Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage

So, Windows 10 isn't the saviour of the PC industry after all – and is beginning to look more like a Windows Vista than a Windows XP. PC growth predictions have been revised down by IDC. A range of companies including HP Ink and Northamber blame Windows 10 for flagging sales. "We have not yet seen the anticipated Win10 …

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame users for the UI

The incoherence in Windows 10's UI is a direct result of that wonderful in-house team not listening to what users wanted when designing and testing Windows 8. It was pretty well inevitable that the headlong retreat from that UI disaster would also have to involve pandering to the poor bloody users this time around, with all their diverse requirements and preferences, and that the result would be a bit of a mess. Would Windows 10 have been any better if Microsoft's team had designed the UI in splendid isolation? Possibly, but Windows 8 suggests otherwise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Yes, don't blame them for the Windows 10 UI. Praise them for it.

It works scarily well from phone to tablet to surface to desktop for the vast majority of people that only use 10 or 20 applications at the most. What it doesn't cater for so well is the IT bod who wants several hundred programs easily accessible from a hierarchical menu. That's what happens when you listen to people and give the majority what they want.

[keithpeter]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

And we don't need another significant change in the UI right now thanks. Training/supporting people going from Win7 to Win10 is just about supportable as long as we don't have to do it again next year.

[Bob Vistakin]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Needs more of this. Much more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

The Insider program. Perhaps it's cynicism, but cynicism based on long experience, particularly with the Microsoft newsgroups, to expect that the majority of participants would be Microsoft fanbois. Otherwise there would be a reasonable no. of users who enjoy beta testing so are not necessarily Microsoft bootlickers, but many are likely obsessives - like the kinds who have a morbid fear of being a day or two late to get the latest definitions for this or that anti-malware offering; or early-adopters of all stripes.It does seem as if more users ran the Technical Preview than previous betas, but whatever demographic that was an increase of, obviously it wasn't from the overwhelming majority Windows 10 is actually aimed at. Perhaps it was a smattering of fanbois, obsessives - and those like myself.

I'm not going to attempt to classify my own 'type', beyond that we tend to read The Register; if we're obsessive about tech, nonetheless retain an open, rational mind, and have no affiliation. We are probably the minority participants who ideally would be the majority (given there not being a chance in hell the majority market for the end product is ever going to consciously beta test).

You might even - in our almost-legalistically even-handed way - consider Microsoft's intentions running the Insider program of being honourable, if naive.

However, I never saw one single example of Microsoft acting, or even expressing the intention to act on any suggestion or complaint that would involve doing anything differently. The cynic would suggest that, no, Microsoft weren't being naive; that they assumed from the same long experience that the majority of Insiders would be those for whom Microsoft can do no wrong, and those who simply have to run the very latest tech but have no opinion. If so, the Insider program would be a cynical marketing ploy presumably designed to make the target market think that Microsoft 'listened' to it's customers when developing Windows 10; while having an army of those ordinary 'customers' proclaiming to the world how great it is.

So call me 'cynical'. But, considering that since April last year Microsoft have been engaging in the most cynical marketing ploy in home computing history, so far culminating in bundling Win 10 advertising in a Security update; that the only way to decline is to decline the Security update...I for one conclude that the Insider program is what it ultimately felt like, to me: a cynical marketing ploy. Apologies to my fellow even-handed beta testers if I've strayed into 'biased'.

[Hans 1]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

>Training/supporting people going from Win7 to Win10 is just about supportable as long as we don't have to do it again next year.

XP EOL'd April 8, 2014, when did you train people going from XP to 7 ?

Imagine, you had migrated to Linux iso XP, Gnome or KDE, no matter, both versions (or clones thereof) are still actively supported. Imagine you migrate to Linux iso 10?

[keithpeter]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"Imagine, you had migrated to Linux iso XP, Gnome or KDE, no matter, both versions (or clones thereof) are still actively supported. Imagine you migrate to Linux iso 10?"

@Hans 1

In my dreams, but, if pigs were seen flying in formation over Birmingham, and cats were cohabiting with dogs &c with a few tweaks to an image we could have This or This and minimal re-training (system already has OpenOffice/GIMP/Inkscape).

Yes, XP -> Win7 did involve training.

[AlbertH]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Yes, XP -> Win7 did involve training.

Strangely, W7 -> KDE didn't require any significant training at all. We just relabelled "Writer" as "Word Processor" and so on. The users got over their Monday morning shock by lunchtime!

It was only a week or so later, when the users realised how little time log-in took and how some of the "extras" we'd given them worked, that the general uptake of the "new system" was fully approved. The company have saved a potload on licencing and now employ a (smaller) support desk staff who are clueful and useful.

There has also been a mass migration of laptops - including many personal ones - as the users realise just how well their gear is supposed to work!

[Adam Inistrator]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I changed one user from Windows to Ubuntu experimentally and about a month later I heard that the other four users in the office were miffed they "hadn't been upgraded".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Yes, Linux Desktop makes a terrific word processor!

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

The two boxes I have to use at my place of gainful employment still run XP. And Office 2003. Any questions?

[Chika]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

when did you train people going from XP to 7 ?

There were sufficiently few changes to the UI that required a large amount of retraining in the general workplace when shifting between systems prior to Windows 8. Every version from W95 up to W7 was an evolution, not a paradigm shift and the changes that did occur were more of a problem for support than for users. Even on the support side things weren't that bad.

The only big problems tended to be where applications broke because of underlying changes made by Microsoft, and even there it was often something that could be worked around except on a few occasions where the software itself was heavily flawed (so-called "dirty coding" has always been a problem and not just in the world of Microsoft).

So training was quite often trivial as long as things weren't mucked about with too much. In my experience of XP to W7 rollouts, very few people really noticed much difference in what they were doing. W8 and W10 broke all that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

And we don't need another significant change in the UI right now thanks. Training/supporting people going from Win7 to Win10 is just about supportable as long as we don't have to do it again next year.

The obvious answer, which Microsoft instantly dismissed, was give us back the nice Windows 7 full-colour and gradients Aero GUI, and use icons people can recognise, instead of ones drawn by a three-year old.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

@ AC - "a three-year old" - I think a three-year would do better.

Slurp seems to be ignoring 50 years of UI research. The research indicated that for large screen devices which have a full keyboard the classic "WIMP" interface is the best for users. On hand-held devices which will not normally have a full keyboard, the touch interface works best. The basis of both GUI systems is human anatomy which has not changed in a long time.

[Michael Sanders]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Exactly. No user in the preview wanted the color scheme or for aeroglass to go away. And everybody was confused about where to go for control panel settings. This was a microsoft, done by committee special.

[Palpy]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..."

1. I don't use Win 10, it's various Linux and Mac at home and Win 7 at work.

2. HOWEVER: what I have heard from friends who updated to 10 from 7 is that they are lukewarm at best.

If it is good for "the vast majority of people" then why does regular-user S. tell me "it's frustrating to use" (and he's a Win fanboy), regular-user G. say he uses Win 10 because he has to but "likes Windows 7 better", and enterprise-user D. (retired) says he has a Win 10 machine for his kids to game on but finds it annoying, and bought a Mac for his own use?

Again, I have no direct experience of Win 10 so I really am not gain-saying your opinion. Just that others seem to think differently. Must say, I am in the "older user" set, so maybe that has something to do with it. I've gotten a bit less patient with some software, though I also distro-hop and despite my Windows background find it pretty easy to get along with various interfaces.

Perhaps it's a matter of what a given user finds interesting and worth exploring, and what a user just wants to work without bothering him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

As you have never used Windows 10 all you need to do is go into PC world (sorry horrible thought, but you don't need to talk to the staff except to say "no thank you"). Have a play on a tablet, a surface and a non touch screen laptop or desktop all running Windows 10. As you have some experience of different UI's I expect you will find all three incredibly easy to use. Although like me you may find the Surface (or any other hybrid) that supports both touch and keyboard weird at first when you find your self using both the keyboard and touching the screen to get things done. I've only had the pleasure of using one of these for 10 minutes but when I went back to using my own non touch laptop I kept touching the screen trying to do things the "touch" way before laughing and using the mouse.

People don't like change, but no change is no progress.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

"People don't like change, but no change is no progress."

No change is also not breakage. Sorry to take the Bombastic Bob route but IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT.

Apart from that the real problem isn't in the interface, it's in what you don't see unless you go and read the privacy statement and try to find the limits MS impose on themselves.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

If it ain't broke don't fix it is a nice statement, but if we were to follow that Ford would only have model T's in their showrooms and sales figures would be disappointing. Often you only know its broken after it has been fixed.

As far as the privacy argument goes, I don't think Microsoft has a cat in hells chance of getting anything tangible out of the data it pulls back other than usage statistics. Certainly nothing that's going to be materially damaging to me. They just aren't that good. Google by contrast has an excellent track record of hoovering up our personal data and making use of it by slinging adds at us that might just get us to waste money on something we don't need. Sadly like most people I have never read the Google privacy statement which I suspect they change whenever they feel the commercial need.

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

If it ain't broke don't fix it is a nice statement, but if we were to follow that Ford would only have model T's in their showrooms and sales figures would be disappointing. Often you only know its broken after it has been fixed.

You may not have noticed AC that not too long after the Model T, the motor car industry pretty much settled on a standard arrangement of accelerator, clutch, brake and gear shift. MS seems intent on shifting these around in a somewhat random fashion (for our "convenience"). Unsurprisingly, many resent this.

Fortunately, there was no Apple equivalent suing the pants off anybody who dared to use the same locations as their vehicles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply ? @Pompous Git

Well yes they did sort of standardise cars with accelerator, brake, clutch) after the model T. Of course I suspect you, given the way you worded your comment (but not everyone here) will know that the model T pre-dated this with the middle peddle engaging reverse. Of course automatic transmission changed the "standard" layout in a very significant way, and some people like it though others prefer the more conventional way of driving. This will change again with self driving cars, and people are going to bitch about that too. Will a self driving car be an improvement on a model T?

[Bill Ashley]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

In fact, Ford had to bust the ALMA which had the exclusive license from patent troll George Selden and the Electric Vehicle Company.

[Pompous Git]

@ Bill Ashley

Didn't know that! Two new things learned in 24 hours. And they say you can't teach old dogs new tricks ;-)

[KeithR]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

"not too long after the Model T, the motor car industry pretty much settled on a standard arrangement of accelerator, clutch, brake and gear shift."

The final arrangement - as we've come to accept it - had SWEET FA to do with the Model T's incarnation.

In fact it was a Cadillac that first hit on the "modern" layout: and the Austin 7 that took it and made it stick.

In short - you've failed across the board to make the point you seem to be trying to make.

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

In fact it was a Cadillac that first hit on the "modern" layout: and the Austin 7 that took it and made it stick.

In short - you've failed across the board to make the point you seem to be trying to make.

Precisely where did I state that it was the Model T Ford arrangement that was adopted? You would appear to have a reading comprehension problem.

[Richard Plinston]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

>> "not too long after the Model T,

> had SWEET FA to do with the Model T's incarnation.

That is why he said: AFTER the Model T

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

@ Pompous Git - For any device there is an optimal range of layouts for users. Slurp has forgotten that human anatomy is fixed and will be fixed for a long time. The layout of controls has taken into account that the standard human equipment includes two legs with feet, two arms with hands with opposable thumbs, \two forward facing eyes, and two fixed ears on the side of the head. Forget that and the user experience will be disastrous. AC and others seem to be ignoring there is something called human anatomy that limits one's options.

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

@ Pompous Git - For any device there is an optimal range of layouts for users. Slurp has forgotten that human anatomy is fixed and will be fixed for a long time.

That is somewhat dependent on how much the Microserfs are willing to go to piss their customers off. I know I've had days where I would cheerfully have sawn off various of their appendages -- without anaesthesia. Like when my Small Business Server was an open relay for two whole fucking weeks while I waited for a patch to fix it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

Slurp has forgotten that human anatomy is fixed and will be fixed for a long time.

But.... Microsoft is trying to get all desktop users to devolve slightly by making us have Gorilla Arms from using our 26-inch desktop touchscreens all day long.

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

But.... Microsoft is trying to get all desktop users to devolve slightly by making us have Gorilla Arms from using our 26-inch desktop touchscreens all day long.

But it's just so "convenient" spending half the day cleaning the greasy fingerprints off that monitor by wiping it on your jeans ;-)

[julian.smith]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

"As far as the privacy argument goes, I don't think Microsoft has a cat in hells chance of getting anything tangible out of the data it pulls back other than usage statistics."

So that's why they moved from charging about $100 per copy for W8.1 to giving W10 spyware away ... the "products" (formerly known as customers) are worth more than the previous revenue from selling the Operating System - although in your case they probably got a bad deal!

LMAO

[KeithR]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

"No change is also not breakage"

Absolute baloney.

As everything else changes around it, an OS *has to* change to keep up: not many 64 bit apps gonna run on Win ME, are they?

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

As everything else changes around it, an OS *has to* change to keep up: not many 64 bit apps gonna run on Win ME, are they?

You're a bit arse about there. I had to move from PageMaker to InDesign when I upgraded from WinXP to Win7. (An excellent move as despite PageMaker being more than good enough, InDesign was what PageMaker should have been from the start.) IIRC Win32 applications arrived long after 32 bit processors replaced 16 bit processors, not the other way around.

And who the fuck ran WinMe voluntarily?

[Palpy]

Re: @ AC: @ palpy: Try it, it's OK...

I expect you're right, and I would have little problem with the interface. If I did I could easily install stuff like ClassicMenu.

I won't bother with Windows on my personal machines, though:

1. Because security.

2. Because privacy.

3. Because control. (Though yes, one gives up considerable control over one's machine just by using modern chipsets, BIOS, etc. But for most of us there is no choice there.)

4. Because money. The upgrade to 10 is free, but what about the next one? And the next?

Better to just to step off the MS merry-go-round.

But back to the topic: my puzzlement is about people I know who have installed Windows 10 and don't much like it. My friends don't respond with the bitter hatred and repudiation they had for Windows 8. However, some people who greeted Windows 7 with "Yeaaaah!!!" are now saying "Well, I guess I'll use it if I have to" about Windows 10.

[itzman]

Re:No change is no progress

Ohmigawd! The bacon I have for breakfast hasn't changed in Years darling! so much for progress!

Without Progress, my breakfast might stay the same for Years!

Let''s face it, I didn't start eating Breakfast because I was hungry, but because I was so fashionable...

Sorry fans, gotta rush off to my third sex change operation. Progress .....progress.

[Chika]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

People don't like change, but no change is no progress.

And it's thoughtless comments like this that drive changes for their own sake. Yes, change can be a good thing if that change has visible benefits but a change for its own sake rarely benefits anyone.

If you look at the changes that happened between XP and Vista, Vista and W7, W7 and W8.x and W8.x to W10, you can see examples of where a change has occurred that actually benefitted users and you can also see changes that benefitted manufacturers. Then you see changes that benefitted nobody. XP wasn't perfect when it was first released and users of W2K and W98 were happy enough to stay where they were though WMe users couldn't wait to jump ship. Once XP was stabilised a bit, the shift happened naturally enough.

The biggest reason, however, why W10 is having such a bad time, data slurp and other such bothers aside, is that it hasn't gotten past the early XP bit and unlike XP there isn't a group that is in such a desperate hurry to shift from earlier versions. W7 is stable, familiar and operable and, like W2K years before, it has plenty of life left in it despite Microsoft's increasingly bullying attitude toward it. Actually, if anything, Microsoft's current attitude could do more harm to the industry than good with people with reasonably recent machines sticking with W7 until the hardware goes bad. Then, of course, should Microsoft continue with this attitude, alternatives to W10 may await the Redmond weary user.

The only real way of dealing with this, as far as I can see, is for Microsoft to back off, fix their product, remove the slurp, restore a reasonable update client, stop pressuring the W7 and W8.x users and lie low for a couple of years until the current bad press has died down.

Certainly continuing the nagware, sending the shills and fanboys out to publish their bull and pressuring the users to move off older systems by employing industry bullying tactics and making changes for change's sake will only further decrease their standing.

[Philip Lewis]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

Apparently, the actual OS on Win8-10 is a significant improvement over Win7 in resource usage and performance.

What sucks donkey balls is the UI that is imposed in Win8-10, a UI reasonably suitable for touch devices but fucking awful for the desktop. I can live without every TIFKAM application, now and in the future I expect. What I want is the Windows7 interface on my desktop without constant intrusion of the Win8-10 bollocks.

Like everyone else, I have many years (and $) invested in Win and software, but Win8-10 is so fucking awful (and yes I have used it) that I have drawn the line in the sand.

I have had a MacAir for over 5 years now, but my home server remains Win7 - but I have installed Cinnamon now, and at expect at some point I will make the switch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

Apparently, the actual OS on Win8-10 is a significant improvement over Win7 in resource usage and performance.

What sucks donkey balls is the UI that is imposed in Win8-10

I wonder if there's a relationship between these.....

You know, come to think of it, I could make Windows 7 run faster with less resource usage by setting the display to 800x600 in 16 colour.

That would mean, of course, that there might not be any real performance improvements over Win 7.

