Windows 10 settings: When to fix and tweak, when to leave your PC alone
Summary
On that type of PC, flashing the BIOS often required rebooting with an MS-DOS disk, and if the process didnt go perfectly, you had to fuss with DIP switches on the motherboard and hope you could recover. I hear much less about telemetry these days than I did a few years ago, when a handful of ill-informed commentators harvested truckloads of pageviews by scaremongering about Microsoft "spying" on PCs running Windows 10. With more than 900 million PCs running Windows 10, having that data in real time is essential to identify problems in the ecosystem, especially those involving failures in the automatic update process. The default setting for all editions of Windows 10 is Full, which means that the uploaded data includes some anonymized details about app usage. Naturally, a cottage industry of small utility developers has sprung up to automate those settings, which can have a range of unfortunate side-effects, including blocking access to updates.