I never thought of it as salesy before, but I can see that.

They are not selling anything. The tool is free to use. The playbooks are free too. Or you can make your own, but I’ve never done that.

I’ve used this since I learned about it on multiple machines, and never need to think about it again other than when recommending it.

Probably the only “bad” thing is you need a legitimate, activated instance of windows.

I hear you on the phone number thing. That’s another stupid thing I don’t really do. I have a separate VoIP number that I use for any business I need to deal with. No way are they getting my real number.

And speaking of friends and their apps and my phone number, I rarely give anybody my phone number too. I don’t need it being harvested by the load of apps they have installed. You’re only as strong as our weakest link, and most people don’t give this stuff any thought.

I’m coming from the same place. My windows updates are off (that’s one of the mods that ameliorated makes) and I have not had a problem with it for a few years now.

I’m not saying that windows should be the choice, but I am saying that when I have to use it (there are legit reasons) then my ameliorated version is fantastic.

I use windows at work daily so I am very well aware of out of the box experience. No way I would ever use that for my personal computing.

Ameliorated is something I always recommend and it sounds like while what you are doing is pretty good, there are some shortcomings. I don’t know, maybe ameliorated won’t work for you either, but its worth a try.

Company apps.

Every business you deal with has an app these days. Grocery stores, restaurants, etc… Just install and scan to get your discounts and track your points. Yeah… No thanks.

The most viable option is to manage your own firewall and block the outbound traffic. Only suggesting as a work around for those that want a robot vacuum.

I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.

I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.