Thanks. For the times this end actually isn't smothered with trying to control Windows 10 (8.1 is just fine) OpenBSD can come in handy.
Audio recording is now disabled by default in OpenBSD OpenBSD 6.4 also ships with Meltdown, Spectre v2, SpectreRSB, L1FT, and Lazy FPU mitigations October 19, 2018 https://www.zdnet.com/article/audio-recording-is-now-disabled-by-default-in-openbsd/