I cut the wire to the mic on the laptop. Then disabled it in the device manager. I still get Cortana bullshit. I'd rather use Vista.Vanilla 10 is totally obnoxious and it's the only version 99% of users will ever see.
Did you disable Cortana in settings? I've seen a few pop-ups telling me how fucking awesome my life would be if I re-enabled it but otherwise it seems to be slain. First thing I did in both my 10 installations was to neuter all the extra "functionality" like Cortana, Candy Crush and anti-privacy add-ons. I haven't had that many complaints after that. Operating systems should just be there to run applications. 10 is a bloated, obnoxious attention seeking whore if you don't fiddle with settings for an hour or so. If Cortana were an exacutable application instead of baked in spy/bloat wear I might give it a chance.
"It ain't half bad once you turn off the Fisher-Price interface." - A technician describing the then-new Windows XP to me in 2002 Any of the big companies are gonna bundle a bajillion bits of bullshit into their OS. i've got a folder on my phone full of crap Google won't let me delete off Android. It's much like the folder full of crap Apple wouldn't let me delete off iOS. On the desktop you can kill stuff and hopefully it won't break things... but I mean, on the Windows side of things, iTunes is an optional virus. On the OS X side of things it's in the finder.
Earlier in the day I was reflecting on how almost all the Google crap on my Android is either opt in or I was giving the chance to opt out of it during set up. It's gunking up my phone but in a pretty minimal and uninvasive way. Windows opts users into a great deal of crap upfront. Savvy users can opt out of most of it in settings. As a semi savvy user I receive a subsidy from all the users that either live with it or actually enjoy the crapwear. I paid more for Windows professional on the PC I built in hopes that I might have a bit more control over it, so I probably shouldn't get to excited about my subsidy. The vile Lenovo crap on my laptop is worse than Windows 10. I should just tear it all out but I honestly have no idea what some of it does and don't want to fix the shit I might break. Operating systems should almost exclusively be only platforms for running applications and supervising networks. I could go Linux on my built box but I really only built the thing so I'd be ready to play Mount and Blade 2 when it comes out so Linux is off the table. I'm not crying about it because 10 isn't all that bad. I don't really think any of their other OS's were all that bad after service packs. They aren't a fantastic company and they violate every single ethical rule I was taught in my small handful of programming classes but oh well.