[Pompous Git]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..." @ paply

You know, come to think of it, I could make Windows 7 run faster with less resource usage by setting the display to 800x600 in 16 colour.

That would mean, of course, that there might not be any real performance improvements over Win 7.

About a year ago, out of curiosity, I ran Winword 2 under Windows 3.11 in a VM using one core and spent some time working on a document. I finished the document in Word 2010 on Windows 7 running on bare metal (four cores). There was absolutely no noticeable difference in speed. So it goes...

Have an upvote for using your noggin.

[pmartin66]

Re: @ AC: "It works scarily well..."

For me and my friends and family, Windows 10 has been the absolute best OS that MS has ever published. Super fast, stable, runs all our software and games included. Six second boot times, what's not to love?

BEST user OS. Most easy to maintain as well.

Not owning it yourself and preaching hearsay is really a BAD thing to do. You propagate FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) where there should be none. Just because you are a Linux lover.

And that just makes the Windows user hate Linux users more... You propagate your own crap in other words. It HURTS you and your community to weep and wail so hard against MS.

[illiad]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

trying to make the SAME OS run on BOTH a phone and a PC with a giant screen???

thoroughly stoopid idea...

[twilkins]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"from phone to tablet to surface to desktop"

That's nice, for the few hundred users who use Windows 10 on desktop, surface and phone. For the others who use Windows desktop, iOS phones and tablets, or Android phones and tablets and Windows 10, it's not much of a draw. Hence the disappointing sales.

[Mpeler]

What it doesn't cater for so well is ---

"What it doesn't cater for so well is users who want/need to do real work".

There. FTFY.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Whether they run 10 apps or hundreds of apps, I doubt that many existing Windows 7 or XP users welcome the need to learn the new incompatible Windows UI.

In embarking on the Windows 8 UI Microsoft was not aiming to make its install base of Windows users happier. It's obviously trying to grow into the huge and growing market of cell phone and tablet users where a small touch screen is required. MS wants to leverage its PC dominance as a competitive advantage in those new growth areas.

Historically, MS has done this with its office app UIs too. They didn't care much about impact to their existing users. Now they prioritize compatibility across widely diverse hardware platforms ("Windows everywhere") far above version compatibility on a given platform.

[pmartin66]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Please explain how the GUI is "incompatible" because that really makes ZERO sense. Old apps still work, what is your point? That users have to click on the start button, then 'All Applications'????

Seriously? That's your gripe?

[Goatshadow]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

To me the Insider Program looked like a lot of legitimate issues getting ignored, amidst a sea of unhelpful one-liner feedbacks. The Insider feedback application itself was a poorly designed mess, barely functional even across a few updates. When they decided that the wildly unfinished 10240 was release I gave up on it.

[Grimmyn]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Agree.

Andrew said Microsoft listened to the Insiders. The Windows 10 Insider Preview was an exercise in "democratic design," ?! Any example of that?

Interesting that the insider feedback app had no area for feedback on UI and Security. I left the insider last year because there was no point as no one listened. And I don't mean that all my feedback should be no 1. I voted and commended on a lot but as said... no point

[bombastic bob]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"The incoherence in Windows 10's UI is a direct result of that wonderful in-house team not listening to what users wanted when designing and testing Windows 8"

etc.

NOT LISTENING is DEFINITELY the point. Over on the insider forums, MANY of us (myself, included) CONSTANTLY pointed out "the wrong", from 2D FLUGLY ['flat ugly', aka the Sinofsky look], to the inefficiency of the "the METRO" apps(sic) and the app store, and WORST OF ALL, the TRACKING and ADVERTISING.

NO WAY was Microsoft listening to *CUSTOMERS* when they did all that. NO WAY!

Now, listening to a select crowd of SYCOPHANTS... I could see THAT and COMPLAINED ABOUT IT _OFTEN_, on their insider forums.

But Microsoft's forum manager decided to SANCTION those who most loudly spoke out against their decided direction. Threads were heavily edited, prominent users were banned for only the *slightest* hints of alleged TOU violations, and *I* was even threatened with a ban over my WRITING STYLE. Yeah, who knew?

So I suggest that Microsoft was *ACTIVELY* *SILENCING* the opposition to what Windows 10 ended up being. Hardly "listening" at all.

[Danny 14]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

The only major training we needed for xp to w7 was the ./ for local accounts (as the domain drop down vanished). Classic desktop theme took care of the rest. W7 to w8.1 was a nightmare.

[werdsmith]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Most users I know use Windows for a few seconds after it has booted and logged in, and before they launch their app. Thereafter the only Windows intervention is flipping between apps on the bar at the bottom, locking screen/unlocking screen and shutting down.

It's all about the applications because it is in the applications where the productivity happens, not the OS. Some people couldn't even tell you which version of windows they are "using", they don't even care, or even need to care.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Some people couldn't even tell you which version of windows they are "using", they don't even care, or even need to care.

Back when I was training computer users (business) most clients thought MS Office was windows. I doubt that has changed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I agree. I don't use the menu system either. My apps are on the. Task bar. For everything else I use the wondows key and search and double click to open. I find my folders from the folder icon on the task bar.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I don't use the menu system either. My apps are on the. Task bar. For everything else I use the wondows key and search and double click to open.

That's OK for the progs you use 95% of the time, but fails when you can't remember the name of the program you haven't used for a long time. Something to do with a brain that's 23,728 days old I imagine. I do like being able to pin folders to the taskbar in Mint, something I wished w7 had allowed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I do like being able to pin folders to the taskbar in Mint, something I wished w7 had allowed.

You can. You make a desktop shortcut to explorer <folder> then drag it to the taskbar, then delete the desktop copy.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

You make a desktop shortcut to explorer <folder> then drag it to the taskbar, then delete the desktop copy.

Tried that and nothing appears on the taskbar. Right drag'n'drop doesn't work either. One of the first things I tried to do when w7 first arrived. The dialog box that pops up says "pin to Explorer" rather than "pin to Taskbar". Maybe the phase of the moon's wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Tried that and nothing appears on the taskbar. Right drag'n'drop doesn't work either. One of the first things I tried to do when w7 first arrived. The dialog box that pops up says "pin to Explorer" rather than "pin to Taskbar".

So

r-click on desktop > new > shortcut > location of item explorer d:\ > name for this shortcut D > finish > drag to taskbar

doesn't give pin to taskbar?

If so, I guess you're right about the moon! This also works in 8.x and 10. I wish I could think how to replicate your experience!

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I wish I could think how to replicate your experience!

Fortunately I managed to replicate yours :-)

My problem occurred because I've always created shortcuts with a right drag'n'drop, choosing Create shortcut here. Good to learn something new even if it's too little too late. Thanks for your patience Joel.

[KeithR]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Maybe you just need to learn how to use Windows properly?

Not hard, honest.

[The Real Tony Smith]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

> Maybe you just need to learn how to use Windows properly?

>

> Not hard, honest.

Which version?

[TheBigCat]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

In Windows 7 I use the Quick Launch toolbar to pin folders.

[kb]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Uhhh...just FYI but W7 DOES allow that, they are called libraries and you can make new libraries and pin as many folders in them as you want. Its as easy as "right click on folder > include in library > create new library". Its actually quite easy and once you have it in a library you'll find it right there on the right hand side of the start along with the other libraries.

Now that said about Windows 10....sigh, WTF MSFT? Really? Did you learn NOTHING from Win 8? I have tested Win 10 on just about every kind of system you can name from C2D laptops to octocore gaming rigs and not one, not a single one, was the experience better than 7/8.1!

I'm not talking from a user perspective either, I'm talking about obvious issues with the OS, such as "senior moments" where the OS just hangs for a couple seconds for no damned reason (my guess is its the dozen pages worth of telemetry crap constantly running in the background, but that is just an educated guess) or the way its network performance sucks compared to 7/8.1 (probably the same telemetry crap) to the buggy drivers and updates, I can really not find a single upside to this OS. That isn't even going into the UI which is an eyesore and doesn't even allow you to change the fricking font without reg hacking, the absolute mess that is the Win 10 control panel, its just not a good OS and I have yet to find someone that prefers Win 10 over Win 7, or even Win 8 with Classic Shell.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Uhhh...just FYI but W7 DOES allow that, they are called libraries and you can make new libraries and pin as many folders in them as you want. Its as easy as "right click on folder > include in library > create new library". Its actually quite easy and once you have it in a library you'll find it right there on the right hand side of the start along with the other libraries.

And that makes the new library appear on your Taskbar? Doesn't on my machine. The moon's definitely not favouring me this moonth...

[KeithR]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"It's all about the applications because it is in the applications where the productivity happens, not the OS. Some people couldn't even tell you which version of windows they are "using", they don't even care, or even need to care."

There ya go - and Win 10 *does* make for more efficient resource usage, which in turn will help with productivty.

You're a voice in the wilderness here though...

Seperately - before I even clicked on the link, I knew from the title who the author would be.

[Chika]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

NO WAY was Microsoft listening to *CUSTOMERS* when they did all that. NO WAY!

And here's the point. Of the totality of the Insiders used in this programme, how many of these were ordinary users? You know the type - home users that obediently download every update then bitterly complain when their system stops working. The type who run their systems by default in administrator because they have no idea how to change that.

The very people who are getting hit the hardest by the current W10 enforced rollout because they don't have any idea that a choice exists.

[itzman]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I suggest that Microsoft was *ACTIVELY* *SILENCING* the opposition to what Windows 10 ended up being. Hardly "listening" at all.

A sort of 'hundred flowers' campaign?

"The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science." After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

[ecofeco]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

The only fanbois I've met of Win 10 are just that: very young techs who are full of themselves but know absolutely no history nor that less clicking means more productivity.

In other words, the bearded hipsters.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Well I like Windows 10 and I'm certainly not a young bearded hipster. The first UI I used was SunView in the early 80's. I hated it when it was replaced by Open Look and hated when we moved on to Panorama. Somewhere along the way much later I recall people hating the XP UI that had a Start button but not a stop button. In fact every new UI seems to be hated until its close to being replaced by the next one. It's only with hindsight that you can appreciate that changes have been good.

[Aitor 1]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Err, no.

You can make a UI as good as the old one, replace the old one and it would be a big mistake, as you have to get to know the new one, for no benefit.

Same happens with W10.

It is way better for tablets and phones: it is quite good for them.

But it is terrible for power users, admins and people who have poor vision.

It is also less efficient for mouse and keyboard use.. and the use of realstate screen is worse.

So it is worse for the majority of the users, and better for the non paying ones: you know, the ones that buy tablets and phones that MS makes no money on..

Having a "classis" desktop is almost no effort. I know, because I use start10 etc, mantained and created by fewer that 5 people. Microsoft CAN maintain two desktops at almos no cost, the problem is THEY REFUSE to do it. On top of that, w10 is almost spyware.

I still use Windows because I game a lot, and my games are mostly windows only, buy I am considering moving to another OS.

[Tchou]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

My first UI experience was GEM on Atari 1040. Interestingly enough the windows back then have a lot in common with Windows 10 design...

The only decent replacement I found until now is Xfce running on FreeBSD.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

In other words, the bearded hipsters.

I resemble that remark ;-) But this "bearded hipster" turns 65 2 weeks from today. Been using MS operating systems since DOS 2. Cinnamon Mint since the middle of last year. Agree regarding "less clicking means more productivity". MS first started pissing me off when they introduced the Ribbon UI.

[Deryk Barker]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"MS first started pissing me off when they introduced the Ribbon UI."

It took you that long?

MS first pissed me off when I had to reinstall Windows 3.something (0? 1?) over 20 times. Started running linux in my office in 1993 and have never looked back. Now every system in my house - including the router, video and music streamers and my wife's destop and laptop machines, runs some version of linux.

Thought I might give MS another chance back in 2007 when the college I taught at supplied me with a new HP laptop with Vista preinstalled.

Firstly I thought I'd dual boot in case I needed to show my students anything windows-ish.

Fortunately (!?) Vista was the first version of Windows which could resize its partitions, so...let the program calculate the minimum size it could resize to then feed in that number.

Only to be told it wasn't big enough....

Last straw was the fact the Vista absolutely refused to see my USB mouse. Even tried rebooting with it connected. Zip. I mean USB was only about a decade old at that point.

Bye bye Vista...

BTW I turned 65 last year and yes, I have a beard...

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"MS first started pissing me off when they introduced the Ribbon UI."

It took you that long?

MS first pissed me off when I had to reinstall Windows 3.something (0? 1?) over 20 times. Started running linux in my office in 1993 and have never looked back.

There's a difference between annoyance (things could be better) and being pissed off (why have the fuckers done this stupid thing?).

My experience with Linux dates back to the 90s. Font-handling sucked big time. Couldn't share my (postscript) printer with SAMBA. The SAMBA devs told me they were using NT4 ws to share their printer. No driver for my (Adaptec) scsi adapter so no access to my CD burner. Apparently there were drivers for Yum Cha scsi adapters, just not Adaptec. Etc.

Never ran Vista. Was asked to fix a LeNovo notebook running Vista for a friend. Got thoroughly annoyed with UAC and had to admit defeat.

Happily running Cinnamon Mint now, though there are some annoyances. Example:

On the machine I use for playing music (2,500 titles, mostly FLACs), the volume control works in the most peculiar fashion. Hard left is sound off. A smidgeon (or perhaps tad) to the right is close to full volume. A little further right the signal overwhelms the input stage of my Rotel amplifier. Further to the right still, the volume decreases (WTF!). I haven't tried beyond the tick mark labelled 100%. Finding the sweet-spot required slowing down the mouse pointer speed to minimum. At least the control does something useful (Mint 17.3). The control in Mint 17.2 did nothing!

I'm still trying to find an equivalent player to Foobar 2000. No bling, just works. I hate bling. Creating a playlist in the Linux players I've tried so far is slow (no drag'n'dropping of folders) and presumes you are going to save it. That's something I very rarely do.

[earl grey]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

"turns 65 2 weeks from today"

Get off my lawn kid!

[Pompous Git]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Get off my lawn kid!

You're going blind or bonkers granddad; I'm not on anybody's lawn. Go and have beer or I'll hit you with my walking stick ;-)

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Let's see, humans normally a equipped at birth with two hands each with an opposable thumb and four fingers and two forward facing eyes. The hands can comfortably hold objects with varying sizes and weights but there is a maximum size most find comfortable (not worrying about the exact size). So tablets and smartphones will both physically resemble each other and will use an OS that uses a very similar user experience. Larger devices intended to sit on or under a desk allow for two handed operation via a keyboard, pointing device, and screen. Again successful, user-friendly GUIs will strongly resemble each other. So for both devices there is limited range of GUI options which make for a good user experience. Step beyond that range and expect a backlash.

[julian.smith]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Same here.

Moved to Linux Mint last year ... love it.

Now 3 of our computers run Linux Mint .... the wife barely noticed the change

Still keep one W8.1 for Kodi / MusicBee as they support WASAPI for HD sound

W8.1 has all updates neutered and all spyware updates excised

W10 spyware? NEVER

[Jess]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I like windows 10. Most people I know who have used it, like it. I certainly wouldn't choose any other version of Windows in preference. (However, I might choose, mint, os x or RISC OS).

I liked 95, 2000, 7 and 10 on release.

I though 3.x, 98 and XP were utter rubbish on release, but after a few years became usable.

Vista - utter crap on release (performance and stability, more than UI) so, so ultimately (Usable if you need to run Windows programs, but not what I would choose to use)

Windows 8 - utter rubbish, (not too bad with classic shell though.)

I really don't understand the hate for 10. Unless it is upgrade fatigue.

(P.S. 10 is crap on a touch screen)

[jinx3y]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

interesting....I've been doing the "IT thing" (software dev, admin, etc) for over 15 years...I don't sport a beard, and tend to dress myself respectably, albeit a bit conservatively. I have found the non-custom Linux releases becoming less and less purpose-oriented (as I used to like them) and more geared toward general use. Not a bad thing when you want mass market acceptance. I have seen windows fail (vista,8) and improve (7, 8.1, 10). I currently run my own servers at home (Linux backend for mySQL and web dev on a front end windows 10 client - shock and horror! all running under hyper-V on Server 2012 R2).

More shock - I am not "very" young, know my history (I was around during the original apple vs. microsoft wars - so none of this is new to me - but may just be for you...

The only mistake I can see so far is Micorsoft coming so late in to the game to try and compete with entrenched iCrack users... :-P

[KeithR]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Ecofeco, just wondering:

could you make your statements any more sweeping, generalised, unsupportable and crass?

No, I guess not.

[aqk]

Re: Don't blame bearded young hipsters for the UI

Well, I'm neither bearded, young or a hipster (though I did play bongos briefly about 55 years ago, whilst smoking strange tobaccos)

And I run Win-10 In.Preview 16170 (the Redstone-3) on this desktop as well as the "standard" Win-10 on a laptop.

As well as Android x86-64 on this machine - but only to run a couple of apps that are sadly available only on Android and iCrap.

However, posting this from Ubuntu Mate 16.10 just to kick its tyres. Ugh.

Think I'll switch this partition back to Gnome! Mate is for old ladies. Indeed I WOULD recommend it to some "older" person who was wondering what to replace their XP with. Highly recommended to you folks here!

