Microsoft Windows Recall, remember to disable it

[pcgeek11]

This will fix it for you.

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[ssokolow]

Well, there are reports now that as of version 24H2, Windows Recall is a mandatory dependency of Windows Explorer. If you disable it (which you can, at least for now), it apparently breaks Windows Explorer and drops it back to the Windows 10 version.

So it's a "way to improve your Windows that Microsoft doesn't want you to know", like disabling your TPM in your UEFI settings to get rid of the upgrade-to-windows-11 nags?

 

[mindless1]

Disable updates before 24H2? That has been my strategy *forever*, not to auto-update, instead wait for others to be the beta testers, and make a partition backup first, in case it needs nuked from orbit.

 

[igor_kavinski]

^^^ Prudent

 

[balloonshark]

I'm honestly thinking about getting a mini-pc and installing a linux distro as my daily driver. I still would have a windows PC strictly for gaming but I no longer trust MS.

Windows is malware.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm honestly thinking about getting a mini-pc and installing a linux distro as my daily driver. I still would have a windows PC strictly for gaming but I no longer trust MS.

Windows is malware.

That's pretty much where I'm at. Linux for daily use, Windows if I absolutely have to, that machine stays off most of the time. Right now I'm running 7 on it but been thinking of going 10, or waiting until I can afford to build a newer machine and put 11. Just so I can run latest games. I don't really game a lot but been feeling the itch to get a bit more into it.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Right now I'm running 7 on it

Keep running 7 or at most, upgrade it to Windows 8.1 with latest patches. It's great. Low resource usage.

Windows 10/11 are horrible, 10 less so but Win10 still was responsible for rendering my Hitachi 1TB drive useless due to heavy paging on 12GB RAM and it would take 10 minutes sometimes for the paging to settle down. In the end, the HDD couldn't bear the wear and tear anymore and I had to retire that laptop. Moved from Haswell to Ivy Bridge coz the latter was a Thinkpad that was easily upgraded to 32GB RAM and 240GB SSD and it's my main browsing machine.

 

[ssokolow]

instead wait for others to be the beta testers, and make a partition backup first, in case it needs nuked from orbit.

That was my strategy for major distro updates on the Linux side too but, now that I've got filesystem-level snapshotting on my boot drive, I'll probably not procrastinate upgrading to the next LTS release and just leverage the rollback-ability of my hourly, nightly, and monthly snapshots on my root partition instead.

No worries. I've got 36 hourly, 30 daily, and 3 monthly snapshots to decide if I want to go back, and my apps shouldn't yell about too-new file formats if I do because they pioneered that "update eagerly, rollback if needed" approach through Flatpak. (Saved my butt a couple of times already with Inkscape crash bugs.)

Heck, I'd probably have been on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS already if I didn't see advice that 24.04.0 was flaky and it'd be best to wait a point release or two.

 

[mikeymikec]

Well, there are reports now that as of version 24H2, Windows Recall is a mandatory dependency of Windows Explorer. If you disable it (which you can, at least for now), it apparently breaks Windows Explorer and drops it back to the Windows 10 version.

Makes you wonder exactly what data Microsoft is going to be collecting in the background, and further whether it will actually be possible to be able to truly disable Recall.

I am absolutely glad that Windows 10 will be my last version of Windows....

That sounds like the Microsoft way of doing things. Frankly I'm amazed that it's still remotely practical to maintain a slimmed-down distribution of Windows given their love for integrating everything.

I guess Microsoft needs a lesson in "where techies go, users often follow".

 

[WelshBloke]

I'm actually liking 24h2 on first try!
It didn't try to reinstall Edge, which surprised me. It added copilot, which was disabled before but it's an app and I was able to uninstall it. There's no sign of Recall at all.
The only thing that it did reinstall that I'd previously uninstalled was Teams but I was kinda expecting a much worse experience of trying to remove stuff!

