Took no offense and meant none, I'm just sorry you had this experience. I'll put in a prompt warning the user if they haven't made a backup before Blackbird gets applied in the next update. Due to the nature of the biz, tools like this are always gonna be a bit experimental no matter how much testing you do. That's why I offer free tech-support, you get all sorts of edge-cases and try to fix bugs you'd never find on your own, making the app better for everyone in the long run. I think I only had 1 case so far, way before v1.0, where some dude, bless his soul, ran Blackbird on his work laptop running all sorts of VPNs and special remote management software and it just thrashed all of it. He could use Windows fine but couldn't connect to anything work related. He tried a bunch of different fixes found online before contacting me and we just couldn't get it working, no matter what we did. His IT guy probably hates me on a personal level. So I'd recommend avoiding Blackbird on work-issued computers for now.
Any chance you could add an option to choose which of the services and others that we want to disable? Bit of a pain having to re-enable commonly used things like networking... and the flags to fix those things don't seem to work either, only a full restore does, but either way not having them disabled in the first place would be good
If you want to fully customize every service, task, registry file, network setting you can edit your backup file. Just open it with any text editor, then simply restore it through Recovery Mode. The syntax is pretty self-explanatory. You can remove and add stuff with no limitations whatsoever. You can even add services, tasks & reg-keys that aren't in Blackbird at all, making your own, potentially even more powerful, "profiles" of sorts, that you can share with others.
So that's a no then lol Yea I am aware of that method, would be better to have the option before first run though, even just not to touch networking at all would do (Most people want/need networking enabled and functional) Ease of use is the main thing here, there are other tools that do what blackbird does, but also don't kill networking in the process, or they do have options of what to or not to disable first, I don't want to have to run the same tool 2-3 times in order to get my setup working as I want 1: - Create backup 2: - manually sift through lines of text to mod the backup 3: - Restore modded backup Fairly long winded process tbh and not something I would choose over another tool I can run once and be done with it
Cool, i should really get pi-hole myself, lots of my friends use it also, lol. In the near future im planning to develop small portable utility inspired by WPD called "LTSC Tweaker" with my russian friend, it will block all group policies related to data collection, error reporting, telemetry, windows explorer search history and more - basically all stuff that WPD blocks + way more. We're just waiting for LTSC 1809 to be released, then we will be testing. Of course i will share it on MDL with Source Code to audit once it's ready.
Sounds good, I'd use it Everyone should have a pi.hole, seriously, does so much more than blocking ads too, I don't see them as much now since running WPD but prior to that you see exactly just how much MS phones home from Win 10 machines, it's ridiculous, real time DNS queries also if you want them Firestick is ridiculous too, 1744 blocked queries to device-metrics-us.amazon.com already today (It's only 9.30am)
Fair enough @MrMagic I do appreciate constructive criticism and I can confirm the networking bug does happen to some, affecting LAN connections, including NAS drives and DLNA, while working fine for others using the /L option. That's why it's been a pain to track down. I'll find the f**ker though, eventually. I have no programming background, got a regular day job and I'm doing this in my spare time for free. Cut me some slack, dude. I never meant to imply Blackbird "reigns supreme" or anything like that and I apologize if it came off that way. What I can say though is that I'm really just doing my best and that Blackbird will always be free and ad-free. I only kept going because apparently I picked up some hardcore fans along the way. @hoak Glad you find it useful I still get hyped every time I see a positive response!
@hoak f**king-A, bro. Deliberately breaking undocumented components in a way that doesn't crash a closed-source, constantly changing OS isn't exactly easy for me. But then again, where's the fun in doing something easy? Don't have that many fans but the few I do are all diehard and I like it that way. Even met and got wasted with some of them for like 4 days straight. They rolled up in cars with my country's flags taped to the front when they picked me up, like a goddamn presidential delegation or something. It was badass AF I just wanna build something cool, everything else is secondary to me, perhaps to a fault. On that note, I slept like 3 f**king hours last night and fixed the networking bug. Just got confirmation from a user testing it out. New version will be up shortly. Almost forgot, not Dutch. Here's a hint though: I come from a land made in the image of a bird that never flies.