Warms my heart to stick it to them... This what happens when you press a few keys on the windows 10 calculator...
Unfortunately for my day to day work I *need* windows. Fortunately I've been virtualizing it since Windows 95, so I've kinda learned to work around stuff where required.
On the whole I've always found Windows was *more* reliable under virtualization and (at least in pre-Win8 versions) often snappier. There are a few follow-on advantages to that :
- You can completely deny it access to the outside world.
- You can easily and frequently snapshot the machine so you can install/test software and roll back with zero consequences.
- No issues with Virus/Trojan because of the first 2 points.
- Hardware upgrades on a whim with zero driver issues (and consequential WGA headaches if you actually run that stuff).
- No issues with updates or the OS trying to do things behind your back.
Certainly not for everybody, but for my use case it's a super low maintenance option that has far more advantages than disadvantages. Like I said though, I've been using Linux on the desktop full time since about 1996 with windows in a box (TrelOS it was back then from memory, then Win4Lin, Qemu with the KQEMU proprietary accelerator, and now QEMU/KVM). I played with VirtualBox for a while and I've had a good go at VMWare, but always got better results *for my use case* using the Qemu based stuff.
I did spend quite a bit of time watching Windows 10 in a box to see what it spoke to, but I gave up after a while as even with all the published tweaks there was no way to keep it quiet.
Fortunately the software I have that will only run on stuff later than 7 will run on 8.1 and I've got a nice trimmed SOE of that which behaves nicely in a VM so I haven't had to use 10 in anger yet. It did seem to get upset and leave a lot of gumph in the event logs when it couldn't phone home, particularly as it could resolve DNS.