I will get it on a laptop that mainly lives under my bed (I really do have monsters under my bed)

What the heck did you put in your engine?

Early adoption of OS' has burned me nearly every time since windows 98's launch. I think I'm going to hold off this time until it takes shape/compatibility issues are fixed up.

...bloatware...

Cortana and XBox integration are OS features. It's pretty hard to cast that as 'bloatware'.

I don't try and uninstall Siri or AirPlay from my Mac (the two most equivalent features I can name).

I've registered, but haven't gotten my notification yet. Once I do, I'll probably wait another week or so.

I also have no idea how to uninstall Cortana...

I don't have Win10 installed, but have you tried the regular way of uninstalling Windows components?

In Win7 and Win8, you go to 'Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features (i.e. "Add/Remove Programs")
On the left side, you see "Turn Windows features on or off"

You get a window like this:


(Note how I have Internet Explorer disabled/uninstalled)

Cortana is probably the same way. Cortana is either an "application" which you can uninstall like any other application, or it's a "Windows feature" which you can uninstall through the method I just showed, or, failing that, you can probably figure out which services you need to disable in the Service Manager (for example, I disabled Windows File Indexing (or w/e it was called) on Vista).

Sometimes the settings are hidden in other parts of Windows. In extreme cases, you have to muck with the registry.

Yes, technically this is just "disabling" it instead of "uninstalling" it, but it amounts to about the same. And since Win10 already takes less hard drive space than Win8 (in the order of gigabytes), you're still netting ahead even if you can't literally remove the hundred or so MB Cortana takes up.

Cortana and XBox integration are signatures features of Windows 10. It's not clear to me why on Earth they would make those uninstallable.

Because of EU antitrust fines and the USA antitrust lawsuit (both were primarily over bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, and completely missed the real antitrust issues Microsoft was actually doing), Microsoft tends to preemptively make things disable-able.

I don't have an XBone, so that's why I'd disable that (or just hide the icon/app). As per Cortana, I'd feel like a doofus sitting in the middle of the living room talking to my PC (I've tried it in the past, with Vista's voice-control features), so it'd depend on how useful the text-based functionality is. I don't exactly need a personal assistant, but if enough features are actually useful to my needs, I might use it.

To be fair, the first hour or two of any *Ubuntu or Mint installation I do is removing all the crap built into the default distribution and adding in the stuff that I actually use that doesn't come on the live DVD.

...Or you could install Debian instead :P

In any case, I don't have any particular love for Windows 7 anymore so looking forward to upgrade when nVidia releases Fermi D3D12 drivers.

Sorry Servant, nothing useful under 'Windows Features'.

I'm sorry Swift but I consider stuff like this 'bloatware' and remove it immediately upon installation; and I am certainly not alone in this regard. What annoys me is that now I cannot remove it even if I want to it seems. I'm not running this on a 'media PC' or a phone or a tablet. This is my desktop, its there to play games or get work done.

In the end all Cortana seems to do is just forward anything you ask to Bing anyways... So I really don't see the point.

Run services.msc and look for Windows Defender. You can at least prevent it from running. If that no longer exists in Windows 10, I am not sure. Going to give 10 a whirl.

I grew used to using the Metro interface so it's odd not to have it when I click the windows icon now. The menu is too cluttered and I auto hid my taskbar so I don't have to view it.

Some time ago, I also read it shares peoples wifi passwords automatically with all of peoples social network aquaintances and thought, no, that can not be true.

Now I saw: https://edri.org/microsofts-new-small-print-how-your-personal-data-abused/

No wonder people want to disable things like Cortana.

Shares it IF you enable it and allow it to do so - you have control.

And please, 'abuses data'... I dare say the people cheering this on are using Chrome, or Gmail or another of the Google services which scrape your data and use it to track, sell and advertise to you.

Click-bait headlines are frankly bullshit and anyone with any senses wouldn't bother with them, but the MS bashing continues despite them being the least worrying of the large players out there today when it comes to 'your' data...

Just upgraded from Windows 7 to 10... and this thing is ugly. Does anyone know where to find a Windows 7 like theme?

Sorry, I just fell off my chair laughing. That proves that people will just take anything if it's free. Heck, why would someone want to trade Windows 7 for Windows 10?

Cortana and XBox integration are signatures features of Windows 10. It's not clear to me why on Earth they would make those uninstallable.

Well, because they are shit. Cortana in particular. It's something nobody really needs (though admittedly voice recognition is kind of cool, but then again it doesn't work for where it would really be useful) but it has huge privacy/security concerns. They are indeed bloatware that not only needlessly burn disk space (this is becoming significant again with SSDs) but also system resources such as RAM and CPU. Similar to the builtin spyware that drives the login screen. It just isn't possible that this thingie tells you to try this and that feature which you haven't used yet unless it is being tracked every time you use a feature (or worse, every time you use any kind of program?). Ignoring privacy, that's code that runs repeatedly all the time and consumes resources but does nothing useful at all (on the contrary).

Yes, Google and Facebook and the like have their privacy/security concerns as well. But you opt in using these, and it's your own fault if you do.

XBox integration as optional install is nice if you own an XBox. But making that a part of the operating system for everybody is just... shit.