Hi all,
is there a sure fire way of locking down windows 10 from Microsoft's prying eyes? I have heard about things like DWS (which apparently still can't disable telemetry properly in windows 10) and blocking dns requests via the router.
Andy
AFAIK there isn't one sure-fire way to stop them short of removing the network that they communicate with the mother ship, ie your internet connectivity, maybe some day the folks at MS will pull their head out of their ass but I'm not too hopeful that will happen anytime soon.
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Thanks for your reply! That really sucks. I have been tempted to move over to a linux distro full time, but that has a host of new problems for me. Which include software support and poor game performance (esp on AMD). Should I revert back to windows 7? (loose dx12 but I can disable telemetry).... Or should I just use windows 10 and let MS perv on me?!
if your willing to. you could run a windows vm with passthrough to performance for your games. you can also block telemetry at the vm level too.
I suppose this might be a good option. The only problem is hardware support. I don't think I could do that with my sandy 2500k. My board has vm support though. Does it work very well?
Andy
2500k does not support vt-x.
It supports vtx but not vtd which is needed for pass through
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Nope your 2500k won't work, but to answer you other question...yes it works very well as far as running Windows in a VM/KVM, my Fedora based system runs a KVM with Win 7 and hardware pass through, it works well enough that I just finished Fallout 4 after a few hundred hours of game play, it's not without it's glitches but works well enough for my needs.
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That's great to hear Blanger! I might be interested in trying a similar setup. When you say glitchy, in what respect?
What cpu would you guys recommend?
There are known issues running a KVM with hardware pass through, without hi-jacking the thread (there is a lot of information already here on the Tek in multi threads) but sound latency if you share a sound card between the host system and guest is one of the biggest issues, basically you have hardware/resources that are given (bound) to the guest system when you start that OS running in the KVM so they are unbind-ed from the host system and bind-ed to the guest, then when the guest system is shut down the resources are re-bind-ed to the host, too much of this type of activity in a given session will cause instability in the host system. Physical hardware pass through eliminates some of this by removing the hardware from the host system altogether and setting it aside for only the guest to use, but there are resources like CPU cores, memory, PCI, USB buses and devices that can be shared either virtually or physically which adds a little complexity to the mix.
Another point is that you need the hardware and systems resources to basically run two computers in one box because that in essence is what your doing running a KVM with hardware pass through, so that means you need two of everything you want to share be it a NIC, video card, drive space, sound card, etc. You have to have enough memory and CPU cores to share between both to keep both systems satisfied and stable, it's not really something you do on a whim, but rather plan out and buy the necessary hardware to make it all work so you wind up with two robust and stable environments to use.
KVMs with hardware pass through can be accomplished in a lot of different ways with varying results, it has a learning curve that isn't a real big hill to climb but does have it's pitfalls, with each new Linux kernel it gets easier to accomplish with more stability and support, as you saw your 2500k will not work so supported hardware is the first hurdle that has to be crossed, and then not every Linux distro has the same level of support for KVMs..., like I said lots of research and reading then trial and error. lol.
Hope that helps...
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Thanks for such a detailed reply :) I'm really grateful that you took the time to right this post. And I now have a basic understanding of what I'd need to do. I'm a techie sort of guy and this seems like something I would like to try. I'll have a look around the forum as you suggested to get some more ideas. I do use linux on some of my systems.. ubuntu/mint generally. I have only recently started to look back into linux again, due to privacy concerns with companies like MS. Plus I don't like the direction they are going with windows. So i'll probably have to jump ship at some point. I feel linux is starting to mature and get some much needed support.
No problem.....it's a topic that is near and dear to my heart, I spent a lot of time and effort to get mine to work and at the same time moved to Linux from a lifetime of using Windows, so I had a lot of things to learn, and I made lots of mistakes but once you have a successful pass through to work with building KVMs is easy using QEMU and virt-manager. I just upgraded my host a week or so ago from Fedora 22 to ver 23 and it broke my stable KVM, took me a day or so to figure out how to get it back up and running correctly. One thing I do is that my KVM runs all the time I don't start and stop it and that seems to help both the host and the guest remain stable.
