I have a spare PC in my brother's room for coop play and watching stuff together (I bought it to make coop in one room a simple matter), but recently he was busy with university and I was busy with work, so for about a week it went ignored (and it was constantly switched on). I went to it today, and found it had installed windows 11 without my permission. I tried to use the downgrade function, but it looped permanently on one window; restarting my PC the hard way did not fix that, it was constantly booting to the same loop. I constantly shut it down via the power button trying to get it to stop or to get a different screen to show and now I'm worried I may have damaged my PC. I managed to finally get the option to boot from my USB and installed windows 10 to a separate drive; yada yada yada, I reformatted my PC to do a clean install of windows 10. I'm now going to have to reinstall my antivirus, malwarebytes, VPN, VLC, Steam and the app that automatically checks what your hardware is and installs the latest drivers for them (can't recall its name currently).

I really hate Microsoft and their disgusting practices, I'm really, really annoyed with them right now (and please, don't tell me to get Linux, it's not gonna happen).

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    If you're not going to use Linux, at the very least use a Windows package manager like Chocolatey

    After you set up Chocolatey, to install what you need, you just need to open cmd/powershell in admin mode and run

     choco install malwarebytes vlc steam-client [other apps here]
    

    to install them on your PC instead of hunting each exe file individually. To check for upgrades, just run

     choco upgrade all
    

    Not everything is on Chocolatey, but almost everything I use (notepad++, windirstat, autohotkey, paint.net) is on there: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=

    • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I only learned recently myself, but the guy that makes Notepad++ is really anti-China. There are a bunch of versions with names like "Tiananmen June Fourth Incident Edition" and "Free Uyghur". Not that downloading freeware supports him in any way lol, but I personally decided to start using a different program after I found out