For work I need to get access to the VPN for files on server and to access internal websites. Unfortunately, at least initially things need to be configured through Microsoft Windows 10, which I fortunately still have on my laptop but I have almost never used it. I always found MS Winders to be obnoxious – it’s always trying to sell you commercial software and is incredibly slow.

I had been resisting getting the VPN set up on my personal laptop, but it looks like it I will need it sooner then later. Unfortunately when I tried to boot windows, it had somehow gotten messed up in the grub bootloader, so I it wouldn’t boot. Apparently it couldn’t find bootmgfw.efi, which is the Winders BIOS bootloader. Which I know nothing about, but browsing various bootloaders in the EFI I was able to finally find a bootloader that fired up the ol’ Winders 10.

Then I found my version of Winders 10 is too out of date to install Cisco AnyConnect for the VPN access until I run the various security updates from the past 6 years. Which I am in the process of doing, but I’ll have to go down to the library so I don’t use too much bandwidth at home over the hotspot. It seems like the updating had stopped due to a lack of disk space, but I’ve been in the process of removing all the trial-ware and spamware to free up a lot of space in Windows.

I got rid of Office360, which I have never used. I will just use LibreOffice on the Linux side of things when I need office software. Or just Google Sheets. I got rid of dozens of trial-ware and commercial programs and games that came bundled with the laptop but I never plan to use. I don’t know what half of the programs do but I can’t imagine I will need an add on media player or games for a side of computer I have booted once or twice.

One of the worse programs to remove is McAfee Anti-Virus, which is entirely worthless spamware in the era of Windows Defender and the freeware AVR Anti-Virus. You can remove the program, but the McAfee ads continue to pop up on your screen until you manually purge the McAfee directories from your hard drive. It really is spamware if they continue to advertise their garbage program after you delete it using the built-in Winders program removal software.

For anti-virus, I will probably just stick with the built-in Windows Defender and make sure I have the latest patches, because outside of work sessions where I need something over the VPN I will just run Linux. I don’t plan to ever install any other Microsoft Winders software on the computer, so the risk is relatively low. It’s easy enough to just reboot into the Linux environment I have been using for decades and are comfortable with. Why the hell do you need anti-virus software when in Linux they just automatically apply the latest security patches with apt-get?

I stripped down everything I could find in Windows to strip down. No special or graphics effects, a simple blue background. I got all that crap tiles out of the Start Menu and restored the Start bar to it’s most basic list of programs to switch between. Then I rebooted the machine. No more advertisements for McAfee or Office 360 and the Winders environment is quite fast. Winders is now only 52 GB big at this point, meaning my Winders partition is 66% free and it is sane enough for me to use it without clutter while I have to use it.

So while I will be happier as a pig in shit when I reboot my laptop back into Linux with simple, old-fashioned XFCE window manager, I will survive when I absolutely have to use the Winders.