Okay, I will help you turn your minestrone into an inediple slop: the kind your grandkids will have nightmares about for years to come.

Step 1: Create a minestrone.

sometime i even turn of mic and cam acsess on my phone

I have some bad news for you. Whatever software switch your phone has to "turn off" the mic, can still be bypassed by either the manufacturer or an attacker that gets root control of the device.

The only way to ensure a mic isn't listening is by either unsoldering it or shorting the + and - contacts. I mean in the case of a phone you can probably do the toothpick thing and then test it and repeat until sound actually quiets, but note that phones can actually listen to you by via the accelerometer :/

So, is there an easier way to completely disable the microphone?

First take it apart and determine what form factor the microphone is.

Is it a through hole microphone with two pins that are soldered to the underside like this? If so it's best to desolder it to prevent damaging the PCB. Use a soldering iron to heat up the pins and pull it out with pliers from the other side. If you don't have a soldering iron and don't want to buy one, I've also seen people using side cutters to cut off the solder joints and loosening the component enough for it to be pulled out through brute force without breaking the circuit board. If you can't or don't want to do either of those and don't mind risking the device, you could just yank it out with pliers like you're an old timey dentist pulling teeth, and hope that the pins break before the board does, might also help to twist it back and fourth repeatedly until the metal gets fatigued and break.

It might also be a surface mount microphone that, as the name suggests, is only soldered to the surface of the PCB. Might look something like this. These are pretty challenging for most people to desolder especially if it's close to other components, but they're small enough that the solder pads don't need a lot of force to break, so if you can get a good grip with pliers you should be able to just rip it off. Twist it until you feel the solder joints snap and then pull straight up. It doesn't really matter if you rip the pad off the circuit board since you don't plan on soldering anything else to it. But what you do need to be careful of is if you peel off more of the copper traces than just the pad, which can damage other components. If you do want to desolder it, touch the soldering iron to the metal casing which should hopefully heat up the entire component enough to melt all the solder joints, then pull it off with pliers. Just be careful not to touch any nearby components with the soldering iron.

Failing all those, you could also take a screwdriver or awl, put the pointy end on the microphone, and hammer it a few times to cave the metal casing in and hopefully crush the audio sensing parts. This will probably destroy the microphone, but less certain than removing it.

I've also heard recommendations about grounding the microphone connections after removal for extra privacy, mainly to prevent the traces from picking up EM waves, but I don't know how to reliably do that without breaking stuff so can't give any advice.

Does putting tape over it completely mute it?

No. Speech is surprisingly robust from an audio perspective and it's entirely possible for audio not recognizable to humans as speech to still be decoded by speech recognition AI. The thing is even if this works 90% of the time and makes the audio completely unusable, you can never prove if your case is in that 10% where there's juuust enough information for AI to detect. You also can't easily hear the actual output of the microphone so for all you know it might be fully intelligible and just muffled. If you're concerned about privacy to the point where you're asking how to remove a microphone, I doubt you'll accept that 10% chance anyway and removing the microphone entirely will save you a lot of anxiety.

micefrone

BTW, Lemmy lets you edit titles, so you can fix errors like that.

Yes that would work fine, you can pretty much run anything inside a VM. So yeah a properly set up VM with internet access + VPN client + anything else you want to install will work.

Not too sure what the issue is that you are encountering, you'd need to update your post with a lot more info. My suggestion is to start over and make sure the VM is set up correctly e.g. install the OS in the VM, verify it has normal internet access. Then install the VPN client in the VM, verify VPN is working properly. After that qBittorrent or anything else can be installed inside the VM. (probably best to save snapshots of your VM after each step in case you screw up and need to roll back)

No reason it shouldn't work.

Whats your VM software, what's the host and (especially) the guest OS?

I've seen this error with an app in Windows, while running it in an admin account, haha. No idea what these app devs are doing to cause these messages.

Keep in mind under Linux, distros today often don't setup the first user as root, but as a limited account (there's a separate root account with it's own password).

I prefer containers...

theres one available called gluetun that can run proton vpn..

then I have a deluge (torrent client) running in another container that specifies gluetun as it's network source.

this way if the VPN drops I don't bleed my actual ip

these containers are pre-built and public so config is fairly minimal

Yeah it would be no different from running without a VM. The issue you're having isn't related to it being a VM.

Your popup there looks like it is because the user account you're using doesn't have admin privileges on windows. If this is a fresh install, I have no idea how you've ended up in that situation, as the user account you create on install is admin by default.