Why Windows Is So Much Better in the EU [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOQeKeKNXLU

40 50 3 years ago

Another argument PRO big-tech regulation considering Microsoft is willing to have two variants of Windows in parallel, the "user respecting" one in the EU, and the "fuck our users" everywhere else.

latexr• 3 years ago

the "user respecting" one

More like “fuck users to the extent permissible by law”. It doesn’t count as respect if you’re forced to do it.

FirmwareBurner7• 3 years ago

Of course, but there's nothing stopping other countries putting similar rules in place. Brasil also has copied a lot of GDPR. If you install Samsung magician it will ask you if you're from EU or Brasil :)

maxglute2• 3 years ago

Says in the video you need a fresh install. Sigh.

65103• 3 years ago

Would they get away with that?

fuzzfactor3• 3 years ago

One simple but advanced approach is to take a new blank SSD, partition it with a "small" 64GB NTFS volume to begin with, then freshly install Windows 11 to that. There will be plenty of free space to install numerous additional software programs or apps later, as long as you install the software only to your resulting C: volume, while making sure you create well-organized folders on volumes other than C:, to safely store any and all valuable data that you or your software may handle or generate.

With ordinary multipartitioning you can have a number of different volumes like D:, E:, F:, G:, etc on the same or different hardware drives. People should be accustomed to that now that removable drives like USB have been common for so many years. Having a volume other than C: on a Windows PC is not supposed to be confusing like it was when users in the 1990's had to first adjust to the appearance of CDROM drives as D: containing their own separate folder set. It was widely thought, incorrectly for years, that D: would be assigned to a CDROM drive forever. Users already had to become familiar with C: being a HDD and having folders which could each hold more data than a single floppy, plus A: had been challenging enough for floppies to begin with, where most people had no experience ever using a B: floppy drive at all.

OTOH some of the wiser PC users did start out booting to DOS on their A: floppy and directing all valuable data to their B: floppy. Ejecting the B: floppies as they became filled, sometimes even filing the full floppies in physical filing cabinets, then inserting a freshly-formatted floppy into the B: drive to collect more data. A DOS version could then be upgraded by replacing the A: floppy with one that a newer version of DOS had been "installed" on.

So today you would use volumes other than C: to store ALL your valuable data, whether on the same SSD or external.

C: is so special, while also being the most subject to corruption, that it needs to be built and kept in condition to be almost "disposable", to where you can recover from a full backup image or re-install Windows and apps on a whim, as quickly and painlessly as possible. With all your irreplaceable data safely untouched because you make sure that particular type of data is always on some other volume besides C: to begin with. This is nothing new. Some people eventually do come to the conclusion that it does make more sense to have their huge movies taking up all that space in their own "filing cabinet" in their own F:\Videos folder, rather than further bloating their Windows volume deeply tucked away in C:\Users\mindless_user\Videos, or worse, which is where some of the apps are going to shuffle your data into storage in "parts unknown" on C: by default unless you take pre-emptive initiative.

So you don't really want a whole lot of gigabytes for C: when you think about it. Terabytes could really be something to wait through if it went into auto disk checking upon reboot one day.

But you DO want to always install additional software to the C: volume along with Windows, and the default location (usually in C:\Program Files\new_subfolder) is normally ideal for that. Installing Windows apps to other volumes than C: has been possible for decades, still not recommended for the faint at heart who might want to do an occasional backup or recovery.

And you first build C: by freshly installing Windows completely disconnected from the web, using a Local Administrative account only (going without a password can still be considered a secure choice at this point), then meticulously adjusting settings and disabling and removing some things like you would expect with a fresh Windows installation. You may also want to launch Edge so you can adjust its settings before going on the internet too. Even though things will probably update when you do eventually connect to the web, reverting some of your settings anyway, or adding new "features" having undesirable defaults which might need to be addressed.

All of the user-optimized settings you have made to your initial Administrative user are now contained within that one specific-named folder such as C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin.

But any new users you may create on the system will take on the non-optimized settings you started out with by default. Because new users will be based on the contents of the C:\Users\Default folder which is where your passwordless Admin account was generated from to begin with.

If you would optionally like future new users to have their initial settings based on your carefully configured Administrative settings at this point instead, you would have to replace the contents of C:\Users\Default\ with the contents of C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin\ while booted to an alternate volume, or booted to something like the Command Prompt of the Windows Startup ISO.[0] However keep in mind that some of the contents of C:\Users\Default\ might actually be subject to significant future autochanges once exposed to Windows Update if much different default profile parameters are pushed out generally by Microsoft, and there may not be any warning if this occurs.

Before installing any actual software (or maybe even offline drivers) this might also be the first worthwhile time to back up all the work you have accomplished so far. At a time when your Windows is way more useful than it started out when fresh, but still as few gigabytes as it's ever going to be. This is when it's quickest & easiest to backup & recover. Booting to the Command Prompt of the Windows Startup ISO, then using DISM /Capture-Image to comprehensively capture the contents of your idle target partition, in the form of a naturally compressed file-structure-based WIM file. So it's not really a bitwise "partition image" but upon redeployment onto a formatted NTFS volume it ends up acting a similar way, and it's an even more useful recovery compared to bitwise. Might as well consider it a Windows IMage file. You'll have to bone up on DISM only a little bit to accomplish this, becoming familiar with only about 1% of the full DISM capabilities.

Then you can move forward installing your (drivers and) desired software, with further backups of C: you may want as you go along. Make sure you become familiarized with each of the added apps so you can correct any default settings they might have for storing DATA anywhere on your C: volume. Change those default storage locations to some volume other than C: that you control, where you can more sensibly back that data up separately from Windows itself, at different times using different backup methods (even manual data backup becomes easy when stored separately from Windows like this). Plus you may no longer have the drive space limitations you had in the 1990's so you may not even need compression of any kind for very much of anything any more, depending on your situation.

