to run a Windows app on Linux, using Wine. Note that this will not work for every app out there, though a lot of people out there are working on testing different apps and figuring out how to get them to work in Wine.

The main app I use to help with my art (specifically for 3D models to make references when I need it) is Windows only. If I could get it to work on Linux, it would give me no reason to use Windows outside of my work computer tbh (which is a company laptop anyways).

[model-theory]

Reminder to my Windows users to get Winaero Tweaker and spend some time going down the list removing annoying stuff from Windows. Also get a bloatware removal tool like bloatbox or Windows10Debloater to get rid of the random annoying programs installed automaticall.

Winaero Tweaker especially can stop adverts in the windows search bar, remove all online links, disable Cortana, and implement many more QoL improvements.

[taigacryptid]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy. stop using amazon and audible (owned by amazon).

use firefox. stop using chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers).

use mega and stop using google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

get more of your media and resources for free. use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb (owned by amazon).

use storygraph instead of goodreads (owned by amazon).

prioritize mobile games with a good score on darkpatterns, don't let mobile games waste your time or money

read factual news and spot news media blind spots/biases on ground news

use services like mediahuman or cobalt to download music. stop using spotify

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

buy new and used books from thriftbooks (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

save money on games, and play archived/defunct games on flashpoint

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

instead of adobe, create and edit pdfs using pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app)

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

instead of gmail, use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail.

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice!

last updated: dec. 3rd 2024

[virtualgirladv]

robotgirls who came preinstalled with lots of bloatware and are in the process of removing all of it, literally bit by bit. am i onto something here

i too am worthy through therapy