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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#271

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…

Enterprise LTSB is what you're looking for.

No Cortana, just old school search like in win7.

>How did it even get launched in this state?

Microsoft wants to make money with services not software. I can understand their reasoning. Nobody wants to pay for an OS anymore. Win10 is their new business strategy: Cortana and the Store.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#272
If it’s worse than Siri that is bad.

I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks”

It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like “Days turn into weeks”???

Re: Cortana is really bad

#273
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some random idiot on a blog post So you're not ok with holding employees responsible for their work product failures, but you're ok with calling people with strong opinions about said failures "random idiots"? Hooray hypocrisy. > That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments. So companies shouldn't take customer feedback into account when making product decisions? That seem like a pret…

>Calling someone an idiot doesn't threaten their livelihood. Nor does someone calling for a firing on a blog actually threaten a livelihood.

You'd be surprised. Lots of cases of people fired because of a blogger etc asking for their heads -- even for things totally irrelevant to their job.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#274
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wit…

> Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD light blinking. I don't know what is going on.

Its gathering telemetry, running live traces on your software, gathering statistics, everything gets packaged and uploaded to the mothership regularly

Re: Cortana is really bad

#275
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type 'upda' to get Windows Update, but instead it shows Java's updater. Type 'updat' and all search results disappear completely. Type 'upd' and now it shows Windows Update but not the Java update. Type fast and get different results than if you type slow. Type the same thing a third time and get different results than the first two times. And now Cortana keeps bugging me with lame notifications. How do I turn this o…

Same with Spotlight search on macOS: Type "pho", it suggests Photoshop Type "phot", it suggests Photo Boot Type "photo", it suggests Photoshop again

I get different results on this too but to the same effect. At least macOS still gives you all options underneath whereas Windows 10 will just not show you anything sometimes

Re: Cortana is really bad

#276

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…

Gettting rid of annoying and privacy violating Win10-Stuff: https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/

Re: Cortana is really bad

#277
post #158
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows used to be optimized around user experience. Are you sure that wasn't MacOS ? I can't think of a time in recent memory I would describe windows as focused around user experience, it has always had dark corners.

Update as I can't edit original. This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience. What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for". While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not th…

Windows has been the dominant desktop operating system for going on three decades now. You don't get to that position by being hard to use for the average user. I'm curious what other concerns you think may have trumped usability over the majority of Microsoft's reign? I'll give you one to start off with that the DOJ fortunately shut down -- Consolidation (e.g. bundling IE into Windows Explorer).

Re: Cortana is really bad

#278
post #182
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually MS has had really consistent and great UX. To the point where any slightly computer-literate person would get an intuition about where something ought to be located and be almost always correct. It is not as beginner -friendly as apples products, but far more user -friendly.

My main work machine is windows - I wouldn’t go that far though I think I know where you are coming from. From where I sit some of their engineering decisions seem much more driven by platform goals, etc, rather than user experience.

Which version of Windows are you using at work? It has definitely gone downhill since Windows 7, hence this entire conversation. I'm curious if you could expand on the platform goals and how that has affected things.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logged in just to upvote you .. Everything is the fastest search tool I have ever used. It is ridiculously good. From memory, it doesn't index files, just reads the File Allocation Table. You have to wonder: how is it that a single developer can build something so much better than a behemoth like MS? They should be seriously embarrassed.

We aren't the customers. The advertisers who pay to show up as Search Results are the customers. That's why.

We are the customers though, that's why it's so tragic a fall. I spent something like $200 for Windows. Microsoft doesn't get to use that excuse here. It's not some free service like Gmail; Windows is paid. See also the OneDrive advertisement fiasco.

I think Windows started going downhill for two reasons: When Microsoft coopted the desktop version to add mobile-oriented features (Windows 8), and then when they coopted it to start cross-selling their cloud and Web services.

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