Coming soon to a body near you…after taking control our your PC, Bill Gates has his eyes on our biological system, playing again the good cop/bad cop game of viruses and vaccines he developed with Microsoft foundation and his friend Fauci.

I am still using the Win 7 OS. I have been very protective of it and have managed (thus far) to block efforts by MS to replace it with Win 10. My wife has a laptop running Win 10 and I have had just enough exposure to it to know I don't want it! If at some time MS manages to replace my OS with Win 10 or something else, I will probably move on to one of the Apple products. As mentioned above, Win NT was a great system, perhaps the best thing Microsoft ever produced.

The were a good OS of the era. The bad guys now know how to penetrate it however. It is not a supported or secure OS. It is your computer, and your data so it is all your risk.

I use Win 10 pro, and update it as soon as the updates are out. I prefer to stay current.

You're jumping ahead.

First, define what's "spyware" and what's being done now and let's see if there's a consensus what is and what isn't.

No ads as far as I can tell on my machine.

Bloatware, I give you that, but the rest does not follow as far as I know. Do tell if that's a misconception. Always eager to learn, not a tech "guru" by far.

There is usually an easy "opt out" for the non tech savvy consumer for those features which an average non tech savvy consumer can disable without any bad side effects. I just showed you one in my previous replies, with a few mouse clicks.

Those in the latter category wanting full control of the product are not the non tech savvy consumer.

Gotta draw the line somewhere in that spectrum of usage.

Is there a line within that spectrum ? Let's start with that question. From what you said, it appears you don't think so and hence this discussion thread.

Make sure it isn’t used for any business transactions since that will expose your customer’s info CC etc to hackers as well.

Use whatever you want, just stay up to date !

I should again add that Microsoft is only catching up with the other two players. They are far worse.
It's time to re-draw the line in the sand.
I'll start with the basic suggestion that spyware would be any undisclosed usage monitoring, any personal/proprietary data capture, and perhaps any other data transmission that does not specifically relate to the upkeep of the software itself as intended.
This is not my final answer and I am not a techy.

The subject is obviously complex, but every EULA term should be speeled out in simple layman language.
(most of these are written in vague legalese innuendos which basically say "We can do anything we want and you can't sue us, so there.")
Anything not specifically "opted into" should automatically be considered a breach or violation of contract or another description.

Now you are just being coy Mr. Gates. Bloatware is commonplace, begrudgingly accepted, but that would be a very good start.

It might be excused as "Oh it's only 5% of resources running in the background and the average consumer never notices it anyways".
But what if it was not?
What if it was 95% of resources? Is "the line" more opaque at that point?
What if it significantly shortens battery life needed for emergencies?
What if it leads to denial of usage of the product and/or deviation from an expected lifespan?
Maybe the computer only lasts half as long, and works half as well.

And yes...even Win10 crashes as I've found.
Many non-OS programs will restart on their own after being terminated. i.e. the virus reference.
Many services can not be terminated.
Many of the same can affect function and frame-rates which may cause epilepsy.

The goalposts get moved again. There shouldn't have to be any two-tier description of people using the term "tech savvy". Grandma and da haxtor should have the same rights when they open the box, IMO.

Thanks to this thread I was able to get rid of (IE, turn off) that news window thing on my wife's computer. It must have been a 'feature' that hasn't been able to install on my machine.
Thanks guys.
I Appreciate the help!