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No Start Menu for You

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Re: No Start Menu for You

#181

Post by acdha »

oriolid wrote: post #178
josephg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has been the same. I had an old Intel Mac start occasionally crashing after taking it in for a screen replacement. I fired up memtest86 and sure enough saw errors. I took it back and Apple replaced the entire motherboard for me for free. Does anyone know if there’s a memtest86 equivalent for M1 macs? I’m not sure how I’d go about testing the ram on my machine now.

When this happened to me, I was told that the memory can't be replaced without replacing the entire motherboard. Which means that after warranty period has passed the machine is either very expensive to repair or unrepairable.

That’s sadly true given the design trade offs: M1 CPU package includes RAM - that makes it fast by lowering latency and removes the category of errors related to physical sockets but means any failure requires the entire part to be replaced.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#182

Post by acdha »

josephg wrote: post #174
acdha wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh and for some reason, it's less stable than my prior windows machine. Apps just crash a lot, but that's probably due to the Arm64. I mean, remarkably stable compared to computer back when, of course, but compared to Windows 10, I have more crashes and even had to restart a couple of times! This is not normal: you might have a hardware issue or possibly some kind of invasive corporate security software. The two M1…

My experience has been the same. I had an old Intel Mac start occasionally crashing after taking it in for a screen replacement. I fired up memtest86 and sure enough saw errors. I took it back and Apple replaced the entire motherboard for me for free. Does anyone know if there’s a memtest86 equivalent for M1 macs? I’m not sure how I’d go about testing the ram on my machine now.

It hasn’t arisen for me yet but the recovery mode (Command-R at boot, or boot holding down Option and select it) has a hardware diagnostic which does at least basic memory testing.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#184

Post by fassssst »

flohofwoe wrote: post #74

Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.

Pretty much every engineer on the Windows team does this type of work. When you have 1+ billion computers with an infinite combination of peripherals and environments (what language, what apps are running, etc.), it becomes a game of statistics and prioritization.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#185

Post by behnamoh »

fodi wrote: post #125
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found Windows window management to be pretty poor. They removed always on top (except in OneNote, and it's in power toys). Open a second Word document and all your docs get maximised. Undock and re-dock your MS machine from it's MS dock and the MS OS suddenly has no clue where to put your windows. Dock to a different dock (hot-desking; same brand and size of monitor) and the entire display options need to be re-…

I've been using DeskPins for "always on top" since I've known about its existence.

Surprisingly, there’s no way to keep an app on top on macOS!

Re: No Start Menu for You

#186

Post by emsixteen »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #80
zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

I've found Windows window management to be pretty poor. They removed always on top (except in OneNote, and it's in power toys). Open a second Word document and all your docs get maximised. Undock and re-dock your MS machine from it's MS dock and the MS OS suddenly has no clue where to put your windows. Dock to a different dock (hot-desking; same brand and size of monitor) and the entire display options need to be re-…

> They removed always on top

Are you saying macOS has this?

Re: No Start Menu for You

#187

Post by kevincox »

martin_ky wrote: post #6

It seems to be a pattern with (not just) Microsoft products to hang the UI while waiting for some remote API, usually talking to the home base. Happens a lot to me with Office desktop apps - they freeze sometimes for a good second or so while starting and more surprisingly also when closing. One time it bothered me so much, that I recorded an ETW and unsurprisingly the time during the hang was spent waiting for some…

This is actually one of the things that I appreciate from React. Because the view is synchronous you need to explicitly bail out on loading states (`return `). In general you are presented the option to do something while the async work is running and other parts of the UI almost always work.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#188

Post by ptx »

LelouBil wrote: post #175
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it? Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.

I am 100% sure it will happen someday.

It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/

Re: No Start Menu for You

#189

Post by dwringer »

I've always kind of wondered if this is working as intended. Occasionally I type the name of an installed program, but the result loads slowly for whatever reason, but in the meantime there's almost instantly a search link which, if I press thinking my result was found, opens up Edge (a browser I never launch otherwise) and inevitably shows me a variety of advertisements, rather than launching the program I already have on my computer.

This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.

Re: No Start Menu for You

#190

Post by shaan7 »

zwaps wrote: post #34

I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…

> If you do consider switching, one warning about Mac is this: Window management is utter garbage

Phew, so I'm not alone. I used a Mac during 2014 to 2018 and window management was the most frustrating thing. I wanted to scream every time I accidentally moved a "maximized" window 1px to the right. aaaaargh.

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