If there was anyone perusing your personal computer drives I would suspect it would be Gates' Windows.
I don't save things to my computer hard drive. I have a 1T external hard drive and save things to it. If i am not saving anything or working on file on that drive it is unplugged.
I had been fighting a lot of glitches and freeze ups until I started this practice. I suspected some of my files were being saved to something I had not designated to have access.
While Microsoft absolutely is spying on you -- and will turn on settings previously turned off, even hidden ones that registry edits can change -- freezes, stutters, etc. is likely related to page file being assigned to a hard drive, or indexing.
Hard drives are very slow, as are old and/or unhealthy SATA SSDs. When your OS is trying to index or call on the page file, your performance will slow. Depending on the amount of time that's required, you may not notice it. It also happens at all times, many times per second.
This can also be exacerbated by an aged or low end CPU and RAM.
It's likely that when you remove the drive, it stops because the indexing isn't..indexing that drive anymore, or the page file isn't mistakenly being re-assigned to that drive.
As one example, I had a 12 year old 1TB HDD. Its health was clearly not very good. My PC slowed down, and I have extreme sensitivity to stuttering (which is why when gaming I'm an FPS whore). During two separate periods of time, my page file had decided that it wanted to target that HDD as its source, and brought my PC to its knees.
This was also tricky to sort out and troubleshoot because in normal circumstances, A) page file shouldn't be affecting performance that badly and, more importantly, B) page file should not be changing its settings by default, unless the OS was being a bitch (which, Microsoft has ensured it is)
You notice how generally most windows installs only last a few years before you have to restore from backups or do a clean install? It's basically because if you look at the EULA you don't read but just click accept essentially it isn't your OS. Essentially Microsoft act as a secret root user in the background and are forever changing things - ultimately all the hackers and those who write the malware and viruses exploit this vulnerability and over time your system just becomes corrupted and you have to start again. I think my record with a Windows system before I had to start again was 3 years and 8 months.
I put up with it for a long time because it was what I was used to - then in 2017 I decided to jump ship to Linux for my general day to day computing. It was a steep learning curve but I did have some experience with it when I was in university in 2007-2008. Its certainly better now than it was back then and I find it far more stable - although there is a compromise in that there are many applications you have to go without and doing some things is more difficult. Over all I'm happy I decided to jump ship.
I haven't entirely got rid of Windows - I have a gaming PC for flight simming which has Windows 10 and a few bits of software I can't get away from but I don't think I have ever opened an internet explorer on it.
That's interesting - I have a Windows 7 machine on a really old laptop. It has some pirate factory scan tools on it (Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW) and my oscilloscope software. Haven't booted it for a while and it hasn't been connected to the internet since 2020 - I haven't noticed that doing it. I was so paranoid I actually physically removed the wifi card from it. Funny how officially its only security updates but if you are right behind the scenes they basically run it on the same creepy AI that Windows 10 and 11 run on. From everything I know about the Windows OS they absolutely have the capability to do that and there is nothing you can do really.
You know mate depending on what you do you should try Linux Mint - its very user friendly. It's Ubuntu based. With the Cinnamon desktop its basically a windows 7 work alike. For my general computing needs - internet, documents, watching videos and doing some light photo editing, programming, listening to music there is decent Linux software to do all of that. Linux plays better with AMD graphics than Nvidia though. If you've got an old machine it'll be happier on Linux Mint than it ever was on windows. My sisters 12 year old laptop that runs a 540m i5 at idle it uses 2% CPU and 1GB or RAM. Generally it can cope with the browser and 1080p video, she uses it for working from home and gets by with it though the RAM and the processor use is high with modern applications. You have to learn the terminal a bit and get used to doing things the linux way instead of the windows way and I spend a bit of time combing through stack exchange. Mint is also a very stable distro and a stable system - I did bork a few of my systems early on entering commands I didn't understand but my current system is 3 years old and very stable with one little bug with software I use an alternative to and 1 time it kernel panicked. My dads Windows 10 laptop has had stability issues and weird bugs. I end up having to look at it every 6-8 weeks.
The only Windows I even have is a virtual image that runs on my NAS, and stays paused. It only ever is resumed if I need something specific, and is paused again immediately afterwards.
Everything else I've had for the last 20-30+ years has been Linux. In fact with Crossover (by CodeWeavers) pretty much everything I need can be run in Linux using their Crossover program. Even Office or Quicken.
If there was anyone perusing your personal computer drives I would suspect it would be Gates' Windows.
I don't save things to my computer hard drive. I have a 1T external hard drive and save things to it. If i am not saving anything or working on file on that drive it is unplugged.