I mean I've not used it massively since the update but so far it seems fine.

 

[igor_kavinski]

There's no sign of Recall at all.

It needs an NPU to work I believe and so far not supported on any GPU AFAIK, not even on Nvidia GPUs but supposed to be working on that. I guess JenSin gave them a discount on AI servers or something so they announce Nvidia GPUs as the first ever to enable the Copilot+ experience.

 

[WelshBloke]

It needs an NPU to work I believe and so far not supported on any GPU AFAIK, not even on Nvidia GPUs but supposed to be working on that. I guess JenSin gave them a discount on AI servers or something so they announce Nvidia GPUs as the first ever to enable the Copilot+ experience.

Be interesting to see how much that impacts on battery life on a laptop! Obviously on someone elses as I'm never using it!

 

[manly]

That was my strategy for major distro updates on the Linux side too but, now that I've got filesystem-level snapshotting on my boot drive, I'll probably not procrastinate upgrading to the next LTS release and just leverage the rollback-ability of my hourly, nightly, and monthly snapshots on my root partition instead.

No worries. I've got 36 hourly, 30 daily, and 3 monthly snapshots to decide if I want to go back, and my apps shouldn't yell about too-new file formats if I do because they pioneered that "update eagerly, rollback if needed" approach through Flatpak. (Saved my butt a couple of times already with Inkscape crash bugs.)

Heck, I'd probably have been on Kubuntu 24.04 LTS already if I didn't see advice that 24.04.0 was flaky and it'd be best to wait a point release or two.

ZFS?

I'm still on Ubuntu 22.04; haven't decided on the upgrade path just yet.

 

[Steltek]

I guess Microsoft needs a lesson in "where techies go, users often follow".

You are presuming that Microsoft actually has the capability of learning a lesson.

Based upon their proclivity to continually and repeatedly do the same stupid things over and over and over again, I'm not actually convinced that anyone there is even remotely capable of it.

 

[manly]

You are presuming that Microsoft actually has the capability of learning a lesson.

Based upon their proclivity to continually and repeatedly do the same stupid things over and over and over again, I'm not actually convinced that anyone there is even remotely capable of it.

This is overly harsh. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they and Nvidia are the stock market cap leaders currently. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft has any taste, but it does mean that Satya Nadella has been a pretty good CEO.

One thing they have learned over the years is that Linux is very good for their (cloud) business. Gates and Ballmer would have never ever come to that realization.

 

[mikeymikec]

Microsoft delays rollout of the Windows 11 Recall feature yet again

Microsoft works to make Recall “secure and trusted” after security complaints.

arstechnica.com

The "trusted" aspect would be a lot easier to achieve with an opt-in feature and an uninstall option, but cynical me thinks the appearance of trustworthiness is what's important here.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Screenshotting my activities without my consent is never going to be considered “secure and trusted”.

 

[WelshBloke]

Microsoft delays rollout of the Windows 11 Recall feature yet again

Microsoft works to make Recall “secure and trusted” after security complaints.

arstechnica.com

The "trusted" aspect would be a lot easier to achieve with an opt-in feature and an uninstall option, but cynical me thinks the appearance of trustworthiness is what's important here.

At best it's going to be that annoying thing where Microsoft makes me download a massive update, installs some intrusive software with questionable security aspects, then I immediately uninstall it and have to trawl through the privacy settings again to see what they changed. (Then probably leap through lots of hoops to disable a bunch of services that Microsoft "helpfully" added just in case I needed them)

Honestly no matter how secure and privacy respecting it is it's not something I want or need running on my PC taking up resources that I could be using elsewhere. Make it so I can download it if I want it, not force install it them make me get rid of it!

 

[igor_kavinski]

Make it so I can download it if I want it, not force install it them make me get rid of it!

They should do that for EVERYTHING they have ever added to Windows in the past. Things like Windows Live Mail or Media Center got axed despite plenty of people using them. It's like they are not proud of some good stuff they created but then try to push newer stuff with less functionality on us. Points to there being chaotic politics inside their offices.

