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Windows Microsoft

Windows 11 Now Comes With Its Own Adware (engadget.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the no-place-to-run dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: It used to be that you could pay for a retail version of Windows 11 and expect it to be ad-free, but those days are apparently finito. The latest update to Windows 11 (KB5036980) comes out this week and includes ads for apps in the "recommended" section of the Start Menu, one of the most oft-used parts of the OS. "The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps," according to the release notes. "These apps come from a small set of curated developers." The app suggestions are enabled by default, but you can restore your previously pristine Windows experience if you've installed the update, fortunately. To do so, go into Settings and select Personalization > Start and switch the "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions and more" toggle to "off."

Windows 11 Now Comes With Its Own Adware More | Reply

Windows 11 Now Comes With Its Own Adware

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  • Install Enterprise/LTSC (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Install Enterprise/LTSC and activate with a chinese KMS server or Microsoft Activation Scripts. You're welcome

    • Isn’t Enterprise Windows a subscription model with a minimum number of seats ? That's a hard no if it is.

      • Yes, it's a site license model where you pay per seat with a rather large minimum number of seats. But the commenter you're replying to is telling you to install it and activate it using illegitimate servers. They're advising people to replace their (presumably OEM-licensed) copy of Windows Home with a pirated installation of Windows Enterprise.

        • Which is undoubtfully a true crime against humanity. Oh, the ruthlessness, the cruelty! There's poor Microsoft carefully improving peoples' computers with advertising, "telemetry" and unwanted crapware to save their developers' children from poverty and starvation but these ungrates have nothing better to do than changing from one paid license to another. What would Jesus say?!

  • I toggled Windows off. I also bought a mac mini.

    • So now you're getting higher prices whenever you try to buy airline tickets on Expedia, or toilet paper on Amazon? Asking for a friend...

  • Once again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @12:46PM (#64421402) Journal

    This is why I don't use Windows at home.

    After W7 I went to Linux and haven't looked back. It's bad enough I have to put up with Microsoft's excuses and incompetence at work, I definitely don't want to deal with that at home.

    • I tried for a number of years to convert - too many missing drivers, too many text files to be edited with VI.

      That's no longer true, it's equivalent to a Windows install now. If you can handle one, you can handle the other.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmccue ( 834797 )

      For home use Linux is the way to go for non-developers. But most of those people moved even to a worse system, Cell Phones. The spyware on Cells make Windows look like a locked down NSA System.

      With that said, I do not like the direction of Linux these days, I have been evaluating the BSDs for the last few years and I have to choose between 2 variants when I decide to move off Linux.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not new, Windows has pretty much always been like this. The default install of Windows 95 came with a load of crapware and offers for dial-up internet. Which was actually kind of funny, because Windows 95 didn't have a firewall so if you did dial-up, you were pretty much guaranteed to have your machine p0wned within seconds.

  • Windows 11 start menu was ad/spam ridden from day one.

  • Whenever someone says "curated" watch out! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "These apps come from a small set of curated developers." In other words, developers who are willing to pay for the ad space.

  • It's pretty rare I open the start menu for anything.

  • I'm convinced that for the past couple decades Microsoft has been secretly run by someone who made a bad deal with a genie, ended up cursed, and is purposely trying to tank the company to get out of it. But nothing they're trying is working as it should, and they sweat as they look at the marketing research.

    "Come on! Come ON! They're buying Vista? VISTA?! My God, what else can I even DO?"

  • Just an other reason to use Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SysEngineer ( 4726931 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @01:25PM (#64421566)
    Microsoft wants your money!! they will create incompatibilities(DrDOS), lie (Fear Uncertainty Doubt, FUD), and charge for security.
  • I've been saying for years, to paraphrase: “Windows 11 is an ad delivery service, given away as shareware.”, this new Microsoft BS, takes that statement and doubles down on it. Windows 11, or Windows in general, is meant to be an Operating System, which means after installing it, I should only have enough tools and applications to get going. Anything else is my responsibility, including making sure I have the licenses I need to use the products.

    Go and grab a professional Operating System like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Solaris, FreeBSD, or several others and install them, what do you notice? What you'll notice is that bloat, and the crap, are gone. When I open the application's selector in Gnome 46 on Fedora 40, what don't I see? I don't see Ads, I don't see links to download applications with privacy abuse records that make North Korea smile, I just don't see garbage. I might see LibreOffice installed, I'll see some default applications that range from good to “why, I guess.”, but I don't see useless, pointless, nonsense crap.

    To paraphrase another quote I say often: “Windows is for people who pretend to do work, Linux / Unix are for people who have to get work done.” Microsoft keeps position Windows as the OS for laughs and to be discredited, and it's discredited, it's one step away from door knocking to explain it's a child predator (and it is a predator of children).
  • Any bets on how much MS will charge to turn ads off? $50 a year? $200 a year? Will it be a tiered system in which you pay more and more money to have MS analyze less and less of your data?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Any bets on how much MS will charge to turn ads off? $50 a year? $200 a year? Will it be a tiered system in which you pay more and more money to have MS analyze less and less of your data?

