Due to the fact that I absolutely hate Contana and the way Microsoft collects data about people, I was curious if there was a good way to remove Cortana without harming the way Windows 10 works? Or should I consider buying a copy of 7?
You can remove Cortana from the taskbar easily enough. Removing her completely, I dunno.
Just right click her and hide her, if you don't want the bitch down there....
If you have an MS account you can sign out of it and that will turn off Cortana. It cannot be uninstalled as it is part of the OS. Disabling it is about the best you can do atm. For the Win10 Pro you can do this...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3109900/software/you-can-remove-cortana-from-windows-10-but-its-tricky.html
Take a look at majorgeeks under System Tools>Windows 10 Fixes, you should find something there to do what you want.
I don't trust or use Cortana, either, and rely on my own wits to remember appointments, etc. In fact, I use Win 10 like a regular OS, without the apps and other crap it comes with. All that got uninstalled or hidden very early in the piece.
Should've called it "Katana" instead
I checked the link and there isn't anything there to remove Cortana. All you can do is disable it.
even if you can uninstall it, chances are it'll install itself again every month
really? This far in to W10 and you would even think about moving back to a system that is falling farther down the support chain? Not logical at all..
I just purchased a new retail copy of Windows 8.1 last week for a brand new computer. Don't regret it even slightly!
And you can upgrade it to 10 for free.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgrade
Well there used to be. I haven't checked lately, but I used to run a program from there that uninstalled Cortana. However, it could be that the latest updates to Windows, and thus Cortana, have rendered such fixes inoperable, and therefore it has since been removed.
I did that because some of my [paid for] programs were updated on Win 8.1 but would no longer work on that OS.... even when using 'compatibility mode'. Not that I like Win 10, but it was my only option if I wanted to run those programs. Thing is, Cortana is a data miner that sends all sorts of information back to MS, and I'm not at all comfortable with that, so I disabled it immediately upon installing Win 10 Pro on this machine... which apparently will have to do now.
As for Win 7, well I no longer have a copy to try my updated programs on, and there's no way I'm paying for an OS that'll lose support sooner rather than later.
brand new as in couple of year old hardware (pre-skylake) or brand new brand new? because.. you might have heard that ms has stopped providing any sort of patches for win 7 and 8.1 for anything newer than skylake... as well as some skylake machines
https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/windows-7-8-old-cpu-updates-blocked/
brand new as in couple of year old hardware (pre-skylake) or brand new brand new? because.. you might have heard that ms has stopped providing any sort of patches for win 7 and 8.1 for anything newer than skylake... as well as some skylake machineshttps://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/windows-7-8-old-cpu-updates-blocked/
I have W7 on my machine and it still gets all the patches/updates.
Same here on my Windows 7 Ultimate.
Brand new as in Ryzen 7 1800X, so it will have that issue. And yes I did/do know that will happen in the future. It hasn't as of this time yet though, and of course it isn't like I can't upgrade to win10 at that time. When that time comes I will just have to make a decision; run without updates, upgrade to Win10, or upgrade to Linux. It could be pressure will have caused MS to change their stance on data collection by that time, and Win10 will make good sense then. For now, I'm good. I'll be hurting on games that do Directx12, but not Vulkan at some point. But as of now, I don't run any games that I need to worry about that.