But- I spend most of my time on this machine in Win-10. I DO NOT see what all the fuss is about with all you old fuddy-duddies. OK, The Win-10 UI is SLIGHTLY different from XP or Win-7. So? Learn to navigate.

You geezers obviously have difficulties with anything "new". Still running Netscape 4.7?

Confession: As an elderly (semi-indigent) retiree, I have lots of time to fool around with OSs.

Wake me up when Linux replaces Windows on everyones' desktops/laptops. But be advised -I may not wake up- I don't have many years left.

And let me know when the dislike on this post hits 100. It's been so long!

[SuccessCase]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Nobody seems to have mentioned the point that it the designers who you need to make decisions. Democratic design simply doesn't work to produce a good result. Steve Jobs loved to quote Henry Ford to make this point,

"If I asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'"

[zen1]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

I don't know how many times I suggested of at least giving the user a choice between the Aero and the Metro UI's. Since it first made its debut, I have loathed the metro interface, so when MS delivered a hybrid love child of the the Aero/Metro UI's not only was I furious, but I was insulted at such a half fast attempt.

In the company I work for we have thousands of users who will need to be trained, most of which fought the migration from XP to 7. In my little consulting business, I don't how many of my customers who've contacted me to get rid of windows 8.x and 10.

All that being said, IF Microsoft listened to the tester feedback, the OS would be completely different. If that's not enough, Microsoft totally destroyed what little trust and faith I had in them because of their new anti-privacy/pro-big brother policies. I think that's reprehensible of them and I'm annoyed as hell that Microsoft is people, who truly don't understand the full extent of what's going on.

Me personally, I'm committed to abandoning all things microsoft on all of my own equipment. And if I run across one of my customers whom I think can handle the transition, I recommend them to give *NIX a go. Most who've given it a try have liked it immensely and don't ms the Windows drama anymore.

[Andy france]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

<troll>

So Windows 10 is a commercial disaster and their reputation is forever tarnished.

2016 must be the year of the Linux desktop and it's time for the PC manufacturers to supply Linux PC's.

Can we all finally agree that Linux Mint is the distro they should offer as the alternative to Windows.

</troll>

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Can we all finally agree that Linux Mint is the distro they should offer as the alternative to Windows.

Sure, it'll do. Functional desktop for those who don't know enough to care. For those who do care, it's enough to evaluate that the machine will do what we want and test it out before we obliterate the OS and install what we want.

[Planty]

Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation

its way way worse than it's already tarnished reputation. Most people than were lured by the freebie upgrade have since downgraded, after finding all that glitters is not gold.

Expectations were sky high, with the big number jump, but its basically Windows 8.2 with all the failings of Windows 8 still all in there. An operating system that sucks on a PC, sucks on a tablet AND sucks on a phone too. I don't think Microsoft could have messed this up any better if they had tried.

[wsm]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Yes. Can't you hear us screaming? Give us back the desktop!!!!!!!!

Oh, and everything that goes with it---the Start Menu control, the transparency control, the control of the size of windows, organization of all things we add that aren't MS. It's really all about control, isn't it?

But why go on? Nobody at Microsoft is listening.

[Craig100]

Re: Don't blame users for the UI

Was MS aware of the debacle in the Ubuntu community when they changed the UI to Unity. Almost exactly the same paradigm and well before W8. They would have seen the reaction if they cared to look. So it seems there's been a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to get themselves out of the mess they shouldn't have got into in the first place had been less naive and done some due diligence.

I find the W10 interface difficult, but then I only use it on a VM as I switched to Linux Mint ages ago. The main issue I have with W10 is the sheer arrogance (though it's probably naivety) of the requirement to constantly monitor your doings and report back home. It seems to me, they almost pulled it off - getting out of the W8 UI issue - but then just had to shoot themselves in the foot one more time.

Their naivety/arrogance never fails to amaze me. I believe it's call the "Redmond Bubble". They should get out more ;)

[djstardust]

It's the data harvesting

That puts me off. I have even ran DWS Lite on my 8.1 machines too and it's simply stunning how many "call home" services and ports it blocks.

Oh, and trying to ram Windows 10 down people's throats by using malware type tactics isn't the smartest move either.

If it wasn't for the fact my DJ software and associated music editing tools were Windows only I'd have been off by now, but not to MacOS as it's an overbloated mess too.

MS need to realise the game has changed, and they've played a big part in that change by forcing people off their operating system. As I have said many times, give us an updated windows 7 without the Metro interface and without the spying and it would be a winner. Shame it's now all too late.

[djstardust]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Oh, and the forced updates are a definite no-no.

Users on the VirtualDJ forum have already posted about a MS update borking the video drivers and causing BSOD all over the place.

I *NEED* a stable machine for my work that is tested, having a company like MS forcing possibly corrupt or unstable updates is a definite no go. That's it.

[Novex]

Re: It's the data harvesting

I was originally looking forward to Win 10. But, I said it right when MS said the updates weren't going to be user-controllable: it's a deal breaker. That's why I now use Linux Mint as my general PC OS. Add on the data harvesting and the need to be connected to cloud for quite a few of the 'features' to work and it's going to be in trouble getting support in the wider world. Joe Public might not care, but MS must realize that businesses (of which many are very small, and not able to afford Enterprise licensing) aren't going to be happy with any of those three things.

Now, if MS can retreat from these three, at least as options for those users who want and / or need control of their PCs, they might get the sales they want. I know I'd consider a return to Windows in such a situation.

[oiseau]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Indeed ...

That and 'all the rest'.

> I was originally looking forward to Win 10.

I confess that I entertained that idea for a short while.

But in the face of all of MS's actions (shenanigans to put it very mildly), I decided against it.

I have been a MS OS user for the longest time, ever since DOS 5.0.

I have also gone through most of the disasters MS fished out to us all.

XPSP3 was my last MS OS (which I actually liked a lot) and I was able to cope with most problems with a decent firewall and reliable backups.

So I don't think I qualify for the MS hater label some may want to pin on me.

Then Vista, 8.1, W7 et al and came around and I decided not to go along with any of them, staying with my XPSP3. Updates ended and that was it, no way I was to continue with MS and W10.

I keep a netbook with one XPSP3 for the odd software (tax returns, temperature-data meter) that I cannot run on Linux and eventually it will get to be dual boot.

> That's why I now use Linux Mint as my general PC OS.

Exactly my situation.

And quite happy with it for the time being.

> ... if MS can retreat from these three ...

> ... I'd consider a return to Windows in such a situation.

I don't think so.

Not if hell freezes over, twice.

I'm sure my views represent a great many out there.

Just my $0.02

As always, YMMV.

Happy Easter to all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's the data harvesting @djstardust

If you NEED a stable Windows machine with no updates just use Windows XP ...... but beware of getting what you have asked for.

[present_arms]

Re: It's the data harvesting

I use VirtualDJ pro, Mixx and Traktor (shaky though on traktor) on linux fine using play on linux, everything works too including broadcasting. so no Windows for me

Alie

[BitDr]

Re: It's the data harvesting

What he said. Lose the data harvesting (and actually do it, don't just say you've done it) and restore the W7 UI and there would be little if anything bad about Win 10. That however, is not going to happen. Why? Things like GWX and how it gets on a system are a good indication of Microsoft's mentality. Microsoft wants to pimp out the meta data that their installed base of users COULD generate. They want to get the data first, before Google and their like does, and they can only do that if they get it from the Operating Syste. They took the approach that the installed base of Windows users was locked. They were wrong.

Customers are not a resource to be exploited, they are to be treated well, hand-held, fawned over, and made to feel like royalty, and when GWX (Get Windows 10) tool started installing itself, nagging users, using their sometimes expensive bandwidth to download Windows 10 files, the true purpose of Windows 10 was found out. The customer was now a product. People didn't like it, and they are voting by staying pat or moving elsewhere.

[Alumoi]

Re: It's the data harvesting

If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product.

Did you pay for Windows 10? Nope. You paid for Windows 7/8, Windows 10 is NOT an update to 7/8, it's a different OS.

[BitDr]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product."

I call bovine excrement on that, you ARE a customer because you bought Windows 7 and Microsoft is pushing/has pushed you into "upgrading" (their words on the dialogue boxes). Yes yes, you could have refused, but actually saying "No Thank You" was not an option. Rejection was only available by closing the dialogue box, which is not the same as saying "No thanks", but is more of a "Get Out Of My Face" (for now) response. If you bought a PC with Windows 10 installed already then you ARE a customer by proxy of the weak-willed hardware industry that is slowly slitting its own throat still thinking that Microsoft is the same gravy-train they hitched their wagon to waaaay back in 1990. It is not, and their inability to shuffle product is proof of it.

In addition, as mentioned earlier Microsoft themselves are promoting W10 as a upgrade;

"Upgrade now?" or "Upgrade later?"

and then there's the

"Your Windows Upgrade is ready"

If it truly is a DIFFERENT O/S then they should put it beside W7 and no tilting the playing field in favor of W10 by reducing support for W7 and drivers for new chipsets. If it truly is a different O/S then why move to it? Let the two "different" operating systems with the same name duke it out and see which one wins.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product."

I agree, but the logical corollary to that is that MS are no longer in the OS business (at least for non-business users). Perhaps that is the reason why they no longer have a decent product offering in that market.

"Windows 10 is NOT an update to 7/8, it's a different OS."

I disagree. There's eff-all difference under the hood and it is being pushed like a service pack. The main difference from 7 is the amount of spyware and nagware.

[DF118]

@Alumoi Re: It's the data harvesting

If you're not paying for a product you're not a customer, just another product. Did you pay for Windows 10? Nope. You paid for Windows 7/8.

Presumably those paying for new machines with OEM pre-install, or buying the retail version for their own build are somehow magically excluded from your spurious logic?

A snip at £116.99.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: @Alumoi It's the data harvesting

> A snip at £116.99.

I never understood this kind of pricing. It's basically a sticker that says "DON'T BUY ME, YOU COMPLETE CRETIN".

It's not even Veblen's idea of "the more pricey, the more classy", because everyone knows WIndows is mildly disgusting computing fast food with added trans-fats.

[Danny 14]

Re: @Alumoi It's the data harvesting

£116? Thats the best advert for linux ive seen in a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Did you pay for Windows 10? Nope.

Would I have paid for Windows 10 if I saw it worth the money? Yep. I was actually considering it in its early days. It looked promising. The betas had telemetry, and I thought that this was just during the beta period and that the final release would have this turned off.

However, in light of:

- the telemetry in the final release, which is more difficult to remove than a nun's knickers and is constantly turning itself back on

- the lack of control over updates

- the attempt to coerce users into downloading free "upgrades" to the OS

I say, no deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you pay for Windows 10?

Yes, in my time wasted fighting it off, in my data being appropriated by it, in the time spent while it downloaded itself and installed itself against my will, in my time being wasted adjusting to its peculiarities and irregularities, etc etc

If I calculate the cost of these things, I guess it is the most expensive operating system I ever had the misfortune to meet.

[admiraljkb]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"Did you pay for Windows 10? Nope. You paid for Windows 7/8, Windows 10 is NOT an update to 7/8, it's a different OS."

GUI /= OS

Actually, Vista/Win7/8.x/10 are all the SAME underlying OS with different GUI designs. The actual OS nitty gritty under the hood is the same architecture with relatively minor improvements accumulating over time. There were some medium/major improvements to the OS between Vista and 7 to get the bloat down (mainly the Video subsystem by eliminating double buffering, ala presentation mode), but since then, the GUI has been the main thing getting jacked with all this time in order to run the same UI on tablets/desktops.

Lets look at the earlier NT lineage which changed UI at the same time as it changed the underlying OS, and might be the source of your confusion

the NT3.x lineup was the same GUI and OS underneath (and the prototype for the current winOS with ring3 drivers). It was still effectively the microkernel/portable OS/2 that it started development as. BUT, they threw Program Manager on the top instead of Presentation Manager and didn't include compatibility with OS/2 v2 apps when the MS/IBM relationship went sour. (the OS2 1.x subsystem remained in NT until Win2k)

The NT4 through WinXP lineup was the same GUI (mostly) and OS underneath (pushed drivers down into Ring0, ruining processor portability and optimized to single CPU systems, which MS went on to regret in the multi-core era, and had to fix with "Vista" reverting out much of the NT4 lower level mess. Its this era that created much of the issues MS had with trying to get a newer portable device going due to what appears to have been a lot of hardcoded mess in NT4, which in turn generated a lot of their security headaches which persist to this day.). Now GUI wise, it would have been nice if they'd put the W9x GUI on top of NT3.x and kept making underlying improvements going and waited for HW to have caught up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's the data harvesting

An updated Windows 7 without the Metro interface and without the spying is essentially any modern Linux distribution. Microsoft can't offer anything anywhere nearly as good and clean as this: they don't know how to any more, if they ever did. Bloat, amorality and misplaced arrogance runs as deep in the core of Microsoft as it does in any sociopathic CEO today.

[KeithR]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"An updated Windows 7 without the Metro interface and without the spying is essentially any modern Linux distribution. Microsoft can't offer anything anywhere nearly as good and clean as this"

So - in essence - you're bigging up Linux distros for doing a good job of copying Windows; while slagging off Windows for being Windows?

Fuck me - I can't cope what that much wrong-headedness...

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

So - in essence - you're bigging up Linux distros for doing a good job of copying Windows; while slagging off Windows for being Windows?

Fuck me - I can't cope what that much wrong-headedness...

Some things are worth copying, some not. Live with it. The Windows metaphor is a great success. Similarly, books have long been published where you read from top left to bottom right and front to back. MS seem to want to change the metaphor, but I suspect it will be as successful as persuading the book-reading public that it's way more kewl to read books where some pages have to be scanned bottom to top, some from right to left and the index is in the middle of the book, rather than at the end.

I will take a pass on fucking you.

[Chemist]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"I will take a pass on fucking you."

A man of taste and refinement

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

A man of taste and refinement

I do believe you are the first person ever to say that about me ;-)

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"The Windows metaphor is a great success."

You probably meant "the windows metaphor"?

The spell checker even attempted to capitalise the common word "windows", which is so sad.

Microsoft by no means invented the desktop metaphor, nor the overlapping windows concept.

(And there I had to correct the damn speller again.)

In fact, I can't think of a single thing that MS has invented. Although I'm sure they have a number of patents on obvious technical solutions.

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

You probably meant "the windows metaphor"?

No, I thought about it, but the original WIMP interface was of course invented at PARC. The Macintosh interface was a copy of a copy, the first commercial implementation being the ill-fated Lisa. Windows is a copy of a copy of a copy and therefore far from being "invented" by MS. But then I said nothing of invention. I merely remarked it has been a great success. I don't know of a more widely adopted WIMP interface, but I am willing to stand corrected if you do.

I do think it's actually irrelevant who invented WIMP. More relevant was BillG's dream of a computer on every desktop. And his company achieved that. Not IBM. Not Apple. Not Atari, Not Commodore...

[Steve Todd]

Re: It's the data harvesting

@Pompus Git - Um, no. Take a look at the original PARC/STAR GUI and compare it to that of the Lisa/Mac. The Apple version is obviously not a copy. They took some of the ideas and ran with them. Others they forgot about, yet more were completely new to the Mac. They even back-ported some of the ideas in the Mac to the Lisa. The metaphors of a GUI settled down and standardised in large part due to the manuals that Apple wrote on how to design a good GUI.

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Take a look at the original PARC/STAR GUI and compare it to that of the Lisa/Mac. The Apple version is obviously not a copy. They took some of the ideas and ran with them.

So when Apple were running away with PARC's windows, icons, menus and pointing device ideas, they became completely unavailable to the researchers any more because they weren't copies. How does that work? Curious minds and all that.

[Steve Todd]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"So when Apple were running away with PARC's windows, icons, menus and pointing device ideas, they became completely unavailable to the researchers any more because they weren't copies. How does that work? Curious minds and all that."

Firstly Xerox were actually paid for Apple seeing and making use of the ideas from PARC. Secondly Apple didn't claim ownership of the Xerox ideas. What they claimed were the ideas they had come up with themselves in the approximately 5 years between them seeing the PARC system and the Macintosh. Things like repainting uncovered portions of windows automatically.

See http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taouu/html/ch02s05.html for some of the history.

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Secondly Apple didn't claim ownership of the Xerox ideas.

Er, I didn't say they did. You implied they did with your statement "They took some of the ideas and ran with them."

Took = ppl of Take.

Take = to get into one's hold or possession, to seize or capture, to catch or get (fish, game, etc.), especially by killing.

When someone copies my work I take that as flattery. I don't get precious about it, though I do send the occasional notice that the copier should acknowledge me as the source where they haven't.

[Steve Todd]

Re: It's the data harvesting

@Pompus git - Firstly "taking an idea and running with it" does not imply theft, it implies that it is built on and improved from the original. Secondly you implied that Xerox's ideas became unavailable to researchers once Apple used them. Untrue. The original ideas were implemented by Microsoft in Windows 1.0 and that wasn't a problem with Apple. Windows 2.0 used Apple's extended ideas, which is where lawsuits started (and were ultimately a failure because copyright wasn't strong enough protection).

