The Mainstream Press Doesn’t Understand Microsoft or Windows (Premium)

I read several mainstream news publications, and I’m always teetering between amused and concerned when confronted by their coverage of personal technology. No, not John Gruber faux outrage over some perceived slight, just concern. It’s not just antitrust regulators who are focused on the biggest of the bad players in our industry—Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta—it’s clear that the mainstream press falls into this group, too. And they just don’t get Windows, or what Microsoft is doing with Windows.

And Microsoft continues to use this ignorance to its advantage, moving ever more aggressively to push its own products and services in Windows, track users without their consent while offering no way out, and spamming users with ads and crapware.

Point being, when Brian Chen of The New York Times writes an article called The Default Tech Settings You Should Turn Off Right Away, I’m paying attention. And then I’m sorry I bothered.

Users of Apple’s iPhones are told about several general ways in which they can enhance their privacy and turn off data-sharing functionality.

Users of Google Android-based devices and online services are told about the data-sharing management functionality that the online giant offers.

Those fools who continue to use Facebook are likewise told about how they can use the company’s privacy checkup tool to “prevent snooping by employers and marketers.”

And users of Amazon’s e-commerce website and Alexa and Nest devices (the latter of which are owned by Google, not Amazon; the latter owns Ring) can exert “some control over how information is shared.”

And that’s all … fine. It’s also horrifyingly high-level and incomplete. But then so is most mainstream news. You gotta keep people’s attention.

But it’s the Windows coverage that bugs me. That always bugs me. Here’s exactly what the article mentions about controlling your privacy on Windows. This is all of it, two paragraphs.

“Windows PCs come with a host of data-sharing settings turned on by default to help Microsoft, advertisers, and websites learn more about us. The switches to toggle those settings off can be found by opening the settings menu and clicking on Privacy and [&] security and then General.”

This is factually correct and horrifically useless. Yes, Windows does come with a “host of data-sharing settings,” and, yes, they are turned on by default. And yes, you can find them where Chen tells you, though Settings is an app with a capital S and not a menu. But what he doesn’t tell you is which of those settings to change. There are literally hundreds. There are so many that I devoted a huge section of the “Personalize” chapter to this in the Windows 10 Field Guide. And in the Windows 11 Guide, it’s getting its own chapter. This is boring, dry stuff, and while you cannot do anything to stop Windows from tracking your usage completely, there are settings you can and should change.

But I’m as concerned with this bit of stupidity:

“Yet the worst default setting on Windows may have nothing to do with privacy. Whenever Kimber Streams, a Wirecutter editor, tests new laptops, one of their first steps is to open the sound menu and select No Sounds to mute the many annoying chimes that play whenever something goes wrong with Windows.”

Well, that is fascinating. I do the same thing.

However, Streams, Chen, and The New York Times don’t tell you three important and related points. They probably have no idea.

First, there is no such thing as “the sound menu” in Windows. There is a Sound control panel, separate from Sound settings (in Settings > System > Sound), a weird legacy UI that’s still available in both Windows 10 and 11. And it has a Sounds tab where you can change the sound scheme. Not being able to correctly identify things you’re writing about is a key problem, at least to me. That’s step one.

Second, this setting will not stick, not in Windows 10 and not in Windows 11 either. That is, you can change the sound scheme to “No Sounds” if you want, but it will revert back to “Windows Default” eventually. I have no idea why, or how this happens, but my guess is it’s tied to the never-ending Windows updating scheme: some updates seem to revert some settings to their default. (I sometimes see this with the folders in Quick access/Home in File Explorer, too.) There is no workaround for this.

Third, navigating to the Sounds tab in the Sound control panel requires extra steps in Windows 11 (as compared to Windows 10) unless you know a shortcut. Of course it does. In Windows 10, you can right-click the Volume icon in the system tray and choose Sounds, and the Sound control panel will open to the Sounds tab, which is convenient. In Windows 11, you have to right-click the Volume icon in the system tray, choose Sound settings (which opens Settings to System > Sound), and find and then select the “More sound settings” option (it’s way down at the bottom) to open the Sound control panel. But it opens to the Playback tab, so you have to then manually click on Sounds to get where you want to go.

But I noted there was a shortcut.

The faster way to do this in Windows 11 is to use Start search and search for sounds. The default choice, Change system sounds, opens right to the Sounds tab in the Sound control panel. See? There’s a real tip.

Maybe that’s what they meant by menu. And maybe the typical NYT reader would be able to follow those instructions. But I seriously doubt it.