remember the issues people had with windows 10 spying on them? how even if you turned cortana and all the other "on by default" privacy invasions off, th[url=http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/]e OS still sent major telemetry to microsoft[/url] including all your keypresses, search history, etc.? well they've backported that through [url=http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/microsoft-has-no-plans-to-tell-us-whats-in-windows-patches/]windows update[/url] feature into windows 7 and windows 8/8.1. there are core system files being used by microsoft to collect data on people. they had it as an optional update where it could be deleted, then it was moved to a critical system update so you couldn't delete it. and on top of that, they've fired the entire team responsible for testing patches and bugfixes so that the end user is now a guinna pig. if something bricks your machine, you're SOL. they want to sell people's information as a commodity. it's why windows 10 is free and comes '"without games DRM". so they can milk people, and be legally in the clear since nobody actually bought it as a product so they can't claim any loss against it.. and they've disabled the ability to downgrade to other systems since 10 would have used your activation key. you'd have to rebuy your old OS at full price with a system wipe to go back. because most of the market is not tech-savvy they falsely claim it cannot be used to identify someone. think about it like this: if they collect all your last 100,000 keystrokes, they'd probably find out email addresses, passwords, and names. things that can be easily used to identify you. all this is uploaded to their private servers. and none of this is made clear to the end user, it's buried pages deep in the EULA, in legalese. and [url=http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/directx-12-tested-an-early-win-for-amd-and-disappointment-for-nvidia/]Direct X 12 doesn't work right with Nvidia graphics cards[/url], giving a nearly 80% boost to AMD cards so that a 290X can stand toe to toe with a 980ti. there are a few registry hacking programs people are making to try and disable this spying(no word on results/reliability) or if you have the know--how or a guide you can try to manually disable it. just so you know. TL;DR:Microsoft is not your friend and is now including proprietary spyware in windows 7 and 8.1 because they introduced it in 10. https://youtu.be/ntS7ekPLSQc?t=1h48m20s