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

"taking an idea and running with it" does not imply theft, it implies that it is built on and improved from the original. Secondly you implied that Xerox's ideas became unavailable to researchers once Apple used them. Untrue ... Windows 2.0 used Apple's extended ideas, which is where lawsuits started

"Theft" is your word, not mine. I used the word "copy" which you objected to because you said Apple "took" the WIMP idea.

My friend Tony copied my star-picket puller several months ago. This required him measuring it, making a sketch and photographing it. All a matter of a few minutes. I dare say, given Tony's inventiveness, the copy he made is an improvement on mine.

About an hour ago, my friend Chris took the star-picket puller to assist in removing some fencing. He didn't steal it, I didn't accuse him of theft, because even though he is depriving me of its use for several days, he has done so with my permission.

Now do you understand the difference between copying and taking? I suspect not.

Here's an image of the MS-DOS Executive from Windows 2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MS-DOS_Executive,_Windows_1.04.png

I suspect the resemblance to the Macintosh Finder is remarkable only while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In System 7 at least which is the earliest I have used; it's on the Mac SE sitting under the desk at which I am sitting.

[Steve Todd]

Re: It's the data harvesting

So you're arguing over the semantics of the word "copy"? Simply put a copy is the same or close to the original. MacOS was radically different from Xerox STAR (not least of which because it wasn't a pre-emptive multi-tasking system), and was the fruit of a lot of research by Apple into human/computer interaction and GUI design. Apple literally wrote the book on how to do much of that.

The best you could argue is that SOME ideas were copied from STAR, and that Xerox were paid for their use. To use the hated car analogy, at most Apple bought a STAR chassis, then created their own engine and bodywork to produce something quite different.

Microsoft likewise copied STAR concepts for Windows 1.0, but for Windows 2.0 they copied ideas from Apple without payment or permission (and if you think Windows = Finder then you're an idiot). As I said previously, it was those parts that Microsoft lifted (like redrawing uncovered sections of a window) that caused Apple to sue them.

[Pompous Git]

Re: It's the data harvesting

So you're arguing over the semantics of the word "copy"?

Er you turned it into an argument about semantics chum, not I.

And no, I do not think "Windows = Finder" and nowhere did I state that. I compared the Finder to the MS DOS Executive since they perform the same function. They are, as I stated quite different and clearly the Executive was not copied, or stolen from Apple. You, like so many people who have a computer OS as a religion, are a bore.

[a_yank_lurker]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Slurp seems to be in panic mode with W10. Part of the problem is the PC market is mature and that means relatively flat total sales. Marketing and brand loyalty become more important because the bulk of the future sales will be to existing users. Their panic has caused several unforced blunders such as releasing a not ready for prime time version, harassing users, using updates to force users to upgrade, and not being honest about their built-in spyware.

[JoeTheAnnoying]

Re: It's the data harvesting

Yep. When my son's Windows 8 machine just couldn't wheeze its way through all the crapware that had accumulated, my son didn't even consider Windows 10; he had me give him a clean Linux install. And he's all of 11 years old.

"I don't want Windows 10. It spies on you!" was his reasoning.

He can only run around 70% of his games, but I've paid him back for the ones he lost, and he says it's a much, much better experience.

When Windows has managed to destroy its UI and its reputation so badly that even kids prefer Linux, Redmond has a serious problem...

[Ilgaz]

What about WINE?

As you are interested in single kind of applications, not latest game running well, what about installing a stable Linux and run DJ tools via WINE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What about WINE?

or in a VM?

[Adrian 4]

Re: What about WINE?

I've been very pleasantly surprised how well WINE runs some windows programs that I thought I'd have to use in a VM. It's a very different beast from the one I was used to. If you''ve got legacy Windows apps to run, it's definitely worth a try.

[Dan 55]

Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

"As a user I want the desktop experience to look and act like Windows 7's."

"As a user I don't want to be spied on."

See? Not that difficult to fix.

[Bod]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

Into the backlog, reviewed with stakeholders, given lowest priority. Low priority in backlog are the ones you never do unless they become high priority.

Still, though Win 10 desktop experience really is not far off Win 7. I was very surprised that my parents went with the upgrade and adapted to it quickly and like it.

[PNGuinn]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

@ Dan 55.

Nope. Too late now.

I think they may well have pissed off too many of their users this time.

And perhaps the dog is too old now to learn new tricks (or relearn old ones).

After all they seem to have bet the whole shed on this thing.

POPCORN!

[Danny 14]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

That and linux is evolving all the time. Even steam support an awful lot of games on linux.

[KeithR]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

"That and linux is evolving all the time"

"That and linux is copying Windows more and more closely all the time.

Fixed that for you...

[Richard Plinston]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

> "That and linux is copying Windows more and more closely all the time.

> Fixed that for you...

Thank you for clearing that up, I now realise, thanks to your correction, that such things like 'virtual screens' that I been using for a dozen years or more were originally copied from Windows 10.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

That and linux is copying Windows more and more closely all the time.

When I see tiles and ribbons on a Linux desktop, then I'll believe you.

[Charles 9]

Re: Feed this into MS' Agile development methodology...

A lot? The Linux catalog is barely 20% that of the Windows catalog, and plenty of headliners like Fallout 4 are still missing.

[Mark 85]

Microsoft gets the opportunity to reboot its reputation with Redstone in the summer – that's the codename for its next overhaul of Windows 10.

Four things will need to happen....

1) Change the name. Just because anything named Windows 10 will be met with the same displeasure as "Vista".

2) Don't push it down everyone's throats. The rollout on Win10 has been a public nightmare for users and tech support types. (We get calls from friends and family because....)

3) Make the damn thing install and work. Too many borked computers, too many glitches with drivers, etc. Ok.. this is probably a subset of #2...

4) Since it's a service (SaaS), tell us how much it will be payed for... ads? Monthly ransom?

And I won't even get started on the so-called "telemetry" or the unique UI that's giving a lot users fits.

[Chairo]

Two things only?

How about lying about the user tracking? It was supposed to happen only in the beta, but made it's way into the production version.

And it cannot be completely deactivated by the user in the non-pro versions.

And no, introducing the "feedback feature" to earlier versions of Windows didn't help repairing the damage.

No one likes to be watched over the shoulder. It is creepy and disturbing. IMHO that's what keeps most people away from Windows 10 Additionally Windows 10 was pushed with malware tactics. Making your new product perceived as malware is probably not such a bright idea, or is it?

In the past Microsoft could react on bad perception of a Windows version by renaming the next service pack and call it with the next version number. This door they closed by themselves by insisting to call all future versions "Windows 10".

I wonder if they already fired the idiot person responsible for this disaster. Probably there is no one higher up to fire him?

[Joerg]

Re: Two things only?

"How about lying about the user tracking? It was supposed to happen only in the beta, but made it's way into the production version.

And it cannot be completely deactivated by the user in the non-pro versions."

Telemetry can't be deactivated on the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows10 either.

Microsoft allows to disable only what they expose to the public on their atrocious mess of an UI *but* there are so many hidden services tracking users inside the OS and doing the worst.

Even using some third party utilities like DoNotSpy10 to disable all the malware and telemetry crap inside Windows8.2=10 there is no guarantee that a lot more remains active. Until discovered there could always be more and Microsoft keeps adding malware and telemetry tracking with new hotfixes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even using third party utilities like DoNotSpy10, no guarantee that a lot more remains active"

Of course! After all this 'arms race' is just beginning. M$ are surely working on 'workarounds' to DNS & DWS as we speak. Microsoft's corporate culture is that of a cult... No one there is going to listen to users, nothing is going to change... Its Linux or bust my friends...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Even using third party utilities like DoNotSpy10, no guarantee that a lot more remains active"

I'm a huge Linux fan but Linux is facing its own issues right now with SystemD. There are Distros that are not using SystemD. I would recommend those and Devuan is working toward a SystemD free Debian-like (?) Linux ecosystem.

[admiraljkb]

Re: "Even using third party utilities like DoNotSpy10, no guarantee that a lot more remains active"

"I'm a huge Linux fan but Linux is facing its own issues right now with SystemD. "

meh, systemD is nothing compared to the Win10 issues. Don't get me wrong, its controversial, but really not in the same league as the win10 privacy debacle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Even using third party utilities like DoNotSpy10, no guarantee that a lot more remains active"

I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced we've seen the worst of SystemD, yet.

And NO...I will not remove my tinfoil hat!!!

[Michael Sanders]

Re: Two things only?

Exactly what I keep telling people. You can't rely on utilities. They'll just keep slipping it back in with updates.

[ArtFart]

Re: Two things only?

Actually, they did fire him...sort of. I seem to recall his name was Ballmer.

[Boris the Cockroach]

What screwed

win 10 for me was the forced update.

It was bad enough when I had to make sure my little comms package worked with win7 when it had been designed to work with winxp, but suddenly some doofus has updates on and suddenly its running on win10 and falls over.

The whole experience has changed my attitude towards bundling it with a Linux distro and saying "run the mint installer, then run my package installer and you'll have a working system"(or would do if I could figure out the bloody USB to serial converters)

I've said this before, the feedback M$ should have listened to was

"Give us the updated core, with the UI of win7", if they wanted to use a new UI, why not offer it as an option on the installer/control panel", but nope.

I suspect its a legacy of the windows mobile/win 8 attempt to have the same UI across every windows platform regardless of what system windows is running on.

Oh and m$ can f*** off with the 'forced user feedback' too

[Dwarf]

Modularity and customers

I agree with the sentiment of others here. OS's must be modular and trustworthy as we important work on them

Provide a stable and reliable core component, you could call this the kernel

Use the Linux approach and allow different UI's to be used, you've done it before with the classic 2000 mode for example, even though the word classic was patronising as 'old, keep up'

Stop all the spying on us, we are not yours, to monetise

No adverts, we'll pay once for a good product. Note the word good in that sentence.

No monthly or other subscription fees ever.

I'm not always on line, willing or able to use my data allowance on things I don't need

Forget the distorted view that anyone wants their data anywhere except where they control it, so have a storm and clear the clouds

Stop trying to force us to use your products, you can probably see the damage you've done to trust and customer numbers as people flee to other products

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Modularity and customers

"even though the word classic was patronising as 'old, keep up'"

I'm not sure about that. "Classic" often means "what we should have done in the first place". A "Classic Windows" 11 might save them providing they do enough back-pedalling on what they got wrong. That, however, means an accurate diagnosis of just what it was that they got wrong. The aggressiveness of the W10 project suggests a management completely and utterly determined that this is what they're going to do.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: USB to serial converters

I was pleasantly surprised a couple of weeks ago when I tried attaching a USB to RS232 converter to my laptop and all I had to do to make my serial code work we tell it to open /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of /dev/ttyS0. My decade-old code is hard coded for ttyS0 or S1, so I created a symbolic link of that name to the USB device as a temporary work-around until I fix that in a more elegant way. I believe it was using the FTDI chip, but don't know who made the overall converter, and laptop is running Ubuntu 14.04

Back to Andrew's article: sure Windows 10 has a poor reputation but its not just the user interface. That may not be great, but as others have pointed out, its the creepy nature of the telemetry and forced updates that really make me advise against it to anyone who will listen. A shame really as lower down the Windows kernel, etc, has useful improvements.

For Windows-only software that I need (e.g. some CAD stuff) I used VMs and don't have to worry about the "hardware" changing and Windows complaining of activation, etc.

[cambsukguy]

Re: USB to serial converters

Such irony, I have to have a whole Windows machine just to use the RS232 -> USB converter for debug output with the bit of kit I am developing because it doesn't work when I plug it into the Ubuntu 14.04 laptop, which I need(ed) to read the ext4 file system used on the SD card used to run/flash the kit.

Come to think of it, I don't need the Ubuntu anymore because emacs, git et al all work on Windows and I no longer need the SD card file system, except in emergencies. Too late now I suppose, almost done.

[Chemist]

Re: USB to serial converters

"I was pleasantly surprised a couple of weeks ago when I tried attaching a USB to RS232 converter to my laptop and all I had to do to make my serial code work we tell it to open /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of /dev/ttyS0"

I've used them for years with OpenSUSE to connect mainly to PIC microcontrollers. Mostly from my own daemon ( so I compiles in /dev/ttyUSB0) but also from some comms software when testing. Never had an issue.

[bombastic bob]

Re: USB to serial converters

"all I had to do to make my serial code work we tell it to open /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of /dev/ttyS0"

And the beauty of Linux is that if you have a bluetooth serial adaptor, you can use that as something similar to "/dev/rfcomm0" and the code STILL works [I've used 'avrdude' over bluetooth this way].

Try doing THAT on a Windows system, where every device type seems to require it's own "special API". whereas, on POSIX systems (Linux, BSD, even OSX) "everything is a file". makes it easier to support new types of devices from a 'user application' standpoint.

Serial I/O on windows is *PAINFUL* to code. I did that back in the late 90s for a customer project. Much easier in the POSIX world. And let's not get started on the 'no generic driver' problem in windows, where plugging in an inexpensive USB serial device "just works" in Linux (whenever it supports a standard protocol or uses a common chip set). FYI in some cases it might be something like '/dev/ttyACM0' rather than '/dev/ttyUSB0' but you just need to use the right command (like lsusb) to figure out what device was created, and you're good to go (assuming your application isn't already finding them for you).

[Richard Plinston]

Re: What screwed

> if they wanted to use a new UI, why not offer it as an option

MS asked some consultants why Windows Phone 7/8 was not selling as well as IDC analysts had said it would (overtake Apple phone by 2014). They reported that it was because the WP UI was 'unfamiliar'. The solution to that was to make that UI 'the most familiar on the planet' by forcing all Windows users to become familiar with it. Then they would _demand_ that same UI on their phones, laptops, tablets, IoT devices, TVs, watches, and everything else that Microsoft wanted to control.

The flaw in that plan was that WP sales weren't failing because of 'unfamiliarity', it was because MS kept dumping developers (WM6.x, WP7, Silverlight, and now WP8 ->'UWP') and so there were few 'killer' apps that were worth bragging about. WP couldn't find a market position that gave them any volume, and certainly not any profit. They didn't have the style, bling, or apps to take on the high end, they didn't have 'street cred' to be mid-range. They wound up in the bargain bin where they were 'good enough' to be just phones.

[daveattheregister]

Re: What screwed

Hi Boris.

Why not try a Raspberry Pi http://www.modmypi.com/raspberry-pi/rpi3-model-b/raspberry-pi-3-model-b and one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/ABC-Products%C2%AE-Converter-Convertor-Prolific/dp/B000Z3MBG8/ref=sr_1_1 ?

[martinusher]

Re: What screwed

I was a bit puzzled why it borked Bluetooth, some of the USB drivers were a bit werid and it had some serious issues with Cortana and the start menu. It should have worked at least as well as Win7.

I put it down to the funny way that software's built and tested these days. Its not beyond the bounds of imagination to devise software that is modular so that you can build out the clever eye-candy sort of stuff on top of a solid base. That way you've always got a Get Out of Jail Free card in case stuff screws up (because it does). Instead we seem to acres of complex software that's incompletely tested, everything's rapid development this and just in time that.nobody seems responsible for the big picture, its all rapid reaction and patch Tuesday.

Life is so much easier in the Linux world. Cheaper, too.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: What screwed

Cheers for the USB pointers.... I'll have a look at them as and when I can get round to staring at the serial driver source code again.

And I'd love a pi.. sadly that wont fly when the users need a laptop with a simple interface to send data from a PC to various machine tools..

Hence looking into mint....

[CheesyTheClown]

I'm a bit confused

I do experience some hiccoughs but I haven't noticed anything fundamentally wrong with Windows 10. I really miss the Windows 8 start menu, but other than that, it's just another OS. It runs, it's fast, it's mostly easy to use. It's generally for the time being a much more user friendly experience than Mac OS X, but that's mainly because Apple treats OS X like a bastard step child these days.

I was under the impression that Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 were killing the PC industry since there hasn't been a real need to buy a new computer anymore. Once you have an SSD, it works on almost everything nicely.

I just bought a Lenevo Ideapad ($150) for my nephew who felt that smashing the gaming laptop I bought him during a hissy fit was a good idea. It's an Atom with 2GB of RAM. While it will never run Crysis, Windows 10, Chrome and Office ran like a champion on it. If anything, PC downgrading has made a lot of sense since Windows 7 and SSD drives came out.

So, PC companies are whinging because Microsoft has reached the point where optimizing and tuning is what they're focusing on. Meaning today's computers will likely run just fine for another 5-10 years. They're all upset that their glorious market based on new features in software needed new hardware. Well... that time is over. Not only that, but now Microsoft is making their own PCs which is great because that means there is finally a reference platform. If the other guys can't keep up, screw-um.

Now I'm waiting for Microsoft to finally make servers. I would drop $5 million on a new data center if I could get Azure Stack in a box.

[Mark Honman]

Re: I'm a bit confused

> Microsoft has reached the point where optimizing and tuning is what they're focusing on.

Well I think that is what they *should* be focusing on.

Hence why massive changes in the user interaction model are not going down well with people.

They really don't need to do much: just provide UI continuity while as you say, focusing on optimising and tuning what exists.

I would happily pay a subscription for ongoing OS support (security/technology upgrades) for that optimising and tuning.