Anyway when your ready start a thread and there are several of us here on the forum that will be glad to help you over the humps and bumps of hardware pass through.
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You went straight to a Linux KVM from Windows?!
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Yes...... I guess I don't have to say I devoted all my spare time to learning, and I've been on Linux almost a year now (end of this month I'll complete the 1 year challenge) as my daily driver I got the KVM worked out 3 months after the switch, took 7 tries building KVM's after I figured out the pass through using pci-stub (easiest method IMHO) and I'm on my 8th version now, I just ordered a USB sound card to fix the latency issues I've been dealing with for over 6 months, but yeah I jumped in with both feet and didn't look back, today there is no going back to windows other than running it in a VM or KVM for me.
I guess I should also say that this was my intent from the beginning last year was to switch to Linux and run windows in a KVM, I built my current computer for that specific purpose, I was forewarned about Win X very early that I'd want to move off the platform, I trusted the people telling me this and made the necessary changes and learned what I needed (I'm still learning everyday) but it's not like I made the switch then decided to do a KVM.....I had a plan and stuck to it.
Now I'm trying to help others in my circle of friends that are wishing they would have listened, several have moved to linux but are not really ready for the pass through because of their need to upgrade hardware.
Technically speaking i think its allmost impossible to stop windows10 telemetry tracking.
Unless you simply disconnect the system from the internet.
It really bugs me that people seem to ignore the direction that the world is going in. Privacy is important and we should value it more. It should be optional what we share with others!!
I agree.
I dont say that all the telemetry tracking that MS is doing is bad persee.
I have said this a few times before.
I dont have any problems with MS doing some telemetry tracking on users who have upgraded for free.
They use those users as beta testers basicly.
Trowing a few ads on them maes a bit of money.
But the main purpose of the telemetry tracking should be about diagnostics and improving the product.
But i do have a problem with all the telemetry tracking they do on users who exaly pay for a pro license for example.
Users who pay for a license, should basicly have the ability to choose whatever they want, or not want to share with MS.
I also have a problem with its intrusiveness.
I´m currently refuse to use Windows10 just because of those principals.
But Windows10 is basicly a very good OS on its own.
Just all the telemetry tracking, spying and intrusiveness just makes it an OS that i dont wanne use.
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This is exactly how I imagined the Microsoft Windows Development.
Vista Release:
- OMG everyone hates it! We need to fix it now!.
7 Release:
- Everyone loves it! Lets try something new and we will call it 8. Everything is going touch right?
8/8.1 Release:
- Shit man, everyone hates us again, maybe this time we should release something with a lot of user tracking features so we can make our OS great and do no wrong.
10 Release:
- Huh, everyone hates us more now, well WTF does the people want if all they do is complain.
Personally, I like 8.1. I never understood why everyone hated 8.1 purely for the UI. The UI was fine since it was still manageable with tweaks and applications.
if Microsoft took windows 7 and 8.1 and married them together with out the telemetry of 10 it would be a perfect system IMHO. windows 7 didnt get me until SP1 came out before then i was a vista user granted i had to do a lot of tweaks. but for the most part the only windows OS's i cant stand are 8/8.1, 10, ME other than those 3 i cant really bash microsoft to hard.
I think it was the changes to the UI in Win 8 that people really disliked, they helped solve that with the start button on 8.1 but the user base was already upset, myself I have always liked the Win 7 UI and in my personal opinion if they would have just kept that interface as the default desktop UI then added the features and upgrades most folks would have been happy. There is no reason in my mind that both UI's could not have been offered, if you like metro then make it your default, if you like the Win 7 UI then make that your default, a little variety would have went a very long way in providing customer satisfaction.