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The woes of Windows 10

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#231
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.

It took some effort but I did make Win 10 reasonably snappy for me on a Lenovo Ideapad designed for Win 8 with a few tricks: Using a script to disable all the tracking(the only thing I haven't disabled, but probably should, is the SmartScreen protection, which kicks in obnoxiously frequently and wrecks the drive), going to 16GB of RAM so that it stops swapping, disabling all the graphics features except for font smoothing, and switching to NexusFile for day-to-day file operations. There are still instances where I click on something that uses Explorer and it sits there uselessly for a few seconds, and the initial boot or recovery from sleep mode can sometimes be a doozy, but this is now more exceptional than not.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#232

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!

Every time I hear about updates being "forced," yes, Microsoft did some shady things to trick non-tech people into the upgrade which I agree is shady. However any competent IT manager would know how to stop that from happening. Even a cursory google search shows you how to remove the windows update that starts the upgrade. Also all computers on a network domain will not auto update. Each time I read of an IT manager…

Small companies like this usually don't have an IT person at all, let alone a manager.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#233
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 hate the menu [...] everything I tend to open has a shortcut on the desktop or is pinned to the toolbar.

You have to get Keypirinha! http://keypirinha.com/ Set ALT+Space to launch Keypirinha, then type the name of your application to launch it. Keypirinha adapts to how you use it. Often frequently launched programs will only take a couple keystrokes. For example TH launches Thunderbird.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#234
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 really, really like Windows 10. I spend most of my work days in OS X on a Macbook Pro - but I also spend a lot of my free time gaming. Windows 10 is so much more user-friendly than any other OS I use. Settings are easy to find, generally easy to understand and change. Search is great. It boots super fast. It's about to get a 'game-mode' to restrict resources from background apps. Installing stuff from the Windows s…

> Settings are easy to find

Hah. You're lucky your Cortana bar still works. They aren't as easy to find when your Cortana bar disappears when you click it. Tried all the random fixes on the internet to no avail. I never even tried to fix privacy concerns -- it just broke.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#235
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really count a forced reboot "now or in 15 minutes, no delays" as reliable. There are people who've had this happen in the middle of presentations at meetings. Similarly, I've had these forced updates happen, and on relogin "click here to see what was updated" -> nothing listed.

I don't understand this whole "forced updates" FUD. Just configure the times you want your machine to be updated and it gets out of the way.

Except that the configuration options force you to choose at least a 12 hour contiguous period in which updates are allowed. If I could tell it to reboot at 4am when I'm definitely asleep that would be fine, but apparently that's not an option.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I hear about updates being "forced," yes, Microsoft did some shady things to trick non-tech people into the upgrade which I agree is shady. However any competent IT manager would know how to stop that from happening. Even a cursory google search shows you how to remove the windows update that starts the upgrade. Also all computers on a network domain will not auto update. Each time I read of an IT manager…

Clearly something has gone very wrong when an IT manager allowing a software update is considered to be making a "Massive Mistake".

Not trusting vendors is part of the job. IT departments will typically turn off automatic updates from vendors, and instead role them out in an automated way that they control.

If they are too slow in doing that, then they are doing it wrong sure. But Microsoft updates do brick computers, undo obscure enterprisy settings, or role out unevenly across your estate so people are on different versions. You want to see if that happens to someone else before you roll out.

This is even more true with windows based servers, where you'd probably want to switch in an alternative or do everything at 3am on Saturday morning.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#237
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…

Holy sh*t. Are you sure you don't have some malware screwing things up? None of those things are even close to "normal" or "acceptable".

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#238
post #59
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I don't like the flat-UI trend any more than you, but there's two simple facts here: 1) It's not just MS pushing the flat-UI trend. Apple and Google are too, along with every other Web/UI designer out there. Everyone's doing it. MS's version does seem to be the ugliest though, mainly because of the horrible color picks. 2) The users you seem concerned about like this stuff. They're all buying and using Windows,…

Your second point doesn't really hold up - I'm a Windows 10 user, and I don't spend any time even considering Linux UI alternatives because you could show me one that I liked twice as much as Windows and I still wouldn't want to use Linux for my day to day stuff. I actually don't mind the Windows 10 UI as it happens, but if there were the variety of options for Windows that there are for Linux, I'd certainly see if I…

She wasn't implying you should switch to Linux to get the UI alternatives available there. She was saying that there is nobody working on UI alternatives/innovations except for a few people in the Linux space. That everyone had settled on the same basic UI.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#239
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…

That is the tragedy of win10. It's actually a great OS but the lack of respect for user preferences around privacy and updates ruins it for power users. I have to think that the engineers who did the work to make win10 as efficient and stable as it is had cortana and dark UI patterns shoved down their throats. cortana is clippy, we all know that. Who thought it was a good idea to bring back clippy?! Could not have been the team that does powershell!

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have similar problems, the amount of uncoordinated disk accesses that seem to happen constantly are murder for older spinning disks. After a while it levels out but that's usually after the first hour of usage- resource monitor clearly indicates what sent my disk queues up as Microsoft code that's recommended to be on such as defender. An SSD is absolutely required, or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 ins…

> or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 2.0 for the extra iops.

The interface is unrelated to the IOPS you get out of a hard drive. 3Gbps SATA II has no trouble delivering far more than the ~200 IOPS a 7200RPM hard drive is capable of.

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