Windows Professional didn't start to include BitLocker until Windows 8. You need Windows 7 Ultimate for that, and that was withdrawn from inclusion with PCs along with Windows 7 Home Premium. Is Anytime Upgrade from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate still in operation?
And sometimes you get law enforcement officers who appear to have forgotten the rules of the road. Today I was in the right half of the through lane of a city street without a bike lane, with a right-turn-only lane (we drive on the right in the United States) to my right. A cop in a cop car pulled up beside me at a red light and told me I shouldn't be on the road because I'm blocking traffic. When I asked for clarification, he told me I ought to be farther to the right or on the sidewalk, and then he drove off. As far as I can tell, the first is illegal because the lane to the right is a turn-only lane, and the second is dangerous because it might cause me to plow into a pedestrian. Was this an attempted entrapment or just what the French call les incompetents?
Other comments to this story imply that you can't turn everything completely off without buying Windows 10 Enterprise.
things i do want:
[...]
Removal of all phone home code
For that, you're probably going to have to switch to GNU/Linux. Phone home code was introduced in Windows XP.
Removal of the "app store"
Do package repositories on GNU/Linux distributions count as an "app store" to you?
That's really annoying if I'm shutting down to go away for a while
That's what suspend is for.
or because of storm activity
That's what your computer's battery is for. Put it in suspend and disconnect the charger from the mains.
Just put a RED WARNING security patch update icon on the task bar or something.
I've seen people ignore six-month-old red warning icons.
but instead we dismiss linux and its advocates and such with slurs like "freetard" or "SJW" or "fedora" or "PC".
I thought Red Hat chose the name "Fedora" for its community distro and IBM chose the name "PC" for the model 5150.
Legitimate businesses can get a lot more failures to conduct business, since customers would not always have the card ID ready at hand.
That can be handled with an awareness campaign analogous to the We Card program, building an expectation among citizens that if you're going to subscribe to porn, you're going to need to have handy a means of age verification.
just asking the question above does not create a bunch of opportunity for credit card fraud.
But it does create a bunch of opportunity for the government to shut down your business on grounds of not taking legally sufficient precautions against underage access. It's a balancing act of liability for credit card fraud vs. liability for fines for noncompliance.
I hope that what you're missing is the businesses that supply professional laptops will continue to offer them with Windows 7 and no junkware for the foreseeable future.
I don't see how they can continue to do that lawfully. From Windows lifecycle fact sheet: "End of sales for PCs with Windows preinstalled [...] Windows 7 [...] October 31, 2014"
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
