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The woes of Windows 10

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#381

Post by criddell »

hfsktr wrote: post #201
mundo wrote: 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…

IMHO, operating systems are a solved problem. I think that's why Microsoft is pushing the line between OS and applications so far into application space. I understand they may want to ship with solitaire and weather and all the other garbage apps, but why not let me uninstall them?

I don't go to my computer and think "oh great, I get to use Windows" (or Linux or any other OS), I'm there to run some application.

If Windows didn't arbitrarily send data to their servers, I might use the built in calendar or contacts. It feels like they want me to give up my privacy and they are offering nothing in return.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#382

Post by princeb »

E6300 wrote: post #370
Mithaldu wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

dx12 doesn't work with 8

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#383

Post by wildmusings »

AlexandrB wrote: post #143
wildmusings wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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.

And to add to my previous comment, I can't see why you would want to keep your laptop or desktop unencrypted. If someone steals your computer, they have access to all of your data.

And without Secure Boot and/or TPM-backed key management, hard disk encryption becomes vulnerable to someone planting a modified boot loader or firmware on your system.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#384

Post by NamTaf »

E6300 wrote: post #372
cheald wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Cortana turned completely off and settings are really easy to get to. Win key -> sett isn't particularly difficult. Or just typing in part of the setting usually finds it right away.

Maybe you're just lucky, or you're the sort of user MS is targeting with their new UI design. Whenever I'm configuring a W10 machine I find myself going back and forth between two completely different configuration interfaces. I.e. the Control Panel and the Settings app.

To be far I'm the same as the grandparent post, but I tend to stick to the legacy settings menus which still have everything and only encounter the new ones occasionally (ie: updates).

I've learned enough of the new one to navigate it, but I can still basically type my way through settings in the old style menus still so it doesn't bother me.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#385

Post by NamTaf »

wott wrote: post #344
alkonaut wrote: post #202

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.

> You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?) Windows 10 cannot work on a hard drive? In a way, it makes sense: when my father upgraded from Seven to W10, W10 never worked properly and killed the hard drive in a matter of 3 days.

Sure it can, but mechanical drives are just comparitively glacially slow agianst SSDs and 'general OS snappiness' is one of the major real-world examples of where you feel it.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#386

Post by flukus »

NamTaf wrote: post #385
wott wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?) Windows 10 cannot work on a hard drive? In a way, it makes sense: when my father upgraded from Seven to W10, W10 never worked properly and killed the hard drive in a matter of 3 days.

Sure it can, but mechanical drives are just comparitively glacially slow agianst SSDs and 'general OS snappiness' is one of the major real-world examples of where you feel it.

Yet windows 7 ran fine with them, performing the same functions.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#387

Post by seanp2k2 »

Silhouette wrote: post #310
scholia wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot in the Control Panel. The more you move to the new Settings app, the more complicated Settings gets. And if Microsoft didn't provide all those settings, or dropped the whole Control Panel, there would be a tornado of criticism. Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system. Do it all at once, they'll complain bitterly.…

Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system. That's true, but it's probably a lot harder when you've proven to be untrustworthy in what you include under "modernisation" or "updates". Plenty of techie people warned that user-hostile behaviour like the GWX campaign or including non-security things in updates advertised as security p…

Not to mention all the dark patterns around pushing the Win10 "upgrade" in the first place.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#388

Post by seanp2k2 »

VintageCool wrote: post #362
mintplant wrote: post #349

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.

Try https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox

or http://alternativeto.net/software/everything/ or https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/ or http://colibri.leetspeak.org/ or http://alternativeto.net/software/listary/?platform=windows or http://www.candylabs.com/approcket or http://www.launchy.net/download.php#windows

This was a popular thing ~10 years ago, not surprising that Windows didn't get it right. FWIW, MacOS also fails at this regularly with Spotlight, but Alfred is sometimes better. Wox seems to be the closest thing for Windows, and Launchy used to be the one the cool kids used.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#390

Post by hadfgdasf »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #275
zekevermillion wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

> cortana is clippy, we all know that. This is one of the things when they announced was going to be a big part of Windows 10 I knew would turn a lot of people off. I used it sparingly on my WP8, and it was hit or miss most of the time with searches. For instance, I always look for pizza places when I'm in a new city. I was in a new city and had some recommendations from clients. I asked Cortana like five times onmy…

When you set up Win10, it asks whether you want to use Cortana. What's the problem if you say no? Don't use it.
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