Microsoft's Cortana turns its back on consumers as skills are stripped from Windows 10

The Register ^ | Mar 2, 2020 | Richard Speed

[Still Thinking]

Are you ignorant to the fact that many laptops that are in production today have touchscreen? Or do you think that only Apple and android devices have touchscreen?

More indifferent than ignorant. Just what I need, fingerprints all over the screen I need to read. I develop embedded industrial applications so I'm quite sure that a touchscreen, though sometimes a necessary accommodation to working conditions, is definitely an inferior workaround compared to normal PC input devices.

[Mr. K]

I found a way to turn Cortana off (after the dumnba$$es at Microsoft removed the ability) by RENAMING the cortana file.

If you just use the Task Manager to kill cortana it comes right back on, because there is a second program running that checks to see if it is still running and restarts it if it’s not.

You cannot RENAME it while it is running, so you just prepare to rename it, kill it in the task manager, and then before it is restarted hit the enter key to complete the ‘rename’. I usually just append “REMOVED to the end of the name.

Then when it tries to restart the file, it’s not there- (It is, it just has a different name)

I was so happy I defeated that reloading piece of crap that I forgot to kill the other process too... but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

One side effect seems to be that the ‘search’ box doesn’t work anymore but F U Microsoft.

[dennisw]

I eliminate all sight of Cortana via the task bar. Right click it.Though I suppose it is lurking in the background.

I just looked at task manager and Cortana is using zero resources of CPU and memory.