“Misc”

Photo's attached to messages.

If you need to copy photo's that are stored in messages on your Android phone it's quite easy. After hunting high and low on the internet and finding assorted apps that could do it for a price I found out where they are stored on android phones, at least on mine.
Plug phone into a PC USB port, then navigate to "Internal shared storage\Pictures\Messages".
The photo's should all be there. Then select and copy to your PC

Camera Photo's.

If you need to copy camera photo's that are stored it's also simple. After hunting high and low on the internet I found out where they are stored on android phones. On my phone I store my photo's on an SD card.
Plug phone into a PC USB port, then navigate to "SD card\DCIM\Camera".
The photo's should all be there. Then select and copy to your PC
Otherwise navigate to "Internal shared storage\DCIM\Camera" and check for photo's.
The photo's should be there. Then select and copy to your PC

Rufus.

Rufus is a great utility for creating bootable USB sticks
On the Windows 11 VM, I ran Rufus, and selected the file from Z:, which is actually automatically mapped to \\vmware-host. The full path of the source ISO is therefore \\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Downloads\Win11_24H2_English_x64.iso.
When I pressed the Start button, the Windows User Experience window did not appear. Rufus continued to format the USB disk then wrote the files over.
To resolve the issue, I copied the ISO file to the VM Desktop folder. And with Rufus, I selected that ISO on my Desktop. The Windows User Experience window appeared.
This allowed me to create my custom installation to bypass TPM and Secure Boot and install with a Local User.

Control Microsoft Information Access

Microsoft collects as much personal information as it can.
To stop this intrusion on your privacy, you can go through the tedious process in Windows settings and turn off some of the data collection and feel good about it.
Unfortunately that only covers a portion, the rest is hidden in the registry and you don't want to play there.
A much simpler way is to utilize applications like O&O ShutUp10.
This is a free download and works with Win10 and Win11.
A great thing about the app is that you don’t even need to install it on your computer. It’s a portable app that can work without installation. Just run the downloaded file by double-clicking on it.
You can toggle any privacy settings you want from a visual interface, easily deciding how much information the computer is allowed to send to Microsoft.
Instead of going through this whole list one by one, it is easier to simply activate all the recommended settings.
To do this, drop down the Actions menu on the top and select the Apply only recommended settings option.