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The woes of Windows 10

economist.com

141–150 of 475 posts

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#141
post #21
post #9

> But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10. Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive. Linux gets refugees both from Windows and MacOS because MS just keeps messing Windows up (seems to be happening every other version), and Apple simply lets MacOS rot by not giv…

Seeing someone trying to work with it sometimes reminds me of someone trying to hold a hot potato in their hands. For example, today someone tried to display two PDFs and a word doc on a large screen. Well. I guess you know how long that took to work out.

12 seconds? Snap is pretty awesome on Windows 10.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#142
post #99

I am a manager at a small architecture firm and Windows 10 has brought nothing but woe to my office. We have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars troubleshooting and fixing problems (many of which remain unresolved) that occurred as a result of this draconian forced upgrade (and updates that followed). So what if we got the upgrade for free. I've paid for it many times over in labor!

How was this upgrade forced on you? I use several machines that are still happily running Win7 and 8.

They had a dialog saying "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you closed it or said no it would leave you alone for a bit.

Then it would pop up and say "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you said no it would leave you alone but if you closed it it would assume you were okay with it.

I know a lot of people who woke up one morning and their computer was running Windows 10 without their approval, despite having said 'no' to previous questions.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#143
post #11

> There is no question that Windows 10 is ... quite the most secure operating system ever devised. Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?

* Secure Boot * BitLocker: Hard-drive encryption backed by TPM & Secure Boot With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult. * Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) - separate OS running on the hypervisor that can perform sensitive operations. Which enables: 1. Device Guard - Runs code integrity protection, i.e. only allowing signed code to run, from within the VSM. 2. Credential Guard - Run…

> With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult.

Physical attacks aren't part of my threat model on a desktop PC. Indeed these protections feel more like DRM - trying to protect the computer from the (legitimate) user.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#144

>The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10. One thing I've learned over the years: you don't need a high IQ to run a successful business. Without a lot of smarts you're never going to compete with google, bu…

What makes a serious tech enthusiast? I consider myself one and I enjoy using Windows 10 as my desktop PC. I have had almost no issues or qualms with how Windows 10 has performed for me since launch.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#145
post #11

> There is no question that Windows 10 is ... quite the most secure operating system ever devised. Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?

* Secure Boot * BitLocker: Hard-drive encryption backed by TPM & Secure Boot With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult. * Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) - separate OS running on the hypervisor that can perform sensitive operations. Which enables: 1. Device Guard - Runs code integrity protection, i.e. only allowing signed code to run, from within the VSM. 2. Credential Guard - Run…

Weren't all of those in 8?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#146
post #20

I think there's an obvious and more general question here to be answered: if a piece of software is good enough, namely, it "disappears" when you are trying to do your job, then why bother to change it? Yes, the new version might enable a more efficient workflow, or might be faster to boot-up. But people hate changes and you need to invest considerable time in upgrading a piece of software (the upgrade itself + learn…

Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP. But in reality, we're rapidly approach…

And before that people were vowing never to upgrade to XP, and before that people said 98 would be the last version of windows they would ever run...

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#147
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Win7 being good enough and not degrading in any way is a big challenge facing Win10 adoption, and that has been said times enough before. Once Win7 is out of support, may it be from popular applications or simply security updates, we may see things changing. There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they…

Some say Windows 2000 was good enough already. Everything worked well.

Currently checking the history of Windows 2000. Seems W2K was aimed at enterprises while ME at consumers. A bit less than 2 years after W2K's launch, WinXP came out and unified the consumer and enterprise line.

Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#148
I'm normally very fond of The Economist, but this is one of their "blog posts", which seem to not receive quite the same careful, nuanced care that their other articles for their weekly edition do.

Part of the challenge of Windows 10 was the transformation of Windows from a large-release product into a trickle-release service with much faster cycle times with an incremental and continuously-learned approach to ongoing product changes.

At it's core, that's a valid and (I think) mostly welcome change, but Microsoft's solution to the impedance mismatch between the two categories of offering was to force it down and ask for forgiveness later. :/

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP. But in reality, we're rapidly approach…

And before that people were vowing never to upgrade to XP, and before that people said 98 would be the last version of windows they would ever run...

The difference is that after XP, the majority of users didn't upgrade.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#150
Do users actually desire changes to the actual user experience of modern operating systems. I would be totally fine with the OS experience itself I had on Windows 2000 or OS X from 2010. Software that runs on top of the OS and support of it is a different issue. Of course also security and driver support. To me OS user experience is a solved problem and most changed to what I'm used to just make things different without providing value, but require me to retrain muscle memory. I do upgrade regularly because security. If that wasn't an issue I would never upgrade.
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