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The woes of Windows 10

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#271

Post by nolok »

marcosdumay wrote: post #218
distantsounds wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can remove just about all the tiles and extra bloat from the Start Menu, bringing on a more familiar return of what it used to be. Just right-click and 'remove' every tile until there's nothing left.

What you can't do, no matter what you try, is to make the Start Menu show all the programs you have installed. But attaching things there is nice. Even better than the KDE menu.

Google "Classic Shell". It's a freeware, allowing you to replace your start menu with either a XP or a 7 like start menu.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#272

Post by elorant »

I had a rather odd problem with Win10 and that is it hurt my eyes. I don't know whether they changed something with ClearType or for some other reason but after two days I reverted back to Win7.

Other than that, I really didn't like the UI. To change colors in menus you have to use a hack because the preselected list of colors is just dreadful, the start menu once again is all over the place and various other mishaps that give the impression that it's not a finished product. They try to build a unified OS for all devices when all I want is a simple desktop OS.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#273

Post by Terr_ »

shubb wrote: post #236
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly something has gone very wrong when an IT manager allowing a software update is considered to be making a "Massive Mistake".

Not trusting vendors is part of the job. IT departments will typically turn off automatic updates from vendors, and instead role them out in an automated way that they control. If they are too slow in doing that, then they are doing it wrong sure. But Microsoft updates do brick computers, undo obscure enterprisy settings, or role out unevenly across your estate so people are on different versions. You want to see if…

> Not trusting vendors is part of the job.

But at the same time, for an OS company being trustworthy is part of their job.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#274

Post by lineindc »

Karunamon wrote: post #204
lineindc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Group Policy Editor lets you disable telemetry.

..if you're on an Enterprise SKU. Maybe.

No. I have Pro and I can do it. And I think you can download the Group Policy Editor in other versions of Windows, and even if you can't, you can modify the pertinent registry keys.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#275

Post by at-fates-hands »

zekevermillion wrote: post #239
hfsktr wrote: 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…

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 WP8 and every time she would get it wrong or think I was saying something else. On my Android? One time, nailed it.

Also, the desktop integration is down right invasive compared to how the mobile version worked. I don't really use it at all anyways on my desktop, its not very accurate and my app launcher (executor: executor.dk) works way faster anyways for a majority of stuff I'm looking for.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#276

Post by nisa »

hfsktr wrote: 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'm most of the time using Linux but Windows 10 is quite fast and usable if you are willing to do the dance to check all privacy settings and clean the Start Menu of the spam.

I don't use an online id for logging in and use this tool to fix privacy settings: https://modzero.github.io/fix-windows-privacy/ (read the fine print, it's quite invasive!) there are powershell scripts for cleaning the start menu - I don't have a link handy, sorry.

After doing this it's a great system! Even Edge is somewhat usable if you install uBlock Origin (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblgg...)

However most regular users are stuck with the shiny and annonying defaults that make you feel you handed over your machine to Microsoft to show you annoying ads.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#277

Post by flukus »

cm2187 wrote: post #246
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…

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…

The start menu tries to connect to the internet when you search. It has an offline mode, but if you have an intermittent connection it will just hang forever. Opening an application should never require a connection.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#278

Post by mattmanser »

kupiakos wrote: post #270
cm2187 wrote: 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…

The most frustrating thing for me is the automatic updates that are difficult to turn off. If I leave a Windows 10 VM running on my laptop for too long, it will decide it's "idle" and start consuming my resources. Even if I let the updates finish, it then continues for another week, whenever I leave it "idle", to perform AoT .NET compilation, pegging my CPU. Incredibly annoying.

My laptop fan is a bit of a noisy bugger, if I leave windows 10 for 5 mins it thinks idle and the the fan just starts going.

First I found that ngentask was repeatedly running 32-bit ngen and it's practically impossible to debug what's gone wrong so I've replace the ngen with a dummy exe.

But it still does it, now instead of ngen it's simply "System" constantly burning 20% cpu for whatever utterly pointless maintenance task it's decided on that's obviously broken.

It's just really frustrating, I swear that the "idle" mode of win 10 costs me far more money than actively using the laptop. And it's so hard to debug because as soon as the computer activates it stops whatever bullshit it was doing.

On my desktop I tried ripping out all the privacy invasive stuff and have somehow managed to break the start menu search.

I do like it more than Win 7, the startup time's great, but it's still really frustrating at times.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#279

Post by flukus »

vvanders wrote: post #85
mnm1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit. How else is Microsoft (or any other company) going to make money off software no one needs or wants? Other than rehashing the same old product and pushing it onto users for more money, more surveillance, or both, they have nothing of value to sell on the software side. Even if they did have something of value to sell, over 90% of the people have already bought their product. Gotta keep the cash rolling in so…

There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS. Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately. I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's…

> There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.

It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#280

Post by stan_rogers »

shmed wrote: post #253
gerbilly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. I think we shouldn't take the defeatist position with respect to surveillance. I know that techies like us can block this kind of traffic at the network edge or chase down the multiple settings it takes to turn this off, but not all users will be this sophisticated. We sho…

There's a big distinction between "surveillance" and anonymous "crash logs/telemetry".

No, there isn't.
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