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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#141

Post by vocatus_gate »

CydeWeys wrote: post #93
seanp2k2 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.voidtools.com You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB. There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the C…

Thanks so much. I will definitely try these out. It's a shame to have to resort to third party tools to have an acceptable experience for such a basic OS use case as finding and launching applications. I don't know what the hell they're doing over there at MSFT anymore, but they're missing several basic building blocks of a good OS.

For what it's worth I'm another person who's been using "Everything" for years and love it.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#142

Post by vocatus_gate »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #82
CydeWeys wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "everything search"? Is that third party or does it ship with Windows? That sounds like something I need.

https://www.voidtools.com You might also like http://www.getwox.com (basically Alfred for Windows) which can also search the Everything DB. There’s also stuff like https://mobile.jam-software.de/ultrasearch/?language=EN and https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ Yeah, Cortana is awful and if you totally remove it, you break the start menu (just like removing IE back in the day...sigh). Blackbird can stop the C…

Reddit.com/r/TronScript also works well for killing off Cortana and the telemetry "features"

Re: Cortana is really bad

#143

Post by vocatus_gate »

loeg wrote: post #125
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

> I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. Install Classic Shell and disable Cortana. I do it on every Windows machine I set up.

reddit.com/r/tronscript will remove all the OEM and Metro bloat, kill off Cortana, and disable the telemetry "features"

Re: Cortana is really bad

#144

Post by aphextron »

CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

Check out Windows 10 LTSB

https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...

Re: Cortana is really bad

#145

Post by simonh »

8ytecoder wrote: post #111
eitland wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not: Many of us far prefer Windows to MacOS. And it's not just old habits: I came to the various linux desktop environments after Windows and i still prefer some of them over both Windows and MacOS. (Spent almost 3 years on Mac. Started as an enthusiastic user. Left really disillusioned. Have later come to the conclusion that it is really great and I'm just incompatible:-)

Yeah, if you have never used another OS, MacOS seems like the best. But when even the simplest pro things don't work, it gets beyond annoying. Some examples - Cut, Paste files; Shift select files; Minimise and how it works with Cmd+Tab; Maximise the way it works now. I need something like BetterTouchTool to even tolerate MacOS. It's the terminal (Ubuntu on Windows is great but still needs more work) and the quality h…

Some of that behaviour is a bit awkward, but then there are amazing magical jewels like Automator and active folders.

But window management on Windows is a pain now with auto-snapping and the stupid charms thing or whatever it is popping up all the time.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#146

Post by rdtsc »

Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human).

That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated.

There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#147

Post by mcny »

milcron wrote: post #65
neves wrote: post #24

How can I disable Cortana? I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.

The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

> The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment.

Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d... https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png

Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux partition tbh)

Re: Cortana is really bad

#148

Post by cabaalis »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #137
fpgaminer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…

There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years. https://everything.en.softonic.com/ "Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install anything from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#149

Post by vinw »

cabaalis wrote: post #148
vocatus_gate wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years. https://everything.en.softonic.com/ "Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install anything from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.

Everything's site is voidtools.com

https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

Re: Cortana is really bad

#150

Post by 1wd »

orjan wrote: post #105
CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

I use a nice little utility called Launchy[0]. It is invoked by Alt-Space (or whatever shortcut you like), is lightning fast and finds the right application 99% of the time. Based on your problems, I think it could be worth checking out. [0] https://www.launchy.net

https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox is very similar but has a more active community.
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