Basically, I have an SSD with two partitions, because I wanted to claim the windows 10 upgrade but I didn't want 10, well decided to move space around so I'd have more space for 7, well the built-in partition manager wouldn't let me do what I wanted because the unallocated space was on the other side of the disk, so I thought "Ahh I have an older version of mini tool, that'll do it" then once things started breaking I went to system restore and all it gave me was "I dunno, I don't recognize this file system" and I thought maybe if I undo my changes but again the partition tool wouldn't let me shrink it to the same size, so mini tool again and great it's even worse now... Surprised it even boots,because explorer keeps crashing every few minutes and some programs refused to start, claiming it was installed on another OS.
Since I don't have a recovery image, I don't think I can I recover it without resetting everything, in which case I may as well just clean install, so what should I go with? Windows 7 or 10? I don't think 10 is worth the hassle of trying to disable everything and I hate the forced updates and I'm not a fan of cortana or some of the other crap that comes with it either, but it does run a bit faster and 7 is getting a bit old. I would like to switch to Linux but I just have so much software for windows it would be an even bigger pain emulating or trying to find alternatives for every little thing.
My understanding is if you allow updates in win7 it gets the same datamining backdated to it as win10. IMO, in this case you may as well use win10. Also any win7 after [IIRC] aug, 2015 is already compromised with the datamining.
Win10 for me means toggling almost everything off from settings, running Spybot Anti-Bacon, and uninstalling Store & Apps, then if Cortana is still there I'm doing extra Googling for removing that.
Then secondly Advanced System Care has nice startup program / process toggles, but can't disable Advanced System Care from it so I uninstall it afterwards.
Nope, I had long since 10 came out set my updates to manual, looked for a list of affected updates, then uninstalled and hid them, so as far as telementary updates go, its way easier to get rid of them on 7.
I also run things such as peerblock and DNS filtering, thus making things even more locked down, but of course the problem there, is you never know what third-party domains MS might own.
I did try everything I could figure out but still mysteriously after I've recorded guitar that YouTube suggests me guitar cover songs, but that could be just concluded from programs.
Also Steam chat creeps similar way that things I haven't looked into and just write there suddenly starts popping to YouTube suggestions, that could be Valve.
Then also as extra creep topic I talked to my uncle IRL did lead YouTube suggest me same topic but for that I may have forgotten some factor, still its getting creepy.
Alright well, I'm re-installing 7 and I've only recently started taking backups seriously, so this time I once I get all the software I want and my system updated I think I'll probably make an entire partition backup so that way I can get going again within minutes rather hours.
