For 90% of the world, Powershell commands is a big hassle. Saying 'You can use a non-obvious workaround that requires IT knowledge' proves my point.

Here's hoping that MS is as responsive as Google. But given their track record, I wouldn't bet on it.
Re: Updates
1) It happened once, it can happen again.
2) It's completely unacceptable that it happened once. Bugs happen, but this is absolutely something that MS should be testing for, and MS handling of the issue post-discovery did not instill confidence that they're taking customer concerns seriously or even understand what those concerns are.

This is not OK for something that a business depends on. Especially when it comes to data collection - I know people worried about privacy violations because of regulations that their business is subject to. Yeah, there are people out there fearmongering, but this is a legitimate concern that MS has repeatedly refused to address.

Baking a service into the OS and making it a default isn't a good idea for a lot of reasons. The OS assumes that you're using it and acts accordingly. Last I checked, even if it's not used, unless it's blocked from the internet data is transmitted. Probably harmless, but we have no way to tell, and MS keeps refusing to give users control.

I've used Android phones for years, and even Google isn't as pushy as MS has been lately. It would be interesting watching this role reversal, except that this is the possible future of computing we're talking about, so actually it's disconcerting.

For 90% of the world, OneDrive integration in the OS is not an issue.

See? I can make up percentages on the spot as well.

But no, Powershell commands are not a big hassle. They are not even necessary, as a quick google search of "Windows 10 remove OneDrive" shows. You can uninstall OneDrive, assuming you can spend about 2 minutes looking up how to do it.

The Powershell method is cleaner though, and the preferred one, but not the only one.

And with the quick look I did, OneDrive is not integrated in the OS. It's just preinstalled. Windows 10 should work just fine without it, and can work just fine without it.

Pedantry is a bad look on just about everyone.

Rephrase to avoid stomping on your delicate numerical sensibilities: For the vast majority of people, Powershell is not something they know how to use, and any process that relies on it is not a viable recommendation for a typical computer user.

For that matter, most computer users don't know how to remove a program installed on the computer (this is why app stores are so popular). Which is why it's important to make developers provide clear explanations of why a thing exists, what it does, and how to get rid of it. User education would solve so many problems, but nobody is really doing it, and MS seems to be deliberately obfuscating.

If MS had included a 'Here's our services we included, here's what it does and how to remove it' section during the install process. I would be much less irritated. But they didn't, at least not when I tried to install on a test machine. So there's a lot of guesswork, people are confused and upset, and it's all due to bad MS choices. OneDrive might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but pushing a paid service on people is not acceptable behavior for a company with near-monopoly positions.

I'm just surprised no one's gotten legal action together, given MS' track record and the Snowden revelations. I suppose the EU is too busy trying to get Google to bury their corruption scandals, but I would have expected some rumblings by now.

Thank you, so allow me to rephrase as well.
For the vast majority of people, OneDrive integration in the OS is not an issue. Especially since it's not integrated, just preinstalled.

I quite agree on this part, even if what it is we should be learning is not the same.

With the exception of how to remove it, they do have a bit of a blurb when you first run OneDrive about how to set it up. I think it also has a blurb when running Office and trying to save something for the first time, as well as when you take a screenshot. It may not show that blurb if you set up the machine with a Microsoft account, but I'm not sure about that, since I've always used a local account.

But seriously, removing OneDrive from Windows 10 is quite easy. About the same difficulty as setting up a printer or a modem I'd say.

Speaking as someone who just had to walk people through adding the office printer, I think you are seriously overestimating how easy people find that.

For us, it's quite easy. For Typical J, who thinks of the computer as a magic box that does things, it may or may not be easy. And there's no way to predict, really. Our 70 year old is a lot more tech savvy than several of the middle age or younger people at my office.

The problem with blurb-starts-on-running-X is that when X is part of the OS or comes preinstalled users never have to actually run it, but it's still there doing things. So the blurbs really need to come during setup.