While each app & its settings reside firmly on C: along with Windows, no differently than mainstream users.

Somewhere along the line you will probably connect to the internet, and period-specific updates may compromise recovery repeatability compared to what may be available at a future date, but you can always go back to a previous backup if needed. A 64GB backup or restore requires not that many minutes of data transfer using a SSD. The idea of bloating Windows to the max in Windows Vista after a period of time[1] seems to have first arose in order to discourage rapid comprehensive backups and recoveries which had always been multi-hour ordeals which still functioned unreliably compared to what can be done with great certainty in minutes today.

If you really want to have a repeatable Windows build, you could put icing on the cake by documenting which exact version of Windows you install to begin with, each of the changes to default configuration, installation records of each app install and its settings, etc. With the growing documentation referring to increasingly complete comprehensive backups of your evolving C: volume as you bring it up from scratch in a way that would be drastically less time-consuming during a full recovery than during initial system installation & configuration.

[0] Using the Windows 11 Startup ISO booted to the Command Prompt, where your regular established Windows volume is still routinely autodesignated as C: (even when C: is dormant due to alternate booting), you will have to delete or rename the C:\Users\Default folder (to something like C:\Users\DefaultOrig), then using the Robocopy command seems to work with a minimum of permission difficulties:

ROBOCOPY.EXE C:\Users\you_the_passwordless_admin C:\Users\Default /b /mir /mt /r:0 /w:0 /sj /sl

Use current Windows 11 ISO for this, the /sj & /sl switches were not implemented until relatively recently.

[1] Vista was originally released in intentionally-slimmed condition which allowed "upgrading" XP machines that didn't have very much free space, it was plain to see this was reversed as Vista peaked and it was then tweaked to retain cruft that had been originally excluded. This appeared like an attempt to bloat Windows faster than HDD capacity could increase, maintaing the status quo where many customers who could afford it would purchase a new PC and get going again after corruption faster than they could by attempting hours of iffy recovery trying to get back to what they had. Especially if they lost everything on the C: drive at the same time anyway.

Edit: If you read this far I can only apologize, sorry, no video ;)

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

Yes, although I would not call the EU variant of Windows to be "user respecting" at all. Rather "a little bit less fuck our users, but actually still fuck our users".

rchaud2• 3 years ago

It really says something when your average Acer laptop's bloatware is less obtrusive than the actual OS vendor's.

fuzzfactor3• 3 years ago

You owe it to yourself to use the built-in multibooting capability and have parallel Windows installations on your own PC if you're going to try and keep up.

bmacho• 3 years ago

Wait, is Windows Even Worse outside of the EU?

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

I am in a country where consumer protections are being dismantled on a daily basis - the UK. Linux is still legal but remains to be seen for how long. The government will probably want us to install a backdoor to protect microsoft’s data flow. Pretty rough at the periphery of Europe.

cqqxo4zV46cp• 3 years ago

“Linux is still legal”.

Someone’s been reading too much sci-fi.

automatic6131• 3 years ago

Yeah, must be pretty hard living in the land of "in fear of this scenario I just made up".

FirmwareBurner7• 3 years ago

I am in a country where consumer protections are being dismantled on a daily basis - the UK.

That's what you get when you vote to be freed from the shackles of the biggest regulatory block in the world.

FirmwareBurner7• 3 years ago

No. Didn't you watch the video?

Currently, it's the same shit everywhere, it's not "better" in the EU yet, till the new digital markets regulations kick in in 2024 which will make Windows better for the EU after that.

nly• 3 years ago

Sounds like a lot of people in the US are going to setting their Windows OS to the EU locale.

FirmwareBurner7• 3 years ago

Ha, enjoy 24H clock, DD-MM-YYYY, comma as the decimal separator, along with the Royale with Cheese :)

yasuocidal• 3 years ago

Thats not very freedom of you

the_only_law• 3 years ago

Will I get my seconds counter back at least?

PrimeMcFly3• 3 years ago

Is a 24 hour clock really that common in the EU? I can use both because it's not exactly hard to read 24 hour time, but I have noticed its kind of rare in the US. I didn't think it was common let alone the norm in Europe though.

Edit: Appreciate all the replies, thank you.

ajuc2• 3 years ago

What are the disadvantages?

soyyo• 3 years ago

And adopt the metric system? hell no, I'd rather let Microsoft invade every inch of my house!

By the way, Royale with cheese is not actually a thing across all Europe, in Spain it's called "cuarto de libra" which is the actual translation for "Quarter-Pounder", this made the Spanish translation of that Pulp Fiction dialogue somehow nonsense and made most Spaniards realize where the name "cuarto de libra" came from, before that people usually assumed it was some commercial name without any particular meaning.

PrimeMcFly3• 3 years ago

I don't seem to experience any of the cons listed in the video, although I'm using a modified and locked down (i.e. tamed) version of W10, not 11.

simne• 3 years ago

For me interest, that I remember Windows 95, special, pan-European edition, which was really better suited for usage in Europe, with right coding tables, with better fonts for European languages, with more possible keyboards.

It was possible to add many of these things into American edition, but sure, was convenient to just buy pan-European and have all things already done.

After that I switched to programming, and I don't hear much on localized versions (sough, exists versions, much more localized, with all interface and help non-English).

But now I feel some care from EU, as they pushed on standard interfaces (begins with micro-USB/USB-C for mobile chargers) and on exclude some programs from standard distribution, etc.

Admittedly, this EU activity is not always good, it has to be constantly monitored, but overall it looks like a more realistic way to slow down corporate lawlessness than through non-governmental organizations or through legal procedures.

Why Windows Is So Much Better in the EU [video]

Related Stories