[oldcoder]

Re: I'm a bit confused

Save your money.

You can just use RH or Debian for your cloud.

[CheesyTheClown]

Re: I'm a bit confused

Oldcoder,

I'm not sure how that would save me any money. Software licenses make up almost peanuts on the cost of a DC these days. Using retail pricing, It's like $12,000 per server for all Windows Server 2012 R2 licenses including the guests running on them. If you buy 72 Cores, 6TB per server, you put 3 into DC A and 3 into DC B... that makes it cost a total of $96000 for operating systems. And nobody pays retail. So it's like $40,000 instead.

The reason you use Hyper-V instead of KVM is that Windows is paravirtualized on Hyper-V and RAM consumption is more than halved on Windows Guests. That saves nearly $2 million on RAM. Add the fact that it appears that server 2016 will paravirtualize the scheduler as well and that saves maybe $500,000 on CPU. Then add to that for interconnect that Hyper-V has full RDMA support on Ethernet or Infiniband and you can save a ton of time migrating virtual machines.

I love KVM and Open Stack, but I have a business to run. OpenStack and Azure have grown to become amazing platforms. The main difference is that I simply don't want to hire 50 people to sit around dicking with making my systems run on OpenStack. I'd prefer to just download prebuilt, supported and maintained apps from a vendor who has ten thousand customers depending on that app, so when something goes wrong, the vendor works out not only a quick and dirty hack, but a solution that had some quality control on it.

I suppose the comparison is the C programmer and the C#/Java programmers. The C programmers want to reinvent the wheel every time they start a project. They want to have absolute control over every function and they're going to write a 5 million line system using all kinds of archaic methods that end up using things like GObject from Glib because instead of using an object oriented language, they'll reinvent the entire concept of an object and even emulate the C++ vtable using macros which are damn near un-debuggable. Their lack of dependence on a garbage collector which require them to invent a memory management system which is slow as hell because clean-up always has to be run immediately instead of during idle cycles. Their code will take 3 years and require 25 developers working full time to maintain and they'll constantly suffer from memory leaks, performance issues, lock-ins blocking refactoring etc... They will claim that their method of programming is pure and better and the buy paying them to write it will think he's getting state of the art awesomeness but in reality is just getting a headache.

The C#/Java developer will focus on the job which needs to be accomplished and make use of pre-built libraries, a great C#/Java developer will make use of asynchronous tasks and manage their garbage collector and limit wasteful tree walking when it's not needed. They'll use proven and optimized classes and interfaces which are used by a million other developers and are hardened like a rock. While primitive operations in the C code ran much faster, overall the C#/Java code accomplishes every business task faster as optimized C# and Java code tends to use far less complex algorithms and thanks to threading and delayed memory cleanup, the code can spread cores cleanly. And most importantly, they'll develop 50,000 lines of code and deliver code which is clearly written and maintainable. Oh and they were in production in a month or two.

There are simply no platforms currently on the market which actually facilitate delivering business on OpenStack with KVM and/or Docker. The tools themselves exist, but the packages simply don't. Azure is a hair better since Microsoft's has worked REALLY REALLY hard on making "applications" or packages easy to move and deploy in multiple places. The biggest shortcoming in my eyes currently is that I can't see how to legally (within the license) distribute Windows Server as a guess as part of a package unless you're Microsoft.

Oh.. and Hyper-V runs RedHat (which is obscenely expensive) as a guest. So, add to that that Windows has full Docker support as well, I don't really care what the guest OS is, Hyper-V and Azure has me covered. Unlike RedHat, KVM, etc... who will probably keep focusing on 10,000 new ways to deploy new apps, I'm pretty sure the Azure platform is pretty stable now. I'm pretty comfortable knowing that Azure Stack, once officially released will have excellent app support and that most vendors who offer their apps as part of the Azure Cloud library will support Azure stack as well.

It would of course be nice if Amazon or Google released their platforms for private clouds as well, but I don't see that happening. Since neither me or any of my customers can legally use public cloud or any cloud not on their physical premises or connected to any Internet connections at all, those systems are simply not in the cards for us.

[Richard Plinston]

Re: I'm a bit confused

> Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 were killing the PC industry ... now Microsoft is making their own PCs ... screw-um

Microsoft has a policy of increasing its revenue by 'stealing' it from its 'partners'. It seems that it was trying to create an 'XPC' back in the early 00s. This was to have been a .NET based PowerPC (as the XBox was) that would dispense with the need to have OEMs taking all that hardware revenue. This failed to work correctly so they had to throw together Vista to have something to push out the door.

Yes, I think MS plan to have more hardware and become more like Apple with walled garden. They also want to be more like Google with collecting and selling data and advertising.

The OEMs will work out that their loyalty should not be tied entirely to Microsoft and will diversify to avoid being part of the 'death of the PC'.

[Michael Habel]

Re: I'm a bit confused

XPC Windows on a PPC huh... I thought that was more mid-to-late '00's. With Microsoft's other Console the Failbox 360. Since the original XBOX, had a 733Mhz (Pentium III era), Intel Celeron CPU. So not a Power PC Chip then.

[CheesyTheClown]

Re: I'm a bit confused

I honestly don't see this as an issue of stealing from the OEMs. This is more like what Cisco did when they made UCS. They tried to tell their partners what they needed to make data centers really work. The partners (IBM, HP, Dell) all told Cisco they shouldn't dabble in things they didn't understand and they should just be nice and make network equipment. Then Cisco reinvented the entire server market by simply not selling servers. They instead worked towards selling data centers. Even now, Dell, HP and Lenevo have no idea what hit them. It's not that Cisco's sales team are so good, it's that Dell, HP and Lenevo just really suck at making data centers.

Now enter Microsoft who year on year was losing market share to Apple who clearly understood that power users were not important. Power users account for a very small percentage of the market. What was more important was fashion and function. Apple spent a decade making one high volume device after the next after the next. Apple never once released a powerful device, they instead turned Jonny Ives into a brand and turned on the sex appeal. They hired marketing from Tag Heuer, Burberry and more to master the art of designing a top selling fashion brand that made simply owning one of these devices would make you special. They added features and presented them as if having access to them and using them would make girls or guys swoon at the knees to been near you.

And then they focused on building a market where the initial purchase wasn't even the sex appeal, but the accessorizing was. There are 3 year olds who are asking mommy for the new app or to buy an in-game add-on. Apple mastered the art of making sure that whether you buy the cheapest thing they sell or the most expensive was irrelevant, they would get $0.30 from this sale and $1.30 from that sale and then stand on stage bragging to everyone that they made hundreds of billions of $$$ by charging what is basically a 30% credit card processing fee... and then they cut out the middle man by starting their own payment processing system so now even VISA and the others won't see their 3%.

So... here comes Microsoft who realized that Windows could never have sex appeal if you leave it up to vendors like HP to do it. The problem with the PC world is that the PC vendors need to sell PCs. As such, if they deliver someone else's platform like Microsoft Windows or Android, their only path the profitability is through repeat hardware sales.

This isn't like the Android phone world where Samsung can make a profit by selling Google searches after the phone ships. HP, Lenevo and Dell have absolutely no possible way to make a profit following the sale of a PC to a customer. Microsoft has the option to insert music and video stores and such. But the PC vendor is screwed. If they can't sell you another PC, how will they make a buck.

So, the big PC vendors are terrible at sales. There was a time when there was a Gateway 2000 store in nearly every town and you could pay premium prices to buy a computer directly from the vendor. This meant the vendor could actually benefit from some money for supporting the computer or at least not having to split the warranty cost with the store like BestBuy. It didn't work because it just wasn't the right time and frankly Gateway 2000 overextended since they were basically selling other people stuff and the margins weren't good enough etc...

So, when Microsoft comes along and opens stores, sells their own computers and while they do show off computers from their OEMs, no one visits a Microsoft store to buy a Dell or HP. You go there to buy a Surface because it's clean and sexy. It's also supported and even now, I have no problem getting support for Surface Pro (version 1) devices from Microsoft. I still get firmware updates for it as well. So instead of some crap vendor like Dell, HP or Lenevo selling me a computer and basically telling me to buy a new computer the second I need a new BIOS or driver, Microsoft is supporting their devices long term.

Microsoft is still missing one major component... marketing. They can't keep sending Panos Panay onto stage like that. This guy is "soooo local" in the sense that he is REALLY REALLY Seattle. Watching him makes me want to gore myself with an over-sized cork screw. Steve Jobs was said to practice his speeches dozens maybe even hundreds of times before getting on stage in front of people. He would get every word just right. Panos Panay is actually as big of a disaster on stage as Steve Ballmer. You need someone up there who can sell sex. Panos Panay should be selling pizza. I'm sure he's great at what he does... just some people should never be broadcasted around the world. I can only assume that his creepy Seattle behavior lost Microsoft millions of sales because people were creeped out by him.

Microsoft should dig up some people who are great on camera and stage and make them co-VPs of their divisions and make their jobs nothing more than presenting the next products. Give them 18 months from release to release to do nothing more than stand in front of mirrors and perfect the art of selling Microsoft's next big thing. These people should be pretty but not too pretty. They should look like the person everyone wants to be or be with.

Basically Microsoft needs to learn how to market fashion. They now entered the fashion business, it's time to learn from the best and compete. Jobs is dead but there's thousands of hours of video of him out there.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: I'm a bit confused

"I just bought a Lenevo Ideapad ($150) for my nephew who felt that smashing the gaming laptop I bought him during a hissy fit was a good idea."

If I couldn't have found a used Etch-a-Sketch on eBay I wouldn't have bought him anything.

[Michael Habel]

Re: I'm a bit confused

This Cat clearly has mad moneyz, the either you or I if he was willing to fork out. What was it FIVE MILLIONS on an Azure farm... So stop being judgemental.

[CheesyTheClown]

Re: I'm a bit confused

I would agree with you, but these days he can't even do his homework without a PC. So he's been using his grandparents' computer and my parents have been paying for way too many repairs (we're in different time zones and frankly I hate remoting into a PC that's so loaded with malware that clicking start takes over a minute). So, it was just cheaper to get him a PC that was little more than functional.

[Anonymous Coward]

> [Mojave experiment] on hardware capable of running Vista wel

Well what sunk Vista was that it only ran well on top-of-the-line hardware and was like watching paint dry on Intel's low-end offerings.

Actually that's the same kind of vendor arrogance (from both Microsoft and Intel in that case) that is sinking W8->W10. i.e. we expect the customer to lump it & adapt to what we at $big_vendor know is best. a.k.a. "you're holding it wrong".

There is no actual concern for whether the customer ends up with a system that works well for _them_ (though despite "you're holding it wrong", Apple have come closest to this ideal).

Perhaps the root problem is not seeing customers as individuals, but as a money-tree.

Confession: I use both Vista and W10 (w/classic shell) every day. I marginally prefer the Vista machine (Thinkpad W500) but I suspect this is due to the 16:10 screen and decent keyboard.

And the shiny new Dell is only 20% faster than the W500...

[oldcoder]

What sunk Vista was Microsoft lying about what the minimum hardware requirements were.

[Mephistro]

"What sunk Vista was Microsoft lying about what the minimum hardware requirements were."

That, and also many gaffes in the way the OS handled files (e.g. the "copy" process that could leave your PC unresponsive for anything up to hours) and unneeded changes in the UI and the system management utilities that just clashed with everything the users and the techies were used to, plus a worse compatibility with vintage software.

It's a mystery to me how MS didn't learn shit from their previous experience with Vista.

[Anonymous Coward]

<i>the "copy" process that could leave your PC unresponsive for anything up to hours</i>

By 'eck, that I could have forgotten about that! Repressed memory, I suspect. Now you've reminded me I seem to have a deeply-buried scream like an echo from a previous life trying to escape!

[Anonymous Coward]

What sunk Vista was Microsoft lying about what the minimum hardware requirements were.

Anyone remember "Vista Compatible" vs "Vista Capable" ?

"Vista Capable" meant lower-end graphics not capable of displaying Aero fully.

With Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, Microsoft went for the lowest possible screen requirements (i.e. so it can run on an underpowered phone) which ended up looking like 800x600 in 2 colours.

[BobChip]

User feedback

The project team I used to work on had a saying to the effect that, when you ask for feedback, the number of possible answers you get increases as the square of the number of people you ask. M$ have probably been asked by now to incorporate more "features" than there are stars in the universe. No wonder they are in a mess.

The hole they have dug is now much too deep to climb out of. Short of putting together a SMALL decision making team and designing a brand new, coherent OS from the ground up.......

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: User feedback

"The hole they have dug is now much too deep to climb out of. Short of putting together a SMALL decision making team and designing a brand new, coherent OS from the ground up......."

I think it was a small decision making team that put together Gnome 3 which promptly gave rise to two new projects, one to fix all its deficiencies by making it look like Gnome 2 & one to continue Gnome 2. Mate and Cinnamon are popular, Gnome 3 not so much. Fortunately this response is possible with OSS.

[MikeHuk]

Re: User feedback

Sorry, but my experience is exactly the opposite, I have no connection to Microsoft and was a bit of a Microsoft hater(Ex OS/2 user), but as Microsoft were offering windows 10 preview for free I thought I would give it a try. I had an old Lenovo laptop which ran windows 7 but was so slow that are hardly ever used it, so I used it as a test bed for the windows 10 preview. This was January 2015 and even then I was amazed that transformed the laptop into the fast, usable machine. Since then I have participated in the "Insider" program and have seen how much the system improved!

I used feedback to report problems and saw all those problems fixed. It is Microsoft for credit for listening to user feedback marsh, as Microsoft were offering windows 10 preview for free I thought I would try it. I had an old Lenovo laptop which ran windows 7 but was so slow that are hardly ever used it, so I used it as a test bed for the windows 10 preview. This was January 2015 and even then I was amazed that transformed the laptop into the fast, usable machine. Since then I have participated in the "Insider" program and have seen how much the system improved!

I used feedback to report problems and saw all those problems fixed. I give Microsoft full credit for listening to user feedback and the obvious hard work they have put into making a fast, usable and reliable system. Even old legacy software runs better. e.g. Quake II runs better than on the old system it was released on.

I have noticed that when running utilities Glary utilities when doing a system check hardly finds any errors compared with windows 7 years to find loads of problems which time he indicates a far more stable system.

I am amazed at the paranoia going around about windows 10, look at Google who harvest and use user data far more than Microsoft do and where is the outcry against that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: User feedback

@mikehuk: the cut and paste obviously works a treat.

[MikeHuk]

Re: User feedback

Nope - written using MS W10 Speech recognition

[BitDr]

Re: User feedback

I don't care that Google been's tracking people for donkey's years. Just because Google does it is not justification for Microsoft to turn the Operating System that MILLIONS depend on (although they are fast discovering that the dependence is an illusion) into a spy network whose primary purpose is to sell their information to others who in turn can try to sell goods and services to them.

Someone wrote earlier that they think the management team at Microsoft won't turn things around because they seem to have made up their minds that this is the direction they are going. Yes, there's the iceberg, point the ship at it and by all means telegraph the engine room to proceed all ahead flank. I'll start getting people into the lifeboats.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: User feedback ' My experience has been the opposite'

Have an up vote - my Win X experience has been similarly good to date.

[Roo]

Re: User feedback

"Even old legacy software runs better. e.g. Quake II runs better than on the old system it was released on."

That's a pretty low bar, Quake II has been running better on Linux for over a decade and a half on all kinds of gear, including the Raspberry Pi. :)

[oldcoder]

Re: User feedback

Ah... The obligatory MS employee...

One difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google doesn't steal your information from your desktop... And Microsoft does.

The other difference is that Microsoft can't seem to understand the definitions of "secure", "reliable", "trustworthy", or "usable".

[jelabarre59]

Re: User feedback

>The hole they have dug is now much too deep to climb out of. Short of putting together a SMALL decision making team and designing a brand new, coherent OS from the ground up.......

.

They missed teh perfect opportunity when the Wine project re-licenced, and the ReWind project split off. MS could have forked off a BSD base for themselves, then used ReWind as the MSWin-compatible runtime. MS would have known enough of the secret internals to make it work just as well as an old-school MSWin system. Now, I *was* going to say "work flawlessly", but then it wouldn't be a MSWin workalike <g>.

I still think they need to go a WoWoW route (Windows on Windows on Wine), dump all their still-needed legacy code into a separate runtime, and build (or steal from BSD) a whole new underlying kernel. Apple managed to do it.

[Philip Lewis]

Re: User feedback

The underlying kernel is just fine, and IMHO better than the *ix world, but as an old VMS guy, this goes without saying.

MS made several bad decisions back when they made NT, most of them to do with backwards compatible support and putting stuff that has no business being in the kernel in there. The OS is pretty good though. And it has improved markedly over the years.

The UI peaked at Win7, and TIFKAM is abominable. MS could fix this, they won't for reasons that will require at least one more CEO to be shown the door and the death of a board member or two. The Win8 UI is not the future of desktop computing, or any computing judging by sales - but hey, I've retired and don't have to deal with MS data centre software any more

[Pompous Git]

Re: User feedback

but hey, I've retired and don't have to deal with MS data centre software any more

Retirement is cool. Until a few weeks ago I would assist my friends with win7 issues, but the only assistance in that regard I provide now is the advice "upgrade to Cinnamon Mint and I will help. Otherwise it's tough titty".