OneDrive is a small thing, yeah, but it's part of a pattern that includes larger issues, and is very worrisome from the perspective of maintaining a small business office. Enterprise customers will just get the Enterprise edition, but that's not an option for us.

Same difficulty as "Press Win+R and type %systemdrive%\system32\onedrivesetup.exe /uninstall"? You may need syswow instead of system32, depending on whether you run 32 or 64 bits windows, but that is all that's needed to uninstall OneDrive from Windows 10. Having them choose the proper printer may be harder.

You mean the Typical J or the 70 year old is setting up their own machine? Or do they have someone set it up for them? If they do set up their own machine, well done, they are apt enough to do a google search if they find something they don't like. If they have someone else set it up for them, they have someone to ask about "what is this thing here" who should be able to do a google search for them.

I've been in the small lab IT position, and I know how it is to handle multiple machines to do multiple things. And what I've found so far is that it is quite possible to do whatever it is you want to do on Windows, even with the Home editions. Assuming you are willing to spend some time reading the documentation and/or forums.

And if you do need to deploy Windows on multiple machines, it may be worth it to take some time and customize the image you'll deploy, especially if there are stuff on them that you know your company won't need.

Small lab IT != small business IT, if I'm understanding what you mean by that correctly. It's not getting multiple machines to do multiple things (not sure what you mean by that, really), it's having to get users to successfully interact with technology day in and day out when I'm the only IT person here, I don't have total control, and half of my day gets taken up with managing projects, server admin, etc.

I'm sure I can do everything I want - that's not the point. The point is that I have a limited amount of bandwidth, my users have a limited understanding of technology, and I have to prioritize. Taking time to read documentations/forums for Windows upgrades would be nice, but I'm already doing that for server admin, hardware purchases, project management, computers currently failing, NAS support, stats programming, etc. I'm pretty typical in the breadth of my responsibilities afaik for organizations of this size, and I think this is the demographic MS is currently failing at managing.

Home users are not on MS' radar at all sadly - I think Win10 would be a better product if it could handle the flexibility to cater to basic users as well as power users - Enterprise edition exists for a reason, but the Professional Win10 edition doesn't actually address the needs of small business IT and it's frustrating.

About Typical J - at home, they'll be setting it up on their own and then it's a bigger problem. In the office naturally I manage that. Looking back, I switched perspective on you there. But I think home users are important to consider.

Yes. The lab had about a dozen computers of varying ages, and about that many users as well, and I was responsible for making sure those computers could interact with each other and the users could as well, along with stuff like backup, applications and security. They were a sub group of a larger institute, but I'd say a dozen computers is about the size of a small business.

Server administration should also cover deployment and customization, at least from what I was reading back when. Unless of course you have someone else set up the server for you, in which case you ignore the deployment and only focus on the customization.

I actually found that most of the stuff that applies to Enterprise edition can also be used in Pro and Home, with very few differences. Group Policy not being so easy to deploy on Home, but Group Policy is one tool that does the job other tools do as well.

You probably meant to type something more here. No worries either way.

What you described doing is not even a quarter of what I do. I'm not saying this to be rude, I'm saying it so that you understand where I'm coming from and how it differs from your experience.

You were in a single lab, doing onsite support with the backup of an institution and all the perks of dealing with a small number of highly educated user, plus a pretty small number of PCs. It sounds like you were mostly responsible for on-site PCs that were focused on internal use, and did not do software development or server/website admin? Also, I'm guessing limited invoicing/financial/privacy-regulated stuff, and limited responsibility for offsite computers or conferences.

I'm dealing with ~25 PCs on site, ~5 offsite, mix of ages and various operating systems (we are standardizing on Win7 because that's the majority), along with whatever phone trouble people are having. Onsite NAS, 2 offsite websites written in different languages on different servers with different OS and backends (different consultants built them). Developing the software we need, which runs from adhoc Python scripts to programming datasets with statistical languages to all the typical web programming languages to trying to reverse engineer ancient stuff written in C++, or managing the people who are doing the nitty gritty of dataset coding. Managing the IT side of data collection, hardware purchases, supporting users of the site, developing documentation and training videos for inhouse and external users.