      You didn't read the whole summary. It was one fucking paragraph and you couldn't even manage that.

    • Re:The Price to Turn off Ads (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Torodung ( 31985 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @02:03PM (#64421736) Journal

      Whatever. TFS, the summary, tells you how to turn it off. Nobody with an ounce of intelligence lives with ads in Windows 11.

      Excepting maybe the start page on the Settings app. That has ads for OneDrive, Office365, and Copilot. Know what I do with those? I ignore them and get my shit done. Hell, I have to scroll the page to see Office365 and Copilot. And the OneDrive ad just tells you your cloud storage isn't working.

      Does everyone have ADHD or something? Do you have tardive dyskinesia and suddenly jerk the mousewheel? Just ignore ads.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        i do appreciate linux users who are perfectly fine with hours of text configs and bash prompts to get their system "just right" could not be assed to find and toggle one setting

        • If the setting I toggled maintained the state I set it to, then I would have been far less inclined to switch to Linux. But at the time I migrated to Linux, Windows settings that I explicitly changed had a way of consistently finding themselves back to a state that Microsoft seemed to prefer. It happened often enough that I no longer felt like I was in control of my computer, so I switched to an alternative that respected my wishes. Maybe MS doesn't do that as much these days, I wouldn't know, but at thi

      • Whatever. TFS, the summary, tells you how to turn it off. Nobody with an ounce of intelligence lives with ads in Windows 11.

        Umm... how long do you think the ability to turn it off will be available? This is Microsoft putting their toes in the water. They learned from Palladium that you can't just wholeheartedly force such evilness upon people. You have to do it slowly.

        Now, every computer has Palladium but Microsoft lost a key part of it: They are not the sole entity allowed to specify the certificates. They will not make the same mistake with the ads. The money is too important.

      • Whatever. TFS, the summary, tells you how to turn it off. Nobody with an ounce of intelligence lives with ads in Windows 11.

        That is until MS changes that in the next update. The setting might be moved to an obscure area or a Registry key setting. Given the history of how MS has pushed Windows 11, I think this is likely.

        I have Windows 10 Pro and when Windows 11 came out, I had to opt out of an automatic upgrade once. Somewhere along the way, MS changed the behavior of Windows Update. Automatic updates used to be for security and critical updates. MS started adding "Feature Updates" that did things like install Edge as your prima

    • Presumably it would the average price they would make from you if you didn't turn it off. That's logical, so therefore, probably not really a good guess either.

      HOWEVER, we're seeing this in the EU right now with Facebook. Fwict, Facebook, because of new EU regs, is offering people this deal: pay 250EUR or you get advertisments. Again, my assumption is that 250EUR is approx break even point for FB advertising...

      I don't use FB and don't even like them, but to be fair there are expenses to providing services.

  • Well, at least (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @02:07PM (#64421758)

    "switch the "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions and more" toggle to "off."" - well, at last until M$ turns it back on whenever they feel the need to do so, or worse yet, removes the option. Switch to a different OS people, it's the only option that can't be manipulated by M$.

  • IT guy I worked with years ago was more right than we knew at the time. He always said, "Windows is a virus". M$ certainly seems to doing their level best to make good on that sentiment.

  • What is this ignorant bullshit (Score:5, Informative)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday April 24, 2024 @03:13PM (#64422018)

    No Windows 11 does not "now" come with adware. That feature is old. It predates Windows 11 itself. Even Windows 10 was putting recommended apps (ads) in the start menu. And the toggle to turn it off and on dates from Windows 10 and was brought over in Windows 11.

    I can't wait for the writer to go outside when it's raining and declare "after 40 years in journalism I just discovered water makes things wet!"

  • They want people to leave windows, and they're desperate for people leaving windows. This is why they're doing everything in their power to make windows as terrible as possible.

    • No, MS just believes they have the market so cornered and their customers are so complacent that they can inflict anything onto them and they won't lose any significant marketshare. And based on many statistics, they seem to be mostly correct.
  • I'd love to see Ubuntu take out an ad that states something like "Hate Ads Like This Infecting Your Computing Experience? Ubuntu Has No Ads and Fewer Distractions!"
  • I first read the headline as "Windows 11 Now Comes With Its Own Adventure".

    And I thought "oh, a Windows-native version of Adventure [wikipedia.org] would be neat to try out." Then my brain caught up with my eyes and was disappointed. I'd much rather have Adventure than Adware.

  • ... look for the "disable" solution and move on. The article tells us how to shitcan this feature. That's what we did with copilot and all the other bullshit since Windows became viable back when Moby Dick was a minnow.

  • But in line with their overall product quality and respect for their users.

  • I was pushed an update to W11 on my work laptop some weeks ago. Due to the industry I'm in, our security and lockdown policies are actually reasonable, despite really tight. Use a USB stick? Disabled. Local admin? Forget about it. Ransomwareattack? We consider ourself a target, so we have the procedures to handle it the day it happens. But with W11, it suddenly comes with an endless list of sponsored links to God-knows-what in that extra menu, just waiting for a vulnerability to pop up. The typical MS "we
  • This is not new. Just disable the recommendations and move on, just like with 10

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