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Comment by Jemm | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see an ad in the start window. Yes it is anecdotal but maybe my experience is more current.

I work at a MSP and install Windows almost daily. On most systems, I install Windows Professional version 1903, the latest version. On all of those, Candy crush, Skype, One Drive, Office, and a myriad of other App Store apps autoinstall. Each of those are basically ads for paid products. This is on the small business-oriented "Professional" version of Windows, mind you.

Not only do they install, but they immediately fill the start menu tiles with this spam.

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure those autoinstalls are placeholders. If you go into add/remove programs, they're around ~120kb give or take. I think this goes along the lines of the "Office" install that would come with Windows 7 or 8 installs where you click it and it tries to rush you through the process of acquiring Office.

That seems to be right in line with parent calling them advertisements.

The parent (unless we mean further up chain) didn't call them advertisements, but stated that they are store apps that auto install. There is certainly a placeholder there so they are for sure advertisements, but I don't believe you could take this fresh install, take away internet access and click on Candy Crush and start playing it while on a flight. You'd need to download the actual app first.

I said "Each of those are basically ads for paid products." OneDrive and Office 365 do fully autoinstall, and if it's impossible for a layman to differentiate between an ad and a native app, I consider it at least partially autoinstalled.

OneDrive seems to be built into Windows 10 as far as I'm aware, but you must configure it to do much of anything. There was a proper OneDrive application at one time, but I don't know how much of a thing it has been since Windows 8 (10 it just seems part of Windows Explorer plus some hooks in 10 proper). It doesn't show as a tile for me on either my personal or work machine, but that might not be the case for everyone. If I click on it in the applications list on the left, it opens Windows Explorer to the OneDrive "folder".

Office 365 that is interesting because on a clean install, I still had to go to office.com to install it. I didn't have icons for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. and certainly not the GBs of data already consumed by it. I'm looking at my work machine at the moment and it has an "Office" tile that I can sign in and use the web versions, but it doesn't appear to be a full Office install.

My girlfriend's got windows 10 on her computer, the other day she asked me if I could fix the start menu for her. I hadn't really looked at it before then. It was full of crap she didn't install, there was a popup in the bottom corner advertising for an office 365 subscription. She just wanted me to get rid of the tiles. There's no option for this, only an option to make them bigger. So in the end I sat and manually removed them. 2/3's if them were were links to crap like Amazon and eBay, candy crush and other shit that just came preinstalled. Nothing she actually uses on her computer ever ended up pinned there.

They have previously served up game wallpapers with a link to more info about the game, or a link to the Windows Store page for that game.

E.g., googling turns this up: https://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-...

But as I mentioned in my other comment, for me it's been literally once and I leave 'Windows Spotlight' on, because I like the random city/nature photos it shows.

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