Yeah, that last paragraph should have been longer. I lost my train of thought. I'm on the forum to distract myself from my rage at offsite server support #1 - these are the people who suggested we use static HTML and I think COBOL for our website - because they've just told us they're going to change our server again and don't have a timeline, and it could disrupt our users or not. yaaaaaaarrrrrgg.

While the backup of the institution was there if things got way out of hands, the "highly educated users" was not always a reality. No software development or web server, and I was lucky enough to not have anything to do with the invoices, even though I was given the tour of how to do them, if needed.
Yeah, the lab was not the same as a small business, though I do want to think it could be considered a smaller one.

But I do feel your pain for the rest, have done enough of those to know the pain :/

Pre-post edit: Ouch. I'm not sure, but I do think a boss that understands what they've told you should allow you to bring a bottle of booze at work.

I'm LDS, otherwise yeah, that would be tempting. But hey, we get donuts pretty often and the office is 10 minutes from my place, so it works out.

I just - these guys, they're nice, but dang it, ongoing education and actual timelines are important. I have to keep troubleshooting their server issues for them. We've finally developed a decent working relationship, but every now and then I just get mad.

The thing is that most small businesses now have to have a website, and have a PC for each employee, so 12 PCs and no web/server stuff is on the very small end. And what I'd give to have somebody backing me up on things like hardware choices and managing the 8 different projects we have going on right now. It's not that any one thing is too much, but sometimes all of them simultaneously make me feel like I'm drowning underneath this huge pile of hats I have to wear, and I know I'm not alone in that.


EDIT: Add tracking down compatible ink cartridges to that task list.

ouch, please dont bit my head off, i was merely stating welknown fact.
there are loads of users who love win 10 but also loads of users who stay clear from win 10.

Many topics are telling that windows 10 behaves like a judge, it scans all your pc drives and even networks according to lots of posts (take a week off and google for it and you'll be amazed)

So dont believe all mickeysoft tells you, always be alert, cause the funny thing is that loads of people complain about drm in music , movies and games, but they install win 10 without hesitation.
So if you install the uber win10 that checks all your stuff like a bezerker, then why do lots of people nag and complain about DRM ?

I dont like drm so i can have my doubts on all that data collection stuff as i want, i also dont trust mickeysoft. and dont believe all that nonsense about the fact its all to protect us the poor users from cyberharm.

is the current Windows 10 EULA. There is no section 7b. The EULA was updated on July of 2015, the article you linked is from 7 months ago (August). The EULA they mean is [url=https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/]this one, which was published on June 4 (why did they need 2 months to read it?), and it covers the "consumer products, websites, and services" listed here. You'll notice that "Windows" is not part of those services, though quite a few apps are.

As for games needing Securom or SafeDisk, it will need a signed driver. The ones supplied with the original discs are unsigned, thus Windows will reject them (and rightly so). If you do need to run them, there are tutorials out there for how to sign them.

I'll second what JMich said above about the EULA being updated and whatnot. That said, you may not have crashing problems. However, some of the lovable Windows population does, and with the usual mentality of "what, program X failed to work? damn you windows!!" I think they are just in trying to put their userbase up to date than to deal with a mess of Windows OSes, and also to bring the users up to date with security patches and whatnot rather than let them taint the image of Windows security when their system is most probably unpatched. That's the point here.

I stopped reading all those articles about telemetry and GWX, because they all sing the same tired song, so I can't tell what's the big deal with their latest iteration of these articles.

As for the article about DRM (I'll admit by saying I didn't read it either), this has been expected of DRM to begin with. They'd fail in the future. It's a good thing the workaround is as JMich says, but naturally, your real problem is in SecuROM over Windows 10.