Live data from Hacker News

The woes of Windows 10

economist.com

361–370 of 475 posts

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#361
post #201
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ni…

Am I the only one who never had issues with BSOD's, outside of hardware malfunctions?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#362
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of bad parts too. The start menu keeps freezing regularly for me on multiple machines. Searching in the start menu returns random results. Settings scattered across multiple control panels is just absurd. In-OS advertising is a complete no go to me. The nagging to use edge too. The frequent forced reboots and full screen notifications are a nuisance. And it makes it really difficult to change default…

Sometimes when I try to rename a folder in my home folder, Windows Explorer will lock up until I forcibly restart it. Start menu search seems slower and the returned results are worse than in Windows 7, Unity, XFCE, or any alternative I've experienced. Searching "irefox" doesn't find Firefox. Maybe it's because I've disabled a number of privacy-sensitive features in Windows 10, but Windows 7 managed to make this work…

The Start Menu search in Windows 10 doesn't search Program Files by default. It only examines Internet Explorer History, the Start Menu, and Users/AppData.

It's super frustrating. When I search for "vlc", it gives me search results for VLC and instructions on how to install VLC, but it doesn't actually return the vlc.exe program that I already have installed damnit.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#363
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possibil…

> 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. Those are some of the things that I find most annoying. I don't want my OS tied into other platforms. I don't want a local search to also be an online search. I don't want a file search to also be a Windows Store search. I don't want a dozen opportunities to link my local use…

Microsoft really needs to up their game in usability. Windows search has always been and continues to be shit.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes when I try to rename a folder in my home folder, Windows Explorer will lock up until I forcibly restart it. Start menu search seems slower and the returned results are worse than in Windows 7, Unity, XFCE, or any alternative I've experienced. Searching "irefox" doesn't find Firefox. Maybe it's because I've disabled a number of privacy-sensitive features in Windows 10, but Windows 7 managed to make this work…

The Start Menu search in Windows 10 doesn't search Program Files by default. It only examines Internet Explorer History, the Start Menu, and Users/AppData. It's super frustrating. When I search for "vlc", it gives me search results for VLC and instructions on how to install VLC, but it doesn't actually return the vlc.exe program that I already have installed damnit.

I have Firefox in my Start Menu, and searching "Fir", "Fire", "Firef", etc will turn it up. The search algorithm is just so bad that it ignores partial matches that don't start at the beginning of a word.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#365
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…

Windows search is still so bad.

Try FileSearchEX

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#366
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 haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 >I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut on the desktop or is pinned to the toolbar Some people would consider being unable to use a KEY feature of the OS a problem. But you're right, aside from the glaring lack of tires, it's a great car.

I meant I never had a problem with something not integrating when I expected it to. New mouse, new keyboard, new printer, headset, drives, etc. Everything has worked in that regard and painlessly (for me).

The menu I found functional (and someone else mentioned I can actually remove the crap on there I didn't want). I am mostly against the flat UI (I hate it everywhere though) and the settings that moved to random places. I never had a problem with search not working or anything of that nature.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#367
post #147

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 to Windows 7 over XP for mainline x64 support and new window management feature (aero snap). Also, being able to sort system tray icons, as well as the taskbar were very welcome.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#368
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't get over this. It doesn't help that the search (start>type) constantly doesn't find apps I'm looking for. It's to the point where I'm pinning everything to my taskbar. My workflow for a decade or more was to hit the Windows key then start typing to find indexed apps. It's almost useless to me now and I don't really get why.

> I don't really get why I got looking. It's an acknowledged bug. MS isn't even calling it a feature. It's just about as old as Windows 10, and unfixed.

Assuming they're honest, and in their defence, MS has been much more honest and transparent recently: could you imagine being the one poor soul who's been working on that bug for almost two years now? People keep reporting that bug, and you keep ruling out possible explanations.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#369
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's either malware or bloatware. A healthy, stable system with Windows 10 and 8 GB of RAM shouldn't have performance issues granted it doesn't have malware and you aren't overloading the 8GB RAM.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#370
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm a gamer and developer in high performance stuff. I've seen a concrete improvement in both average performance and responsiveness in going from win 7 to win 10 on the same machine.

That performance improvement happened in 8. 10 didn't bring anything new to the table in terms of optimizations.
Post reply on HN