[Mikel]

Re: User feedback

>the only assistance in that regard I provide now is the advice ...

"Your primary problem is that you're using Windows. It is designed to be like that. If you're willing to accept that then your judgement and skills are sufficiently advanced to not need my help."

[Bloodbeastterror]

What's the problem?

I've been a Windows user for 23 years, and each version has been a step up - apart from W8, which was a steaming pile that drove me to install W10 ASAP. As soon as I installed Classic Shell (the very first program, even before anti-virus) I felt right back at home in W7.

Yes, W7. What exactly have they been doing for 5 years to get back to the look and feel of W7? Apart from the loathesome Store and its stupid app interface, it's all so familiar that in daily usage all I notice is a few differently-shaped icons.

[Joerg]

Re: What's the problem?

Classic Shell won't turn Windows 8.2=10 into Windows7. Even using DoNotSpy10 or other utility to disable all currently known telemetry and malware in the OS is not enough to do that.

Windows8.2=10 is a nightmare and Microsoft deserves to go bankrupt.

[Lysenko]

Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

You have to remember that in between the people meeting up in remote car parks late at night and the "lights off, curtains closed, no squirrel noises" brigade such as yourself there are a vast number of people who just don't care very much.

I often sleep (etc.) with the curtains open and the lights on. If you're high enough up the hill behind the house with binoculars you might possibly see things you just can't unsee. That's your problem. I. Don't. Care.

Win10 telemetry is the same. If I'm feeling Assange inclined I'll fire up tails and use tor. Most of the time I'm using LUbuntu or Mint because I develop Linux software. When I'm doing personal stuff (like now) I use Win10. I can't even remember what the telemetry settings on this tablet are because: I. Don't. Care.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

>Win10 telemetry is the same

As long as it's approximately legal, no one gives a crap about your sex life.

But if you're running a business, do you really want an OS that copies sensitive keystrokes and sends them... somewhere?

I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't.

The idea that anyone might be okay with this is so staggeringly braindead it makes Twitter look like a Mensa pub quiz.

[Lysenko]

I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

I refer the honourable commentard to the answer I gave some moments ago.

I am running a business. When I develop Windows software it is for use by Banks. The FCA (or whatever they're called now) audit the Bank security and the Bank audits mine. If the auditors give Win10 a clean bill of health (they do) then that's all I'm concerned about.

The idea that my company needs greater OS security paranoia than a world top ten Investment Bank is ... well ... "incorrect".

As for private use, like this tablet: the part of "targeted ads" I object to is "ads". Stopping people profiling my activity buys me nothing I want. I direct my energy towards ensuring that no ads get through, profiled or otherwise.

[hplasm]

Re: I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

"The idea that my company needs greater OS security paranoia than a world top ten Investment Bank ...".

Hahahahhahaah!!! You've obviously never worked in a Bank's IT department...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

Windows 10 is not being used by banks on this side of the pond north of the 49th. It does not pass muster.

Investment banks have been "incorrect" in the past... remember the 2008 market crash? As I recall they were a part of the problem.

[itzman]

Re: I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

I had to laugh. At all those firms who paid Moodies to tell them how safe junk /sub prime bonds wrapped in junk insurance were.

I suppose its more of this 'progress' thing. You don't think for yourself any more, just pay someone else, and then sue them when it all goes wrong.

[Roo]

Re: I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

"I had to laugh. At all those firms who paid Moodies to tell them how safe junk /sub prime bonds wrapped in junk insurance were."

Not sure why *you* are laughing, the tax-payer picked up the tab for big business on that one - and they are continuing to pick up the tab.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'll give you a clue: no, you don't. You really, really don't....

I didn't post the comment you replied to but I think it's safe to laugh at the idiocy of the whole situation. Especially how citizens seem to trust most politicians to "do the right thing" even when they have a track record of not doing that :)

[MelvinP]

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

Except they don't log your keystrokes...

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

@TheOtherhobbes

"makes Twitter look like a Mensa pub quiz".

Well written, sir! Have an upvote.

[Graham Marsden]

@Lysenko - Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

> I. Don't. Care.

Fine: your life, your right, your choice.

But neither you nor Microsoft have the right to make that determination for *us*!

MS forcing people to opt in to their spyware is arrogant and unethical and shows a total disrespect for the wishes of their customers.

And if your response is "if you don't like it, don't use it", you don't even get that CHOICE because they have chosent to first make KB3035583 an "optional" update, then an "important" update and then, after I've chosen to hide it, UNHIDING it again to try and force it onto me!

So, fine, dance around naked if you want to, but don't expect others to do the same.

[Lysenko]

you don't even get that CHOICE...

Of course you have a choice. I keep Win7 and Win8.1 machines for testing purposes. None of the "get Win10 now" manifestations has forcibly updated anything overnight when I wasn't looking.

I guess I'm biased because most Windows users I know work for customers (Banks) and they are therefore spied on continually by corporate security and have zero say about what patches are applied to the machines and when. It has been that way for decades. If I'm ever doing something that requires privacy/security above the level of an Investment Banker then I'll use something way more secure than Win7.

[Graham Marsden]

Re: you don't even get that CHOICE...

> None of the "get Win10 now" manifestations has forcibly updated anything overnight when I wasn't looking.

And because Lysenko hasn't had this happen, obviously *nobody else* has had this happen either, have they?

Of course the fact that most people don't know how to avoid the GWX bullshit and stop it installing on their systems is not relevant to him...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: you don't even get that CHOICE...

"If I'm ever doing something that requires privacy/security above the level of an Investment Banker then I'll use something way more secure than Win7."

My last clients before I retired would have fit that spec.

[PNGuinn]

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

Wrong title.

In the case of ms:

Exhibitionists and Morons.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

<quote>

Wrong title.

In the case of ms:

Exhibitionists and Morons.

</quote>

To quote James Kirk in the 4th Star Trek movie: "he had a little too much LDS back in the 60's"

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: What's the problem?

"Classic Shell won't turn Windows 8.2=10 into Windows7. Even using DoNotSpy10 or other utility to disable all currently known telemetry and malware in the OS is not enough to do that."

MS have a solution to that, add "telemetry" to W7 in the updates.

[Philip Lewis]

Re: What's the problem?

"MS have a solution to that, add "telemetry" to W7 in the updates."

I am somewhat surprised that this hasn't already happened. Oh, maybe it already has :( ?

[cambsukguy]

Re: What's the problem?

If their share price (up 20% in the last year, more than 200% in 5 years) and the quarterly profits are anything to go by, bankruptcy appears to be some way off.

If they are doing well now, with W10 having had such a hard time and being cheap to say the least, then the future - new machines (people and companies do still buy them), new phones, new Surfaces, all running on what is a very stable platform - looks even better.

Of curse, the current share price could be because others see that future and therefore it is required to be good simply to retain the current levels.

Of course, we may well be in a share bubble (again) because of low interest rates. Certainly the case with houses here (in the UK).

[Bloakey1]

Re: What's the problem?

Hmmm.

I would put it to you that Windows 3.1 , Windows Millenium, Windows Vista, Windows 8.0 and Windows 8.1 were a steaming pile of pooh as well.

[0x407ab506]

Re: What's the problem?

3.1 had a low memory footprint and loads of new features. Proper fonts for a start. You couldn't have a proper kernal until memory got cheaper for most people.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: What's the problem?

But you could have a proper "kernel".

It's a stupid myth that Windows 3.x somehow used the hardware optimally. It didn't. It was just a a lazy POS implementation. A real OS doesn't require masses of hardware. It's the graphical glitz, and masses of BS advertising (Flash comes to mind) that swamps your machine.

[Roo]

Re: What's the problem?

"You couldn't have a proper kernal until memory got cheaper for most people."

History shows that folks were running multi-user multi-tasking OSes for donkeys years *before* Win 3.1 and 1Mbyte SIMMs showed up. :)

[Chris King]

"Microsoft gets the opportunity to reboot its reputation with Redstone in the summer – that's the codename for its next overhaul of Windows 10"

The sad thing is that there's quite a reasonable system under there, it's all the other crap they've foisted on it that gives it such a bad rep:

Forced downloads - not everybody has a fast line or unlimited bandwidth ;

Forced installs - changing the way the machine works under the users and breaking old apps is a support nightmare ;

Telemetry - I don't want my systems "phoning home" unless I permit them to do so, say to report a crash or checking for updates ;

Adverts - those little ads in Solitaire and on the Start Menu ? Thin end of the wedge. MY computer is NOT your billboard. I paid for it, you didn't ;

"Mystery Meat" updates - I want to know what those updates do and what they're likely to change, so if something breaks I don't have to risk killing my machine by pulling random updates until things work again ;

No control over update scheduling - if you foist updates on me during the working day, my bandwidth is eye-wateringly expensive. I'll take updates to stay secure and fix things, but I'll take them at MY convenience, thank you very much ;

Random settings changes - if you want to change a setting, at least let me know what you're wanting to change and why, and give me the option to veto it. I may have that setting set for a specific reason, so please stop trying to tell me what you think is best for me ;

Dumbed-down error reporting - sure, make it simple for the folks who need to know something is broken, but I need to know what is broken and where.

Don't even get me started on the UI, the nurse says it's time for my medication and it never goes down easily when I've been foaming at the mouth...

[cmaurand]

Forced Downloads -- Do some digging. You can make them manual.

Telemetry -- Don't run the home version. In Pro or Ultimate, you can turn that telemetry off. In the home version there are a bunch of registry hacks to make, but it can be turned off there as well.

Averts -- You can remove those tiles from the start menu or you can install the free classic shell which will do away with the advertising in your start menu.

You can be notified of updates.

You can schedule updates.

I haven't seen the settings changes, but I started using Win10 a month ago on a work machine (I started at a place and they use Win10). I then upgraded one of my machines.

The memory dumps and the error reports are in the system. You have to look for them.

[anonymous boring coward]

"I haven't seen the settings changes, but I started using Win10 a month ago on a work machine (I started at a place and they use Win10). I then upgraded one of my machines."

Do please report back when you have seen the settings changes, and let us know.

Sadly my Home laptop came with a Home Windows 10.

Now, hacking the registry is not an official way to alter Windows 10 behaviour, and would be subject to be overridden by MS at any time. Pretty much guaranteed to be overridden, in fact.

[Paul Shirley]

listening with one ear

I'll concede Microsoft are listening a lot more than before. They still aren't hearing very much and mostly only acting on what they want to hear, compounded by the insider programme having a strong bias towards being a cheerleading camp. Whatever design damage insider is doing was and is being orchestrated by Microsoft.

Ordinary users are being constantly spied on, to find out how imposed changes are working but not actually being listened to. Not quite "take it or leave it", more working out how to discourage patterns Microsoft don't want. Ultimately this whole mess (and Win8 before it) is Microsoft putting their narrow business interests above customer needs and they still have the monopoly power to dictate to users.

Andrew is also somewhat wrong about the quality of Win10. I'm mightily pissed off with updates hijacking my file associations several times a year, with it installing known bad drivers, rebooting my network pvr server at will (and crashing doing it), still needing 3rd party hacks to its ui and the endless battle to find compatibility settings for so many apps. It's still a mess with fairly minor core improvements.

[Vic]

Re: listening with one ear

this whole mess (and Win8 before it) is Microsoft putting their narrow business interests above customer needs

I disagree.

I see this as Microsoft putting their immediate interests first; their customers and their own long-term business interests are very much second (or worse!) to those...

Vic.

[Pompous Git]

Re: listening with one ear

I see this as Microsoft putting their immediate interests first; their customers and their own long-term business interests are very much second (or worse!) to those...

I thought about this comment for some time before concluding that you are making at least one possibly unfounded assumption: MS management are acting rationally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Teething problems have been a fact of life with software back to the year dot - so not really a problem. I had fully expected to upgrade myself and my dependent users from W7 to W10 once it had settled down with a W7 style UI.

My active planning is now to get away from Microsoft products before we are put in an impossible position.

I have wasted far too much time removing W10 upgrade and telemetry patches from PCs. It is painful trying to advise my more remote clients over the phone on how to do that. Especially when I know such things are not guaranteed to go smoothly. I can't remember a version of Windows that has required me to give my users so much support.

Even this week the whack-a-mole KB3035583 re-appeared pre-ticked for the nth time. Every time I have to spend time avoiding that just reinforces my lack of trust in Microsoft.

[VinceH]

"whack-a-mole KB3035583 re-appeared pre-ticked for the nth time"

Yes, I noticed that the other day.

Luckily, it's only another few months until July - so based on what Microsoft originally said, that upgrading to Windows 10 would be free for a year - that must surely mean they'll stop trying to force it down our throats that way in July.

Won't it?

Well, won't it Microsoft?

On the flip side, if not enough people have succumbed to their malware-inspired approach, they might extend that deadline. And/or they might ramp up the effort before the deadline.

[Soruk]

They'll just pull a CryptoLocker. Upgrade you anyway, then immediately lock you out of your machine until you hand over your credit card details.

[Pompous Git]

They'll just pull a CryptoLocker. Upgrade you anyway, then immediately lock you out of your machine until you hand over your credit card details.

In your dreams. I don't believe that's possible when my W7 is running in a VM on Linux, not connected to the Internet and behind a firewall.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those 3 Weeks to Launch...

Microsoft need another 3 Week time period like that, because the transformation over that period was incredible, some real work was done in that period, it was the equivalent of cramming the night before the exam and passing. Several MS folk realised if they missed that deadline there were serious consequences and stopped forwarding emails, started to answer them.

Yep, the release was rough around the edges. Fundamentals like trackpad drivers from Synaptics really letting the side down, but the bulk of what made it through was thankfully 'good enough', and somewhat surprising at the time, given the insider release of 3 weeks before.

Windows Update is the team member with the broken ankle, though.

I think MS missed that fact, how much customers would still need to use Windows 7 Update to get to Win10. And its been awlful, the nags, the endless 'checking for updates' , 0% downloaded - waits, and of course 'Something happened' errors. Assuming customers have 'upto' 16GB of free space on their C: drive, in the era of SSDs was just stupid.

Windows Update desperately needs those 3 weeks of Genius, with a seamless Dropbox style managment of updating system files.

It takes a while to familiarise with a new Desktop, Microsoft need to back off a little, give customers a bit more time. I've run Vista, 7SP1, and Windows 10 on the same HP machine(s) for testing and the progress of improvement on the same hardware is impressive (especially with an Samsung SSD added since Vista), but then I can equally say the same for Linux Mint over the same period.

But the product itself, Windows 10 is OK, its not VistaRTM (VistaSP2 was fine) if you know what switches to switch, how to install it, many don't.

Worryingy, I've had file corruption on transfers from a Linux based NAS to/from Windows 10 running on an SSD, so I'm slightly untrusting of it at the moment- in the file transfer department and this is not happening in OSX/Mint transferring the same files.

[jonathan keith]

Won't touch 10 with yours

Telemetry and no control over updates. Those are my two absolute no-nos. Fix those in Windows 10 SE and I'll reconsider.

[PNGuinn]

Re: Won't touch 10 with yours

"Telemetry and no control over updates. Those are my two absolute no-nos. Fix those in Windows 10 SE and I'll reconsider."

So they can unfix them again in the next update?

Me paranoid? MOI?

Sorry, ms. You have gone waaay beyond recovering my trust now.

It's the only way. See icon>>

[Bod]

Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

I'm not seeing it, and where are the facts to back up the claims in the article?

Most I know who've gone through the process upgrading to Win 10 have said they like it and I'm not seeing any opinion that it's anywhere near as bad as Vista or 8 (though 8 was actually good, just with a flawed approach with the Start menu). I'm seeing corporates who are happy to upgrade from 7 to 10 that refused to touch 8.

There are rough edges now Microsoft is doing the continual beta approach. Only real issue is with Edge being incomplete in released version, but there's always Chrome.

Now as for PC sales, well that has nothing to do with Windows 10. The market shifted dramatically towards tablets, phablets and phones. A lot of people thought they have no need for a large box under a desk, or even a desk. There's a sizeable shift towards convertible tablet/laptops now though like the Surface and Microsoft are doing well in that market and I'm hearing nothing but praise for the Surface and Surface Book. Comments on hardware being restricted by the software seems odd given the software is extremely smooth on decent desktop hardware. Seems the other way round to me, which is the general experience I've had of all tablets, Windows or Android. The consumers may some day realise they're actually no where near as powerful as a desktop and go back, although many seem content to jump to Apple where the whole experience is tailored to prevent anything powerful from running to ensure it looks silky smooth, even if you are actually being restricted in what you can do.

[Banksy]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

I was going to post something similar. Then again El Reg has had an anti Win 10 agenda since before it launched. They're obviously doubling down now in an effort to say that they were 'right'.

There are some criticisms that I can understand, for instance the 'forced' download/install of Win 10 though Windows Update and the concerns over the 'dial home' information. I can also understand that for very technical people/enterprise IT bods that it might not do everything they require. However, as an end user and speaking to other users everyone seems pretty happy with it.

One very valid criticism was mentioned by Chris King above about not knowing when updates are happening and why. They can be a cause for concern.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"One very valid criticism was mentioned by Chris King above about not knowing when updates are happening and why. They can be a cause for concern."