"oh this and this was terrible. Let's create a whole new cool thing that does even less but has fancy UI!"

 

[manly]

They should do that for EVERYTHING they have ever added to Windows in the past. Things like Windows Live Mail or Media Center got axed despite plenty of people using them. It's like they are not proud of some good stuff they created but then try to push newer stuff with less functionality on us. Points to there being chaotic politics inside their offices.

"oh this and this was terrible. Let's create a whole new cool thing that does even less but has fancy UI!"

"Embrace and extend" Billy Gates once said.

If people want choice, they have Linux.

 

[pcgeek11]

If people want choice, they have Linux.

I agree. That is why I'm all in on Linux.

 

[mikeymikec]

Teething issues apparently:

Microsoft's Controversial 'Recall' Feature is Already Experiencing Some Issues - Slashdot

Microsoft's controversial "Recall" feature (in a public preview of Windows 11) already has some known issues, Microsoft admitted Friday. For example: - Recall can be enabled or disabled from "Turn Windows features on or off". We are caching the Recall binaries on disk while we test add/remove...

tech.slashdot.org

CNBC adds that according to Microsoft Recall "won't work with some accessibility programs, and if you specify that Recall shouldn't save content from a given website, it might get captured anyway while using the built-in Edge browser..." But those aren't the only issues CNBC noticed:- While you might expect that your computer will be recording every last thing you look at once you've turned on Recall, it can go several minutes between making snapshots, leaving gaps in the timeline.

- Recall allows you to prevent screenshots from being made when you're accessing specific apps. But a few apps installed on my Surface Pro are not shown on that list.

- When you enter a search string to find words, results might be incomplete or incorrect. Recall clearly had two screen images that mention "Yankees," but when I typed that into the search box, only one of them came up as a text match. I typed in my last name, which appeared in eight images, but Recall produced just two text matches.

- Recall made a screenshot while I was scrolling through posts on social network BlueSky, and one contains a photo of a New York street scene. You can see a stoplight, a smokestack and street signs. I typed each of those into the search box, but Recall came up with no results...

- The search function is fast, but flipping through snapshots in Recall is not. It can take a couple of seconds to load screenshots as you swipe between them.

 

[manly]

What Could Go Wrong?

Microsoft Recall screenshots credit cards and Social Security numbers, even with the "sensitive information" filter enabled

Despite promising to filter personal data out, Recall still captures it.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Steltek]

It's back.... (in the beta releases, that is, so it isn't that far off).

Windows' Controversial Recall Is Back—Here’s How to Control It

Microsoft's AI-powered Recall feature screenshots almost everything, and if you care about privacy, that still poses a problem.

gizmodo.com

Apparently, it is going to dedicate 150GB of storage to itself on a 1TB SSD.

I guess it will remain to be seen if turning it off ACTUALLY turns it off.

 

[mikeymikec]

It's back.... (in the beta releases, that is, so it isn't that far off).

Windows' Controversial Recall Is Back—Here’s How to Control It

Microsoft's AI-powered Recall feature screenshots almost everything, and if you care about privacy, that still poses a problem.

gizmodo.com

Apparently, it is going to dedicate 150GB of storage to itself on a 1TB SSD.

I guess it will remain to be seen if turning it off ACTUALLY turns it off.

It turns out that Microsoft's way of never annoying anyone with this feature is to keep increasing the system requirements for it to make it consistently irrelevant: PCIe6 SSD required!

I wonder if Recall is what's delaying Win12 development. It seems to me that they're still faffing around with Win11. If so, is the reason for the delay that they kind of hoped to get Recall released and then begin work on Win12 (ie. it's more of a perceptual issue), or whether there are future features planned that require Recall to work. If it was the latter though, that would suggest that Win12 is going to be ARM-focused.