I had been fighting a lot of glitches and freeze ups until I started this practice. I suspected some of my files were being saved to something I had not designated to have access.
While Microsoft absolutely is spying on you -- and will turn on settings previously turned off, even hidden ones that registry edits can change -- freezes, stutters, etc. is likely related to page file being assigned to a hard drive, or indexing.
Hard drives are very slow, as are old and/or unhealthy SATA SSDs. When your OS is trying to index or call on the page file, your performance will slow. Depending on the amount of time that's required, you may not notice it. It also happens at all times, many times per second.
This can also be exacerbated by an aged or low end CPU and RAM.
It's likely that when you remove the drive, it stops because the indexing isn't..indexing that drive anymore, or the page file isn't mistakenly being re-assigned to that drive.
As one example, I had a 12 year old 1TB HDD. Its health was clearly not very good. My PC slowed down, and I have extreme sensitivity to stuttering (which is why when gaming I'm an FPS whore). During two separate periods of time, my page file had decided that it wanted to target that HDD as its source, and brought my PC to its knees.
This was also tricky to sort out and troubleshoot because in normal circumstances, A) page file shouldn't be affecting performance that badly and, more importantly, B) page file should not be changing its settings by default, unless the OS was being a bitch (which, Microsoft has ensured it is)
That is why Linux.
You notice how generally most windows installs only last a few years before you have to restore from backups or do a clean install? It's basically because if you look at the EULA you don't read but just click accept essentially it isn't your OS. Essentially Microsoft act as a secret root user in the background and are forever changing things - ultimately all the hackers and those who write the malware and viruses exploit this vulnerability and over time your system just becomes corrupted and you have to start again. I think my record with a Windows system before I had to start again was 3 years and 8 months.
I put up with it for a long time because it was what I was used to - then in 2017 I decided to jump ship to Linux for my general day to day computing. It was a steep learning curve but I did have some experience with it when I was in university in 2007-2008. Its certainly better now than it was back then and I find it far more stable - although there is a compromise in that there are many applications you have to go without and doing some things is more difficult. Over all I'm happy I decided to jump ship.
I haven't entirely got rid of Windows - I have a gaming PC for flight simming which has Windows 10 and a few bits of software I can't get away from but I don't think I have ever opened an internet explorer on it.
Not to defend Microsoft here, but...
It will remember the last time you saved a certain file TYPE to a certain folder, and will go back to that folder when you save another.
I've had this happen when saving .jpg and .png memes.
Yep it's done this for like 20 years now, each program tends to have a record of the last folder you saved to while using it.
That's interesting - I have a Windows 7 machine on a really old laptop. It has some pirate factory scan tools on it (Toyota, Honda, Ford, BMW) and my oscilloscope software. Haven't booted it for a while and it hasn't been connected to the internet since 2020 - I haven't noticed that doing it. I was so paranoid I actually physically removed the wifi card from it. Funny how officially its only security updates but if you are right behind the scenes they basically run it on the same creepy AI that Windows 10 and 11 run on. From everything I know about the Windows OS they absolutely have the capability to do that and there is nothing you can do really.
You know mate depending on what you do you should try Linux Mint - its very user friendly. It's Ubuntu based. With the Cinnamon desktop its basically a windows 7 work alike. For my general computing needs - internet, documents, watching videos and doing some light photo editing, programming, listening to music there is decent Linux software to do all of that. Linux plays better with AMD graphics than Nvidia though. If you've got an old machine it'll be happier on Linux Mint than it ever was on windows. My sisters 12 year old laptop that runs a 540m i5 at idle it uses 2% CPU and 1GB or RAM. Generally it can cope with the browser and 1080p video, she uses it for working from home and gets by with it though the RAM and the processor use is high with modern applications. You have to learn the terminal a bit and get used to doing things the linux way instead of the windows way and I spend a bit of time combing through stack exchange. Mint is also a very stable distro and a stable system - I did bork a few of my systems early on entering commands I didn't understand but my current system is 3 years old and very stable with one little bug with software I use an alternative to and 1 time it kernel panicked. My dads Windows 10 laptop has had stability issues and weird bugs. I end up having to look at it every 6-8 weeks.
The only Windows I even have is a virtual image that runs on my NAS, and stays paused. It only ever is resumed if I need something specific, and is paused again immediately afterwards.
Everything else I've had for the last 20-30+ years has been Linux. In fact with Crossover (by CodeWeavers) pretty much everything I need can be run in Linux using their Crossover program. Even Office or Quicken.
This is why I only run lunix 😎