You can remove Cortana from the taskbar easily enough. Removing her completely, I dunno.

Just right click her and hide her, if you don't want the bitch down there....

If you have an MS account you can sign out of it and that will turn off Cortana. It cannot be uninstalled as it is part of the OS. Disabling it is about the best you can do atm. For the Win10 Pro you can do this...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3109900/software/you-can-remove-cortana-from-windows-10-but-its-tricky.html

Take a look at majorgeeks under System Tools>Windows 10 Fixes, you should find something there to do what you want.

I don't trust or use Cortana, either, and rely on my own wits to remember appointments, etc.  In fact, I use Win 10 like a regular OS, without the apps and other crap it comes with.  All that got uninstalled or hidden very early in the piece.

Should've called it "Katana" instead   

 I checked the link and there isn't anything there to remove Cortana. All you can do is disable it.

even if you can uninstall it, chances are it'll install itself again every month

really? This far in to W10 and you would even think about moving back to a system that is falling farther down the support chain? Not logical at all..

I just purchased a new retail copy of Windows 8.1 last week for a brand new computer. Don't regret it even slightly!

And you can upgrade it to 10 for free.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgrade 

Well there used to be.  I haven't checked lately, but I used to run a program from there that uninstalled Cortana.  However, it could be that the latest updates to Windows, and thus Cortana, have rendered such fixes inoperable, and therefore it has since been removed.

I did that because some of my [paid for] programs were updated on Win 8.1 but would no longer work on that OS.... even when using 'compatibility mode'.  Not that I like Win 10, but it was my only option if I wanted to run those programs. Thing is, Cortana is a data miner that sends all sorts of information back to MS, and I'm not at all comfortable with that, so I disabled it immediately upon installing Win 10 Pro on this machine... which apparently will have to do now.

As for Win 7, well I no longer have a copy to try my updated programs on, and there's no way I'm paying for an OS that'll lose support sooner rather than later. 

brand new as in couple of year old hardware (pre-skylake) or brand new brand new? because.. you might have heard that ms has stopped providing any sort of patches for win 7 and 8.1 for anything newer than skylake... as well as some skylake machines

https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/04/windows-7-8-old-cpu-updates-blocked/

I have W7 on my machine and it still gets all the patches/updates.

Same here on my Windows 7 Ultimate.

Brand new as in Ryzen 7 1800X, so it will have that issue. And yes I did/do know that will happen in the future. It hasn't as of this time yet though, and of course it isn't like I can't upgrade to win10 at that time. When that time comes I will just have to make a decision; run without updates, upgrade to Win10, or upgrade to Linux. It could be pressure will have caused MS to change their stance on data collection by that time, and Win10 will make good sense then. For now, I'm good. I'll be hurting on games that do Directx12, but not Vulkan at some point. But as of now, I don't run any games that I need to worry about that.

Me three...

For those who don't know, majorgeeks.com hosts all the patches and updates from MS, meaning that anyone can update any machine, regardless of MS stance on 'new' hardware.

Don't count on it!  MS recently spoke of hard-coding various advertising and data collection tools into the OS using Windows Explorer... and unlike the built-in apps, which can be uninstalled or disabled, those tools cannot be removed or disabled without completely crippling the OS.  It was rumoured they were to have been implemented with the Creator's Update, though I've not heard of anyone with the update complaining thus far.  I've not seen anything like that since updating, either, but MS decided it would go the hard-coded way because data its mining apps could be disabled, and come Hell or high water, they really, really want that data.

You all missed the gist of the subject.

NEW PCs reverted to the older OSes won't get the updates. MS is making it so that you have to run Windows 10 on a NEW PC. At least that is what I read from it.  Link below.

 https://www.ghacks.net/2017/03/17/microsoft-blocks-updates-for-new-cpus-on-windows-7-and-8-1/ 

http://windowsreport.com/windows-7-8-1-updates-blocked-amd-ryzen-kaby-lake/ 

 Windows 7 and 8.1 updates coming to an end for new computers

If you're thinking of getting a PC with the latest chips, be ready to have it run Windows 10.

And if you have no use for it, why keep it?  I never gave it a chance to be irritating.  Once I'd read that it wants to know the ins and outs of everything one does and where one is, I got rid of it.  Microsoft isn't to be trusted with that much knowledge, and for those who think all this data mining is harmless, and won't affect them, well let's hope it doesn't come back to bite them on the bum.

There likely to keep the ai. Now assuming there keeping the ai we will have to wait for storage to get better before we can have room to fit the wholevthing on the computer.