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Useless Windows 10 Features

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Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#131

Post by crispinb »

forlorn wrote: post #124
crispinb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably best off asking around on relevant forums about what works best on your particular machine. Of the mainstream distros, I found Fedora was by far the best OOB for my current laptop (XPS 15 9570), but I don't get the impression that's universally true. (Tangent: though likeable in many ways, Fedora was still too much fart-arsing about for me & after a few months I went back to Windows. I don't like it,…

Fedora is absolutely amazing these days. The smoothest experience by far compared to Ubuntu which tends to break or dramatically slow down after each dist-upgrade. I'm on Fedora since v.28 gradually upgrading packages and disto versions. I've seen no problems whatsoever.

For one thing it was the only distro I tried that gave me battery life comparable to Windows without me having to mess about with powertop etc. And everything very up-to-date. Impressed.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#132

Post by 59nadir »

morten-oddvar wrote: post #128

"All the Ads. So, So Many Ads" Seems odd to see complaints of many Ads in an OS--analogous to buying a car and having advertisements show up in the instrument cluster when stopped or not being able to exit the vehicle until watching an Ad. Haven't used Windows in recent memory (probably since these Ads appeared or I just didn't notice them). Is it as bad as the article describes?

> Is it as bad as the article describes?

I run Windows 10 Pro (English, region: Bulgaria), so I don't know if that's the reason, but I don't have any popups (notifications or otherwise) and I have 4 static gaming tiles that are essentially ads since I never asked for these games at all and they're 3rd party products. I assume those come with some bloatware deal that Microsoft made with King.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#133

Post by morten-oddvar »

krylon wrote: post #129
morten-oddvar wrote: post #128

"All the Ads. So, So Many Ads" Seems odd to see complaints of many Ads in an OS--analogous to buying a car and having advertisements show up in the instrument cluster when stopped or not being able to exit the vehicle until watching an Ad. Haven't used Windows in recent memory (probably since these Ads appeared or I just didn't notice them). Is it as bad as the article describes?

At work, I have been using Windows 10 Pro for a couple of months now after sticking with Windows 7 for as long as I could. I cannot remember seeing any ads so far.

Thanks Krylon--it sounded strange to me, hence the question.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#134

Post by 59nadir »

aksss wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #5

Most of these are similar manifestations of the same root evil (not specific to Microsoft): Users don’t want Feature X but Company wants users to want Feature X. They release Feature X to the world. It’s a failure—nobody uses it. The PM or developers who invested in that feature need to justify the investment. So they make Feature X enabled by default. Users disable it. So they remove the disable option. Users ignore…

Are you talking about Cortana right now? Cuz it sounds like you’re talking about Cortana.

I actually wanted to like Cortana and really tried, but between the service actually being down, somehow not being available just from my device other times and the phone assistant app straight up not being available in my region it was just never good enough to like.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#135

Post by tonyedgecombe »

duaoebg wrote: post #78
philliphaydon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but he doesn't want to pay and doesn't want some other app. So just accepts it.

I had no idea this was the case. This is awful. Microsoft got so much good will out of those free games and now they choose to nickel and dime people.

I'd love to know how much money they make out of this stuff, my guess is not very much at all.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#136

Post by hnick »

7532yahoogmail wrote: post #21

The dumbest windows feature? When you accidentally touch the top of a window to top of screen, it maximizes. On Mac it's sort of the opposite: you can't relocate a window to another screen if it's maximizes. It "helps" you by force partitioning the screen.

Sticky corners (with 2 monitors) annoy me more. Drag your mouse pointer to the top corner of the screen, trying to take it to the next monitor - nope, it gets stuck.

It goes from annoying to very frustrating when I am trying to click at the top left of the window on my 2nd screen, but someone at MS decided the mouse will get stuck on the X and close my current window instead. I have very good mouse accuracy from years of computing (and video games), so I can click very accurately and this would always catch me off guard until I slowed down my own actions to double check where the pointer is.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#137

Post by tonyedgecombe »

chowells wrote: post #35
_trampeltier wrote: post #15

Standart folders, does anybody really use them? I upgradet one Notebook at home to from Win7 to Win10. Besides of other things I couldn't believe the added Candy Crash in my Start Menu. In a home edition maybe .. but on Win Pro, serious? I played back on the Win7 image pretty quick. I'm anyway mostly Linux, but I don't think I'll ever move any machine to Win10.

You might think it's silly. Microsoft thinks it has massively cut down on malware installation. One of these is an aesthetic judgment. The other is a security judgment.

These judgements are orthogonal, one doesn't preclude the other.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#138

Post by petepete »

miles wrote: post #12
Bender wrote: post #2

I agree with this article, but I think it can be summed up as, "People need the option to buy the LTSB release of Windows 10". Microsoft refuses to sell it to consumers. It is an enterprise only option (unless that has recently changed and I am not aware of it). I have one windows 7 machine for playing WoW and it will stay on 7 until I can get the LTSB release of Windows 10 and the ability to turn off 100% of the tel…

Anyone can buy LTSC for a few hundred dollars. I cobbled together a post last year on acquiring it: https://tinyapps.org/blog/201811300700_windows_10_ltsc.html However, it does require a willingness to enter into a VL agreement with Microsoft.

Would Window 10 for Workstations be an alternative? I believe it is ad-free, although if someone could confirm that it would be helpful.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/windows-10-pro-for-worksta...

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#139

Post by viraptor »

da_chicken wrote: post #119
cookie_monsta wrote: post #85

I've installed Win10 on dozens of machines and I've never seen ads on the lock screen, in the taskbar, and in notifications like the article talks about. Maybe because I always say "no" to all those creepy tracking/advertising ID type options on the initial config screen and I always say no to Cortana at the same time. What I heard (and it seems reasonable) is that MS included games like Solitaire and Minesweeper in…

I'm reasonably sure Cortana is what displays the ads on the task bar. I've only seen them on others' home systems. I've absolutely seen ads on my start menu for Candy Crush and other MS Store games, but I shut them down with registry tweaks and the like.. > MS sees no practical reason to keep those games free. It's a removed feature that essentially all users expect to be present. Charging for something like that is…

Exactly. It's similar to providing trivial things at work. Don't offer free coffee - meh. Offer free coffee - that's cool. Take away free coffee - the world's ending, are people going to be fired soon?

I doubt they'll get more from the game sales than they lost in bad PR. But maybe I'm wrong, I don't do marketing.

Re: Useless Windows 10 Features

#140

Post by Const-me »

superasn wrote: post #106

I'm deliberately trying never to update to Windows 10 because I think Windows 7 had everything I could ever need from the OS. I wish the hardware drivers weren't so restricted as for my latest laptop no driver exists for Windows 7 so had to be forced to install Win 10 nightmare. One tip for you guys is that if you want to get rid of most bloat that comes bundled with Win 10, I found this freeware software to be prett…

I once needed to test and debug my software on Win7. The app uses hardware video encoder, virtualization doesn't work, so I had to install Win7 on a hardware PC.

The hardware drivers are there. It just takes some time to find them, and then some time to integrate into Win7 ISO so the installer doesn't fail.

I liked Win7 very much for the first couple of days. However I've reverted to Win10. Too many things are broken on Win7 in comparison: high DPI support, usability features like Win+arrow keys, no MS Edge.

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