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The woes of Windows 10

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#201

Post by hfsktr »

mundo wrote: post #171
hfsktr wrote: post #164

I must be in the huge minority. I haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 (if we disregard privacy). Literally everything has just worked. I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great. I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut…

Thousands of programmer years went in to Win10, and the most positive comment on it is "It's perfectly tolerable if you turn off all that stuff they added." This should be in the dictionary to illustrate the phrase "Damning with faint praise."

I think it's the best OS I've used yet really. I remember getting BSOD many times on Windows XP and several times on Win 7 (although they were so rare they were the exception). Almost always those previous iterations had some peripheral that needed help being configured but with Win 10 I haven't had to touch almost anything.

My computer has changed to be not comparable to those previous though because I now have a nice GPU, a nice CPU, and a SSD. So any speed improvements, graphic improvements, etc are skewed by the hardware changes I've made since.

I didn't turn off anything except the privacy that I could. It's just that I don't have a use case for most of the features (yet).

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#202

Post by alkonaut »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #172
hfsktr wrote: post #164

I must be in the huge minority. I haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 (if we disregard privacy). Literally everything has just worked. I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great. I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut…

I run - using the word very loosely - Win 10 on a mid-spec 8GB Dell Laptop. It's literally unusably slow. Opening File Manager takes many minutes. This is practically a fresh install. I have Office 365 installed, but very little else. I don't even have a mail client set up. I dual-boot to Ubuntu on the same machine, and the latter is perfectly usable.

You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?) or a problem with some preinstalled software running in the background.

8GB with even a several years old CPU should be perfectly usable. SSD is absolutely required though. No number of cores and gigs will compensate for the lack of ssd.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#203

Post by fooey »

akappa wrote: 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…

Microsoft has successfully trained me that OS upgrades can be very traumatic. I consider myself an early adopter, and I always run cutting edge on my phone or win laptop, but I only ever upgrade my primary workstation when it dies and I have to.

Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#204

Post by Karunamon »

lineindc wrote: post #139
jasonkostempski wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined." Where is that option? Also, it's easy to get a browser that doesn't phone home and a plugin that stops websites from doing it.

The Group Policy Editor lets you disable telemetry.

..if you're on an Enterprise SKU. Maybe.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#205

Post by tw04 »

mundo wrote: post #171
hfsktr wrote: post #164

I must be in the huge minority. I haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 (if we disregard privacy). Literally everything has just worked. I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great. I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut…

Thousands of programmer years went in to Win10, and the most positive comment on it is "It's perfectly tolerable if you turn off all that stuff they added." This should be in the dictionary to illustrate the phrase "Damning with faint praise."

Just because he isn't using the new features, doesn't mean they aren't useful. WSL is great - still needs work but on the insider previews it's on 16.04 LTS and they're slowly knocking out the nagging little issues with it. If you've got a 2-in-1 like a surface book, the switching from desktop to tablet mode is awesome.

If you aren't paranoid (and completely understand why some people are) about the security possibilities, cortana is actually pretty nice too. And as they slowly tie it into xbox and their other platforms it will just become that much more useful. Virtual desktop support is finally there.

I mean, outside of that, what were you expecting from Windows? It's the most widely used desktop on the planet... it's not like there were any major feature gaps that were just deal breakers.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#206

Post by davidf18 »

1_2__3 wrote: post #176
davidf18 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't these stores standardize on vendors? Why would they use different vendors which only adds to complexity unless they've bought out a different store chain and are integrating existing systems? Also, they should pay the vendors contracts for maintenance instead of trying to do the upgrades themselves. The vendors are generally more likely to do the testing necessary and have the skills for upgrading systems a…

Not to be crude but what you call "standardizing on vendors" I call a great way to spend your days getting screwed by said vendor(s).

Sometimes one has to pay that price. Can you suggest an alternative that reduces complexity?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#207

Post by tw04 »

jacquesc wrote: post #182

I got a Windows 10 laptop (Razer) for Christmas for gaming / media / browsing purposes (been a Mac user for 10+ yrs). It's buggy as hell. The shortcut icons on the desktop and taskbar kept going away (replacing all the icons with a "not found" placeholder), forcing me to reinstall the OS. Now none of the search functions work (e.g. windows key -> search for app.. no results). Whatever, I just use 2 apps anyways (Chro…

>Windows settings panels have at least 2 diff ways to configure anything, the "old" and the "new". Graphics settings have 4 places to change stuff (Intel, Nvidia, built in old and new). It's just a jumbled mess.

They're well aware of that, and if you follow the insider previews, every new build is moving more of the features into the "new" way of doing things. Is it annoying there are two places? Absolutely... but the alternative is not changing anything and waiting 5 years while everything gets rolle dup.

>Bluetooth never recognizes device names (it's a guessing game as to which "Unknown Device" is the one I want). The trackpad is mediocre, and the config panel from Synaptics probably hasn't changed since Windows 95.

Not sure what to tell you there other than a buggy driver on your laptop. All of my bluetooth devices tell me exactly what they are before and after adding them.

The trackpad thing isn't Windows, it's the trackpad razer chose to use, or the driver. One of the reasons that MS finally said f-it and introduced precision touchpad. If you still have the old-school synaptics panel, then Razer chose not to participate.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#208

Post by tim333 »

deburo wrote: post #147
chinathrow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

I upgraded from XP to 7. For me the main plus was stability - with XP you had to reinstall from an image when it got screwed up quite regularly.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#209

Post by gambiting »

hfsktr wrote: post #164

I must be in the huge minority. I haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 (if we disregard privacy). Literally everything has just worked. I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great. I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut…

I've literally never had a system as buggy as Windows 10, every day I switch on my computer I wonder what's going to be broken today. Stuff which works on the same hardware on Windows 7 is just unreliable on Windows 10. Not to mention that 10 is a usability mess and a massive step back in pretty much every corner of the system.

Since I've typed out a small list of my problems with Win 10 before, they are here to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13418573

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#210

Post by bsder »

afghanPower wrote: post #42
akappa wrote: 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…

I get (maybe) your argument when it comes to Windows 7 -> Windows 10, but I think you're overestimating how hard it is to get up and running with Arch Linux. Following an Arch install tutorial shouldn't take anyone here on Hackernews more than 2 hours to get their DE, networking etc. up and going. You should try it. It's fun!

> I think you're overestimating how hard it is to get up and running with Arch Linux

Not really.

Arch was a PITA. FreeBSD has a smoother install (not a compliment to Arch).

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