Windows 10 Telemetry (a personal testimony)

First off I want to explain my level of expertise, none of what I know is certified and solely learned the hard way by being first a PC gamer and now rendering since the late 90's. Tired of paying for replacements or repairs early on I realized that I needed to be able to support my PC habit or quit. So I learned how to build, repair, and maintain my own systems and networks on my own the hard way with many mistakes along the way and have seen nearly everything break in a pc at one point or another. I admit I am mostly a hardware guy and know software enough to get the things done I need to and can do journeyman software repair (malware removal, registry repair etc). PLus I have over fifteen years tech support experience in an unrelated industry which is only important to illustrate I have alot of experience with troubleshooting.

Do take what I say with however many grains of salt you wish.

I have a modestly decent system for CG rendering, here are my specs:

Gigabyte socket 2011 motherboard

Xeon E5-2620 v2 CPU

EVGA gold 1050 PSU

32 gigs of DDR3 1600

GTX 980 ti

GTX 970

I have been having a great experience and am an early adopter of Windows 10 with the above system. During installation I turned off all the tracking stuff and all the advertising and privacy stuff, and it has stayed off for my btw even after the many updates since the upgrade.

Overall experiance with this OS has been very positive first off, the task switcher allows you to open as many virtual desktops as you wish, you can easily close tasks with it (no more ctrl, alt, del to get to the task manager). Plus there was a noticeable performance improvement (I just recently added the second card AFTER the Nvidia mulit card glitch was fixed) in render times, around 20 %.

Here are the things I feel are issues:

Updates need to be more informative, they are not telling you whats in them and that is something they need to correct if they are going to not allow you to manually update.

Edge browser needs extensions badly, but Microsoft has said they are coming next year, still I dont use it because no ad blocker.

Now as for the main reason for this post is because I finally had a BLUE screen not long ago. There was a picture of a sad face and the message said Windows was sending info back to Microsoft then the message changed to say that Microsoft was repairing my registry, along with a counter from 0 to 100%, when it got to 100 it rebooted. It rebooted no problem and I went to Microsoft to ask someone about what happened, about them collecting the info and the repair.

They told me that this is what the telemetry is supposed to do, to help you in crashes like I experienced, and that no personal information was collected. I also do not use my Microsoft universal account to log in, I still use the same logon I used for Windows 7 so that along with turning everything off during installation protects my identity from them.

So for those concerned about privacy with Windows 10, here are the steps:

During the upgrade use the 'Custom Install' in small blue letters over to the left of the BIG 'Express Install' button they want you to press. Then TURN EVERYTHING OFF that you see including the Edge Browser as default unless you want to keep it as default but if you turn the default setting off your current browser will remain default (Firefox for me), anything you want on you can go back to turn on later if you want. Do not tie it to your Microsoft account either, and you should log on just as you did with Windows 7 if that is what you had, if you are on Windows 8 or 8.1 and do not use a local account to logon (in other words you logon with the Microsft account) then this probably won't work as it will find the master account and log into it for you.

For Windows 7 users who upgrade this way and do not tie into the Microsoft account, the con to this setup is you will not be able to use the Store or the Movies and TV apps or other services without tieing in to your Microsoft account first and therefore you will not be able to use the Univeral Apps either, just so you know. There is a trade off to doing it this way, but it's just like Windws seven was before just now its Windows 10.

If you decide to take the leap, Nvidia has released many driver updates already, the multi card issue is fixed, and the other bugs and missing drivers are getting worked out already. The first big update is coming next month already too.