WTF, MS?

Frankly, that could probably be the tagline to this blog, but hey. Having had a run-in with a couple of trojans last night, I left the computer on overnight running a full scan, and by this afternoon it was showing the antimalware software running at 25% CPU pretty much constantly. Time for a clean reboot. On checking task manager following boot, I saw an Edge process kick off automatically, with nothing running. A bit of Googling led to this post on Windows Central which shows the bad effect Chrome has on everyone else - it used to be that only Chrome pre-loaded trash into memory (which was why, when I installed it many moons ago to test, it doubled my laptop's boot time) but now everyone's doing it, presumably because everyone's using Chromium as a base. The fix is to use group policies to stop it - Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Microsoft Edge and disable "Allow Microsoft Edge to pre-launch at Windows startup" and "Allow ME to start and load the Start and New Tab page at Windows startup". Also stops it when Windows is idle. (Nothing bugs me quite so much as the computer suddenly storming into life when it should be sitting there quietly, twiddling its silicon thumbs.)