I had a chuckle at that.

More like a total deal breaker.

[regadpellagru]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"I'm not seeing it, and where are the facts to back up the claims in the article?"

Well, I certainly see it when I come to my farmer neighbour to troubleshoot his laptop, do the routine inoculation of "remember, I don't do W8 or W10, in case you buy a new laptop" and the other person, his provider in various farmer's good, exclaims "Ah, yes, I've heard W10 is awfull".

Neither of them have been in those column (or speak any english by the way), yet, they've heard of this. That is reputation: you know it's bad, even if you can't exactly say why.

MS, as this articile says, need really to do something. Word is spreading fast ...

[Efros]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Anecdotal evidence is so convincing.

Almost all criticism of 10 I hear is from people who don't use it. Similarly OS X, Ubuntu etc. etc.

They all have their problems, they all have their solutions, they all have their detractors and adherents. Personally I use W10 daily and don't have any major issues once I have it setup the way I want it, I also use OS X on a daily basis and have no major issues apart from the awful UI and the god awful Apple office apps, Ubuntu and Mint I use infrequently and have niggles with those too. Point is you use what is best for you and your environment, if and when you've used any OS for an extended period of time that is when you can tell someone whether you think it will do what they want or need with relative ease. For the average user, W10 is probably the only real solution at the moment, even with its faults, niggles, foibles and inbuilt telemetry. I'd say very few people on here are the average user.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Criticism is from those who don't use it"

Hence the problem. If it was buying customers who criticised it, who cares? We already got the purchase.

But non-customers will not buy a product if they perceive, or if it does not actually, do what they want or provide a service.

"All the criticism of my mud sandwich comes from people who don't eat them"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

'..Almost all criticism of 10 I hear is from people who don't use it. Similarly OS X, Ubuntu etc. etc.'

Oh sure, in my case I don't use it, but I get called on to support it when it does get used by people who allegedly understand it.

Cards up front, I'm primarily Unix/Linux biased, but I've been dicking around with computers since the days of the Mk 14, so I've supported, programmed and done 'many terrible, terrible things'™ in many OSes and systems over the decades.

The machine I'm typing this at is a Dual-boot Linux/XP Box, the one beside it, Linux/Win7, the one beside it Linux/XP, the one beside it Linux/Linux, the one beside it Vista, the two HP thin clients Win CE, the Laptops Win 7 and Linux/Win 7, the Netbook Linux/Win7, the PC one under them, XP/XP(just don't ask...).

I've machines in t'other room which run QNX, *BSDs, various Windows server incarnations, Solaris, Irix (and a Haiku OS box).

In short, a fair number of the machines I'm surrounded by at the moment either run Windows, or can run it. They run it as I need to run Windows software for which there are no realistic Linux equivalents(DAW and CAD, mainly), so I'm not totally ignorant of the OS, its variants, or issues (did I mention, back in the day, I once had legitimate access via a home office contract to the source code for Windows 3.11?)

Some of us took a look at W10, thinking W8.x bugfix, realised it's a clusterfsck, and backed away slowly...in a hasty manner...

The poor sod@work whose task it is to roll out W10, a lifelong windows guy, hates it with a passion (he's the guy who has to build the deployment image and support it)

'..For the average user, W10 is probably the only real solution at the moment, even with its faults, niggles, foibles and inbuilt telemetry. I'd say very few people on here are the average user. '

The 'average user'@work would still be happy with XP, they use Win7 with little complaint. The 'average user'@home (extending home to include friends, family and neighbours) I support, a mix of XP/Win7 with an occasional Win8.x, last serious issues I had were with a Win8.1 laptop..that was the first reinstall I've had to perform for a couple of years to fix a fsked system.

The average user@home would still be using XP, only Microsoft scared them silly with all sorts of tales about dire things happening with the EOL of their support for it, the fact that they usually had to go and purchase new hardware to run Win7/8.x didn't please a lot of people.

[Dan 55]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Did you say Windows 10's UI is less awful than OS X's?

Windows 10 takes Windows 8's UI and then replaces the icons with outline stick drawings, sort of like placeholder icons developers do before software is fully finished.

It's seems impossible to make it look any worse, but I'm sure they'll manage it for Redstone.

[1Rafayal]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

you do know there is very little difference between the Windows 8 and 10 UI's right?

I mean, you have used them?

As for OS X, I couldnt give a toss about that right now. It has nothing to do with Windows 10

[AlbertH]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

For the average user, W10 is probably the only real solution at the moment, even with its faults, niggles, foibles and inbuilt telemetry. I'd say very few people on here are the average user.

Many of the readers may not be, but my Dad is pretty average as computer users go. His reasonably stable Windows 7 machine has been repeatedly wrecked by forced upgrades that he neither needs nor wants. Twice he's re-installed from his back-ups (OK - he's a bit less average in that he learned the hard way about backing stuff up when he lost half a book he was writing).

After the second failed Windows 10 "upgrade", he called and asked what could be done about it. I installed Mint 17.3 on his older machine and it took him about a day to adapt. I asked yesterday about reinstalling his newer machine with Windows (to get it working again), and he said "No - just put Mint on it like this one!".

He had resisted Linux for a long time - as he "knew" Windows - but the repeated foul-ups have finally alienated him. He's now recommending Mint to all his oldster friends on the obvious basis that it "Just Works"™.

[1Rafayal]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

there is seriously nothing that wrong with Windows 8.1 or 10 - the only thing wrong with 8.1 is the start screen. 10 is actually quite good. If you have used any version of Windows, then 10 isnt going to be a problem for you.

One thing I have noticed recently is that there seems to be a difference between the upgrade version of Windows 10 (from 8.1 to 10) and the regular 10. Its mainly cosmetic stuff and I only noticed it recently after reinstalling post new hdd installation.

Also, I get the feeling that a lot of the people complaining about Windows 10 have never actually used it for longer than 10 minutes....

[Pompous Git]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

there is seriously nothing that wrong with Windows 8.1 or 10 - the only thing wrong with 8.1 is the start screen. 10 is actually quite good. If you have used any version of Windows, then 10 isnt going to be a problem for you.

Are you sure about that? W10 has no driver for the sign-cutter and that's not a problem? Presumably if your car was upgraded but no longer had a gear box so you couldn't actually drive it anywhere you wouldn't have a problem with that.

Also, I get the feeling that a lot of the people complaining about Windows 10 have never actually used it for longer than 10 minutes....

Somewhat longer than 10 minutes in my case, but I did get sick and tired of error messages every 10 minutes.

[itzman]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

What's wrong with win 10 is that you felt the need to say that nothing was wrong with it.

The nice thing about new linux, is finding out what is right about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Also, I get the feeling that a lot of the people complaining about Windows 10 have never actually used it for longer than 10 minutes....

Does it stay up that long?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Ok, I'll bite.

We were doing some testing of our Kiosk software that currently runs on Windows 7 but this time using windows 10 as the OS.

In the middle of a test, it decided to start updating. This was due to some idiot forgetting to disconnect the Kiosk network from the Internet.

At the end of the update process (2-3 hours dues to the slow speed of the internet connection) a good 50% or our Kiosk software just did not work. Yet on the unpatched Kiosks (powered down when this one wnt walkabout) it still works.

There is no way in hell that we can ship our software with such an unstable platform.

We did some more testing and we didn't like the results so we pulled the plug on W10 based Kiosks.

We are moving everything to Debian.

It is going to add 6 months to our next release schedule but we have to have stability.

btw, we never had an issue with the W7 kiosks updating at times we specified. Not so easy in W10.

So Microsoft, we are not going to be spending an awful lot of money on W10 licenses. Last we we bought some 26,000 W7 licenses. no more revenue from us.

Tatty bye.

anon for obvious business reasons.

[1Rafayal]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Doesnt this have more to say about your software and your testing practices as opposed to the OS?

Not disabling auto updates on a testing environment, or even not isolating it from the internet at large seems like something you need to sort out way before you get to testing...

[AlbertH]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

not isolating it from the internet at large

That's actually funny - the kiosk software I had to write was to actually provide (restricted) Internet access for casual users, so disconnection for the "internet at large" wasn't an option. Nor was an OS that would arbitrarily decide that it was "upgrade" time......

[1Rafayal]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Again I would call you out on your ability as a "developer".

If you have a machine with "full" access to the internet, why is the application running on that machine and not out on some server somewhere, you know, so that you can control it a lot easier?

Or do you prefer maintaining n amount of kiosks on a regular basis more than you need to?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"Doesnt this have more to say about your software and your testing practices as opposed to the OS?"

ISTM it says a good deal about both. It says that the test, albeit accidentally, duplicated the environment in which his product would have had to run when shipped. It may have been an accidental test but it was a test whose outcome has probably saved his business a lot of grief and maybe more.

The only thing wrong with his test procedure is that it was an accidental test and not a deliberate one.

[[e-mail]]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

The facts that no one likes Windows 10 is Microsoft saying, "You need to move to Windows 10 right now" and building Windows 10.x distraction based ads on peoples computers that have turned into Windows 10 Ad servers. I will say that nobody likes Windows when Windows 10.x is a flop. It is a 2nd flop in Microsoft's history when Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 flopped. Windows has became the history like Kodak cameras and digital cameras as well as talk and text phones. The first fact was that a customer wants to buy a new computer, but rejects Windows 10 since there was privacy issues and 2nd, nobody wants Windows anymore. Because Mac sales are going up than before, everyone will have mac or other O.S. instead of Microsoft and in long term, I don't see the future of businesses using Windows computers.

[Roo]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"Not disabling auto updates on a testing environment, or even not isolating it from the internet at large seems like something you need to sort out way before you get to testing..."

Sometimes mistakes in testing give useful results.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"I'm not seeing it, and where are the facts to back up the claims in the article?"

you can look at things like 'statcounter', see which OSs are most popular. 7 is hanging in there around 42%, where 10 has barely hit 15%, and most of its "gains" come from 8.x (which is declining nicely). Not all that 'popular' considering it's *FREE*.

And you can google around, see opinions posted in blogs and on USENET. And at ONE time you could see some VERY long threads on answers.microsoft.com in the 'insider' forum, with titles like "Why I hate windows 10". but they're probably deleted, now...

And then there's the past history regarding Windows "Ape" (8.x), how 7 machines would sell, and equivalent 8 machines would collect dust on the store shelves... until 7 Home was no longer pre-installable (as of a year ago last October). And I believe that after THIS October, 7 Pro won't be available either, so GET YOUR COPIES NOW, *WHILE* *YOU* *CAN*. The value of machines with 7 pre-loaded is likely to inflate, like any rare commodity that has any amount of demand.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"7 Pro won't be available either, so GET YOUR COPIES NOW, *WHILE* *YOU* *CAN*. "

I've done this for a few systems in the last year or so, for this very reason.

It needs to be pointed out that Windows Update no longer works "out of the box", and the magic to make it work is not really documented (if it is, pointers very welcome).

Of course, Windows Update not working might be viewed as a feature not a bug, by both MS and by some PC administrators.

[Roo]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

" 7 Pro won't be available either, so GET YOUR COPIES NOW, *WHILE* *YOU* *CAN*."

That will simply delay the horrible day that your beloved Win 7 stops receiving any updates, and while it is receiving updates (some of which are mutating so you can't replicate a configuration with any certainty) you have to play GWX whack-a-mole.

I know long-term thinking it's trendy or sexy, but in my opinion it would be more productive to be working on eliminating your dependence on an OS vendor whose entire roadmap is built on moving you to Win 10.

[BitDr]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"I'm seeing corporates who are happy to upgrade from 7 to 10 that refused to touch 8."

I've not seen or heard of one (1) corporate type (the kind who actually has an IT infrastructure, not a one-person corporation) move to Windows X, YMMV; but in general they're not going to, if at all, for YEARS! Why? Because the corporation depends on it working while;

1. It must not spew or attempting to harvest information for consumption by third parties

2. it must not compromise their network any more than the legacy OS has, in fact it should be capable of less functionality in this regard.

3. It must work with all Applications and peripherial devices in use across the enterprise.

"Now as for PC sales, well that has nothing to do with Windows 10."

You are standing in a river in Egypt (in denile) mate. Windows 10 is the only thing available on retail Laptops and desktops. Corporate customers are asking for laptops with Win 7 on them and are unable to get them. The only courses of action remaining are;

1. Do nothing and keep working with what they have (about 80% do this). While cost effective Microsoft is prematurely making life difficult hoping to prod them into Windows 10.

2. Buy a new laptop and wipe W 10, install Linux and then Install OEM W7 in a VM.

3. Begin throwing money at determining if Windows 10 or an alternative can be deployed without borking their business activities. This is usually a result of the "making life difficult" activity mentioned in #1, and the more aggravated they are the more amiable they are to alternatives.

Option two is only being adopted by small companies at the moment, those with 200 or fewer employees and no need for special hardware like copy-protection dongles hanging off a USB port or heaven forbid, an RS232 or worse, parallel port. These businesses, while more nimble in the decision making process, are forward looking and don't want to be held hostage by their information systems.

Because of lack of driver support for W7 on new hardware the VM is usually the only viable option for installing it on a new retail PC.

While the tablet might be replacing personal laptops, it isn't making a dent in replacing corporate (again the kinds with many shareholders) laptops and/or desktops,... unless you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google. Tablets (large format ones) as a graphics terminal (RDP || VNC session) into a VM on a corporate server and smaller form factors for retail Point Of Sale and Warehouse work are being used; they are however restricted to the corporate work place and there usually isn't a BYOD policy in effect.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

You are standing in a river in Egypt (in denile) mate.

As are you by perpetuating the utter bullshit that you can't purchase a computer without Windows. Here's how to purchase a Dell without Windows:

http://www.geek.com/chips/buying-a-dell-without-windows-is-not-easy-but-possible-1302452/

[Craig100]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Can't purchase a computer without Windowns? Yes you can, dead easy. I bought a Dell Precision M3800 with Ubuntu on line. Wiped it and put Linux Mint on it, but didn't have to pay the M$ tax :)

[Pompous Git]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

Windowns

The feeling I have when I need to reboot into Windows. Love it! Have an upvote and a beer :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "I'm seeing corporates who are happy to upgrade from 7 to 10 that refused to touch 8."

I know of an international fashion retailer with just that plan.

[Martin Cable]

Re: Where are the facts no one likes Win 10?

"Not as bad as Vista or W8" isn't really a great selling point.

[JimmyPage]

Bottom line

What do I *Need* Windows 10 for ?

[Peter Simpson 1]

Re: Bottom line

What do I *Need* Windows 10 for ?

Exactly. At work, I only recently (~2 yrs) switched over to Win7. I can't say it's any better or worse than XP, which I hung onto as long as I could. I have no desire or need to "upgrade" to Win10.

Transitioning to a new OS is a huge burden for us. All the apps have to work on the new OS, the IT guys need to be comfortable with supporting it, etc. All of which means that forced upgrades are not welcome. They have the potential to interrupt our business, which is a Very Bad Thing, to be avoided if humanly possible. We would like to initiate the transition, if and when it makes business sense for us.

True, the force upgrades to Win10 have not impacted us yet. But just a few weeks ago, Microsoft increased the minimum number of seats necessary to qualify for their Volume Licensing. It's now above our seat count. So, thanks, Microsoft, for nothing.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Bottom line

What do I *Need* Windows 10 for ?

1. Occupying disk space on the SSD of your w7 machine.

2. Consuming scarce Internet bandwidth requiring the purchase of more bandwidth and/or being shaped to 256 kB/s for weeks.

[cantankerous swineherd]

it's spyware. on win7 ATM but next stop Linux.

[BongoJoe]

"Blind Testing"

Ah, it all makes sense now.

[Sil]

Do you even remember Vista ?

There were reasons people didn't like it, like an astoundingly lengthened boot time to minutes an a total lack of responsiveness in typical configurations.

Windows 10 is no Vista. Most people have a pretty good experience with it. It's probably too successful to have a positive influence on the market, because why change an old computer if it works well with Windows 10 ?

If the PC market doesn't progress as much as expected, the fault lay solely on the PC makers. They don't advertise or demonstrate how recent PCs are thousand times better than old ones. They still offer PCs with crap configurations such as no SSD or only 2 GB of RAM of retardedly bad screens.

Once again, they show their total lack of innovation. Windows 10 has very interesting features to offer, such as Windows Hello authentification. Where are the new PCs with integrated RealSense cameras ?

Cortana is available on the PC. Where are the mic optimizations for an optimal experience ?

[Doctor Syntax]

"They don't advertise or demonstrate how recent PCs are thousand times better than old ones."

It depends how old. The industry's real problem is that for most people their old PCs are good enough. There's nothing on the H/W side to require an update and, short of failure, they don't, therefore see any good reason to replace it.

Much the same thing applies on the S/W side as well. If MS had been able to come up with a must-have feature on W8 or W10 and made it a paid-for OS that might well not run on old hardware they might have sold a few extra boxes because of it. But they didn't. They came up with a couple of new versions which gained toxic reputations.

So, if the old box with its old OS is still doing what it was bought to do, why waste money.

And BTW, could you provide some quantified evidence for your "thousand times better".

