W7 X64 Windows update turned itself on for all products.

Petero · 10 Feb 2016

torchwood said:

You dont have to have WU on to update drivers.

If your specs are correct then all you need for your graphics is the Intel update utility.
Mind you i know little about Linux kernal operations/VM and if this option is viable on your set-up.

PS firefox is way above 28.

Roy

Yes the specs are correct and I regularly use the MSI update utility manually to keep the motherboard, bios, intel and video card drivers current.

I mostly use VMWare 12.1 (current version) for VMs, I won't touch anything from Oracle (VirtualBox). Unfortunately vmware in particular and other VM's I've tried briefly currently do not utilize the logic and gpus built into external graphic cards, they only emulate them in software using the main CPU. I think older motherboards that have video logic on them fare better because the VMs use them instead software emulation. Newer motherboards like the MSI x99a xpowerac I have do not appear to include video on the MB.

One of my biggest disappointments in building this new machine with a state of the art overclocked mb with 64gb of DDR4 ram & overclocked video card with 8gb of ram is it performs far worse in a VM than my older much slower computer.

After spending about 2 weeks trying to find a solution, the best I have come up with inside the vm is something like 22 fps for about 30 seconds and then stalling unless moving the mouse around on the screen. The video performance is near the highest specs in the windows shell. Running most video performance tests averages about 60fps when pushed hard with 2560x1440 dual monitors.

The i7 5820 has six cores but vmware, even when set to use 6 cores, only uses 4 of them if you watch it with monitoring software. I test this with autopano running which utilizes all cores when stitching together many images. In the main shell it uses all 6, in the vm it uses 4.

Petero · 10 Feb 2016

torchwood said:

PS firefox is way above 28.

Roy

Yes I know and it is difficult to keep 28 installed. Firefox keeps trying to replace it. There is functionality in 28 not available in the newer versions which I prefer. I trust my security / backup procedures enough to risk not having current versions of the browser or windows updates.

torchwood · 10 Feb 2016

Change the options here

Roy.

Petero · 10 Feb 2016

torchwood said:

Change the options here

Roy.

Yes I've done that and it works unless firefox crashes. Sometimes when firefox crashes it loses all such settings and downloads and installs the newer version without prior notice. (Defaults back to auto update)

I found a setting in about:config, can't remember exactly what it was, something to do with the update download path, that has worked for about the last 6 months. Changed from 1 to 0.

Petero · 11 Feb 2016

Here's a fun article I came across today that confirms what I saw happening on my computer.
4 Awful Secrets No One Is Telling You About Windows 10 | Cracked.com

Of note: The only way I was able to stop this was by disabling ipv6 on the network and on my computer.

Ipv6 connections are far better hidden than ipv4 ones. By default in windows there are a whole lot of commands and software that will allow any computer illiterate user to get a list of the ipv4 ip addresses of all the devices on their network.

ie... You can go to almost any consumer grade router interface and quickly get a list of Ipv4 connected devices.

Ipv6 devices do not show up in such lists.

The update process I finally managed to stop yesterday managed to put 950mb of updates onto my machine (with all update settings set to off) while only generating 82mb of internet traffic on the network. This 82mb was not related to the update so the 950mb had to come from another machine on the local network.

I can't say for certain because I currently don't monitor local network traffic but will take a somewhat educated guess that most current consumer grade network monitoring software won't show you ipv6 traffic.

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Added to correct an error in the statement above. Besides the monitoring functionality of my router I use a utility called "DU meter" to realtime monitor traffic to and from my computer graphically in a small window on my monitors. DUM can be, and is set on my computer, to monitor internet and local traffic separately. The way I spotted what was happening was by seeing a barely visible, at the bottom of the graph, stream of constant downloading. To display this Du Meter had to be seeing the traffic.

All the computers on my network have an ipv4 connection so the data could possibly have been transferred through that address space.

At the time I confirmed there was Ipv6 traffic going on that conformed with the volume of traffic I was seeing. The data stream didn't stop until I turned off ipv6 functionality which to me suggests that ipv6 is active in the background even while ipv4 is being used in the foreground and ipv6 has functionality built into it capable of initiating and sustaining data streams that are far less likely to be spotted than ipv4 traffic.
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From what I've read up on and experienced about ipv6 so far I assume Ipv6 functionality is another step towards obscuring what is going on on people's computers to the point that the general public has no idea about the state of their privacy.