[0x407ab506]

Vista was rubbish when it arrived (and particulary on underpowered hardware). By the time it gor service packed it was pretty good. The difference is that was optimisation and bug fixing. No such hope for win 10. I'm looking forwards to Windows 9.

[anonymous boring coward]

"They don't advertise or demonstrate how recent PCs are thousand times better than old ones. They still offer PCs with crap configurations such as no SSD or only 2 GB of RAM of retardedly bad screens."

1000 is a big number. Perhaps if you still are on a 386 you would be right.

My new cheap laptop is a bit faster than my 7 years old one, but it cost peanuts and has no fan.

For performance you star paying with fan noise, battery time, weight and so on.

Same for desktop PCs. My old gaming PC is not far off a new one in performance per Watt, and I don't want to have a massive electricity bill, so won't be upgrading any time soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

> They don't advertise or demonstrate how recent PCs are thousand times better than old ones.

In what way, precisely? As posted above, I find that my new 2.8GHz i7 QC machine gets through a Vivado run about 20% faster than my old C2D @ 2.5GHz (i.e. 2.5hrs rather than 3hrs on the old machine).

About the only thing that is very much better on the new machine is its 4K resolution display (compared to 1440x900 on the old one).

Oh, and the new machine can handle SD cards of > 32GB.

Thanks to the crap trackpad and chiclet keyboard on the new machine, I tend to prefer _using_ the old one.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the decade-old bugs

The integration of Metro is what they want us to buy, but meanwhile all the decade old bugs are still there underneath, and they can't even get round to finishing integrating Control Panel in Settings or make desktop search work properly.

Give us a reason to upgrade, FFS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Contempt for your customers is the wong way to go

Microsoft started to show a huge contempt for its customers, even if it tried to show it listens to you.

Some people at MS started to believe they could bend customers to their ideas, even when proved utterly wrong. One if the "a single UI fits all". They attempted it with Windows 8 and failed, then instead of dumping it (and designing a coherent family of UI for each device type, with good development tools to support it), they keep on trying, "hey, maybe will run into one that works by accident!".

Hope to bring more developers on your platform? What developers always really hated about MS development is what technology MS hails today will be soon deprecated tomorrow, and you'll have to start from scratch again and again. WinCE -> WP7 -> WP8 -> WP10 - four different technologies to create apps? And then you wonder why there are so few?

Meanwhile use customers as data cows, so you can monetize them with little effort.

Anyway Vista was really bad. Everytime I have to work on a Windows 2008 machine I am reminded how bad Vista was.

[Joerg]

Re: Contempt for your customers is the wong way to go

Windows Server 2008 is the same kernel as Windows7. Not Windows Vista.

[Tezfair]

Re: Contempt for your customers is the wong way to go

"Windows Server 2008 is the same kernel as Windows7. Not Windows Vista."

R2 is more like Windows 7, the first 2008 is a vista clone. Not sure about the kernal, but there is a visual difference.

[Dave K]

Re: Contempt for your customers is the wong way to go

No, that's Windows Server 2008 R2 which is Windows 7 based. Plain 2008 is based on Vista and shares many of its UI issues as a result.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Contempt for your customers is the wong way to go

Windows 2008 is kernel 6.0 (Vista)

Windows 2008 R2 is kernel 6.1 (7)

Besides that, 2008 has the same intrusive UAC of Vista, and lacks some useful features like "Run as" from the context menu (Mark Russinovich had to write one of his Sysinternal utilities to add it) and other nuisances.

IMHO in my experience Vista was not bad because it was somehow bloated (actually, I am lucky enough to use pretty powerful machines), it was the many nuisances it introduced in an attempt to increase security, but actually getting too much in the way. The help system also became clumsy and almost useless (I liked XP/2003 dialog help through the "?" icon).

As a server, 2008 runs enoough well, it's when you have to work in its shell that I hate it more than others (although the "8" interface of 2012 comes close...)

[AndrueC]

Windows 10 would be better if they'd put back some of the context menus. Things like network configuration have not been improved by forcing users to go through 'apps'. I know that right-click is a foreign concept on touch devices but I don't see why they have to try and make it extinct across the board. An option to swap the search functionality so that it gives local results first would help new users as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

If people weren't locked into Windows Server, Server 2012 would be toast as well

Absolutely no sysadmin I know likes the new interface. Not one, including me. What a hassle even trying to just logoff. Click here, move the mouse over there. Click there and click that.

No Windows 10 for me or my family even though I have four laptops and two desktops running it.My kid (just out of college) and my wife both bought Mac Book Pros two years ago, and after getting over the initial conversion curve love, them. My other kid graduates in a month and is going the same way. I would have stuck with Windows 10 except for the privacy fiasco and the forced updates without any detail.

But I'm a security and privacy professional for a bank. And I have a 65" Samsung TV with a webcam and Skype that we use for distant family and Microsoft-owned Skype is killing the TV app on June 2nd. We spent over three thousand for this TV a few years ago and absolutely love it for its this purpose; it was the primary reason. And if my investment can be damaged by an arbitrary and capricious decision by Microsoft, and they can spy on me, and they can push IE security patches with nagware with impunity, I'm done with them except for work. It's a new Mac for me this summer.

And no, I will not install the newest IE security patch with the nagware. F*** off, SatNad.You suck. And I'm high enough in the bank that I have approve/deny approval and I'm pushing more non-Microsoft solutions over the Windows 10 spyware issue. Non-Windows thin clients are in the pipeline for next year.

[keithpeter]

Re: If people weren't locked into Windows Server, Server 2012 would be toast as well

"Non-Windows thin clients are in the pipeline for next year."

@AC in the bank: won't that just be pushing the issue back to your servers? I'm assuming those thin clients will be logging into an MS style desktop and/or back end services.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If people weren't locked into Windows Server, Server 2012 would be toast as well

Actually, 2012, despite the ugly UI, came with some long awaited features - i.e. a far better hypervisor, CA with updated features, and so on.

There are also some important changes both in 8 and 10 (USB 3, better SSD support, and so on), but unlike some server features, most users barely notice them.

[To Mars in Man Bras!]

Who Is This "Remond"?

...and why is it his repsonsibility?

[MikeHuk]

Its not Windows 10

I think this analysis is entirely wrong, the reason PC sales have slumped is because since around 2009 PCs have reached the performance targets that most people are happy with. Reliability has also improved and therefore most people live with what they’ve got. In the past one of the main incentives to buy a new computer was either to improve on the unacceptable performance or due to unreliability. I run a 2009 quad core desktop running windows 7 (upgraded from Vista) which still fulfills all my needs, reliable and fast. Why would I replace it? (Unfortunately the processor is too old to upgrade to Windows 10).

I also run an I5 laptop which does run Windows 10 and in my opinion it is the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced.

Tablets have seen a huge sales opportunity for manufacturers’ not because they replace PCs but because they address a brand new and different market but even and these sales are starting to decline the same reason that PC sales have declined, many people now have a tablet which are fairly reliable and little incentive to replace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Its not Windows 10

A quad core 2009 desktop is not too old to run Windows 10, Intel Core2duo etc. An AMD Quad + nforce chipset might throw it, but if you force the update, using an ISO install of Windows 10, then update the nforce driver from a Windows 7/8.1 driver set, it usually works, so you don't have any missing drivers.

Its just the 'Windows 10 nag' notification update on the taskbar that won't pass it.

[JeffyPoooh]

Re: Its not Windows 10

MH "...the reason PC sales have slumped is because since around 2009 PCs have reached the performance targets that most people are happy with. Reliability has also improved and therefore most people live with what they’ve got."

Yep. Bad capacitors 1999 - 2007. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)

Computers since 2008 would typically be more reliable (not including HP laptops).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Its not Windows 10

HP laptops using Quanta motherboards to be specific.

Have a HP laptop here (Dv3610nr) for testing that's using Winstron ODM Motherboard and its internals are 1000 times better in terms of manufacturing, than some failed 'lead free solder' HP Quanta boards I've seen.

Winstron = Rock Solid still. Trouble is very difficult to know who manufactured it, without a teardown.

The word "Quanta" must directly translate into "lemon" in some languages, by now.

[Efros]

Re: Its not Windows 10

Yep I have a two 2006 vintage quad core Q6600s running W10, faultlessly and with SSD boot drives at more than acceptable speed. Not touched either of them in terms of hardware upgrade (excluding the SSDs and a replacement PSU for one of them) in just shy of 10 years, one of them runs 24/7 and the other probably 3-6 hours daily.

[Emmeran]

The roads always suck where the traffic is busiest

The roads are always horrible where life is busiest. They are slow, poorly designed and in complete disagreement with what you, the individual, need to do right now.

But look over there, in the expensive suburbs, the roads are beautiful. There is no traffic, everything works well and the designers were obviously genius's. Also - nothing is happening over there because there is nothing to do there so nobody actually goes there.

We've watched all operating systems take the same abuse as they have gained enough market share to begin to experience serious grid lock and design/use mismatch. Name your OS/Company: IBM/Microsoft/Apple/Etc.

Ahhh - isn't the grass green over there...

(Actually I feel the most pity for Apple as their consumer focused product line creates flash traffic jams comparable to real-life events such as concerts, fairs and sporting events. The consumer is a fickle beast and hard to predict reliably.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The roads always suck where the traffic is busiest

You sound like someone using Windows 7 still, not Windows 10 though.

Linux Mint certainly needs to be a lot more careful and recent events were a definite wake up call.

It was naive to think just because you put your time and effort into producing a free open source operating system, that anyone could use, there wouldn't be interested parties in destroying that dream, as it becomes/became a real viable mainstream alternative to Windows 10. (Windows itself not been helped by MS's own tactics at destroying Win7)

Linux Mint Is a viable altenative, yet its at the stage it hasn't suffered the 15 years of mainstream abuse Microsoft Windows has, but fundamentally, its secured from the ground up, so that helps.

Its not a downbeat, patched up war wounded soldier, its more a solid,well trained rookie on the edge of the Battlefield, that has learnt a few things from the former.

There is a lot to like in Linux Mint.

Highlights been 12 minutes to install from a USB/ISO to fully updated system on an SSD. A software update system that is transparent and quick, seconds not hours, upon hour.

[Efros]

Re: The roads always suck where the traffic is busiest

W10 will install from a USB 3 stick to an SSD in about the same time.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: The roads always suck where the traffic is busiest

"W10 will install from a USB 3 stick to an SSD in about the same time."

And when it's done that, what have you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

So..

...Win 10 is the OS equivalent of 'Snakes on a plane'?

[hplasm]

Re: So..

No, Snakes on a Plane has a certain charm...

[Pompous Git]

Re: So..

Snakes on a plane

The Git is rather fond of his trouser snake and always takes it with him on planes ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Think Detroit

MS has become the bloated too many VP populated corporate behemoth like Detroit auto companies in the 70s.

They will continue to churn out value-less product until Linux eats their lunch.

It is only going to get worse at MS, that's how bloated organizations work, until the VP's have feathered their nests and leave the ruin.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Think Detroit

I dread getting presented with a Michel Moore movie about Microsoft and dead, burnt-out, computing suburbia where only dazed, jobless data scavengers survive, listlessly waiting for the next democratic update truck to arrive.

It would be like "Tron: Nadella and Me"

[Wade Burchette]

Windows 10 was not a "democratic design"

The most requested feature for Windows 10 was Aero. Guess what was not put back in Windows 10?

Windows 10 feedback was really nothing more than a way for Microsoft to find bugs (and they didn't find them all before their hard-and-fast launch date) and to confirm their vision for the future. I and many people requested a logical, customizable, hierarchy based start menu like the one found in Windows 7 and Classic Shell. That was ignored. Feedback that suggested improvements to the mini-metro start menu were implemented. I and many others requested all tracking to be disabled in the final build. I even submitted my complaint, not as feedback, but as a problem because telemetry is a problem. Ignored.

So long as the feedback aligned with Microsoft's vision for Win10, it was listened to. They were not looking for democracy, they were looking for affirmation.

[Goatshadow]

Re: Windows 10 was not a "democratic design"

Exactly. The Insider program was a joke.

[ADRM]

Re: Windows 10 was not a "democratic design"

Absolutely agree 100%. 100,000's of users asked for Aero and a default Windows 2000 type desktop with blue background and grey windows and 2000 start menu. A "Classic mode" and an "Aero mode". I was one of them, I myself put in multiple requests and up voted others. We were completely ignored. I am still an insider but I stayed on Windows 7 and have not booted most of my Windows 10 virtual machines for months. Can't be arsed. No one in my family is moving from 7 except to Mint. I have that dual booting on my laptop and on several VM's on the main PC. Windows 10 is dead to me. I have all my machines with Upgrade to 10 blocked by group policy and GWX Control Panel Monitor and there have been several close calls with Microsoft rough ridding over the settings and changing (including registry keys) them from let me see what up dates there are to download and install updates without asking and download Windows 10. I love my Windows 7, I paid a lot of money for the copies and Windows 10 is not even worth the price of free (which it isn't as it costs you an old 7 /8 /8.1 license) so it is not a truly free upgrade.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Windows 10 was not a "democratic design"

"The most requested feature for Windows 10 was Aero. Guess what was not put back in Windows 10?"

And I think 2nd and 3rd (before the adware and spyware were added) was to RESTORE the 3D skeumorphic look that made Windows 3.0 a success, and was in EVERY! OTHER! RELEASE! until Sinfosky's abortive attempt at a UI in "Ape" (8.x).

And, not to fail mentioning, something like 'classic shell' built-in. As OPTIONS of course, not forcing anyone to CHANGE [which is what Microsoft's direction is about - FORCING the end-user to do it MICROSOFT's way].

Guess which direction Microsoft picked? that's right, the *FAIL* direction of Sinofsky and Windows "Ape".

/me pointing out that with the Mate desktop on POSIX systems, you can pick 3D skeumorphic, or 2D flat ugly interface elements, YOUR choice. And other desktops have similar themes. I just happen to like Mate (and it's predecessor, gnome 2).

I'd also like to point out that I gave "Ape" a try, when it first released, with Classic Shell. I could *NOT* stand to look at the 2D FLAT UGLY. It's like, "bad feng shui". Win-10-nic has made this EVEN WORSE by taking away NEARLY ALL levels of user customization, and for what reason? Think of it as 'accessibility' to have a PLEASANT user interface to look at, not something that CONSTANTLY IRRITATES YOU. It's good for productivity NOT to be irritated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 is no Vista.

(Borrowed the title from another author).

Times have changed since Vista.

In the Vista era it was almost plausible to argue that Windows was still the only answer, and so it was relatively easy for Win7 to recover from the Vista debacle.

Courtesy of Vista, Windows 8, and other developments (particularly tablets and Android), it has become clear to lots of people (outside the world of the Certified Microsoft Dependent IT department) that for routine stuff, there are multiple alternatives to a Windows desktop/laptop.

That's the big difference between now and then, and that on its own would have made life difficult for the successor(s) to Windows 7.

Win8 was an irrelevant mistake, that seems to be admitted now, and the various self inflicted design and implementation faux pas in Win10 make it even harder for Win10 to appeal to people who don't care about MS but just care about browsing, email, music, pictures, etc.

It may not definitively be the beginning of the end, but it's starting to look like it could well be, especially where Joe Public is concerned. [EDIT: And it's probably too late to recover, given that the alternatives are out there and demonstrably workable, and some of them are even fashionable, unlike Win10]

[Aniya]

Re: with the hope that Microsoft would regain its reputation as a "listening company."

LOL.

[Doctor Syntax]

I tried the insider, mostly because I wanted to test dual boot & this was the easiest way to try it with a Windows OS. It demonstrated its user-contempt on the first install. It reset the H/W clock from UTC to BST.

[Bloakey1]

DEC Alpha.

I have very fond memories of running a huge Progress database cluster on a DEC Alpha running NT.

Probably the best server and software I ever managed and there have been many.

[PNGuinn]

"Mud sticks ... Its beginning to smell"

Mud doesn't normally smell that bad.

S**t does.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality Check

I think there are a lot of valid points here, but I think most people are over reacting to Windows 10. Windows 10 is very fast, and I have had zero problems upgrading users from even old hardware. In fact, most of that hardware is running faster than it ever has. I type this as Windows 10 update is running on an Athlon X2 next to me. Runs great - no issues. As for the reason why no one is upgrading, it is simple economics. The machines are running fine for what most people need them to do, capital is not as readily available to companies, and most importantly - the fiasco's of Windows 7 upgrades from XP are fresh in the minds of IT managers and Corporate Executives. Most companies have JUST finished upgrading to Windows 7 and no one wants to go through that again. Funny thing is, that upgrade got you right where you needed to be. Get a couple of the older boxes and do some testing. While a large majority of clients upgraded to office 2013 or 2016, I still have a setup with Goldmine 9 and office 2007. Works perfect on Windows 10 - including the Outlook connector. I figured for sure we were going to have to upgrade. In fact, 99% of all the software tested worked no problem. The 1% was upgraded and works fine now. While I agree that the spying should stoip, face it people, it is not going away. Suck it up - quit your whining, and move on. Windows 10 is stable and reliable. It is MUCH faster with or without an SSD. I have a few clients that did not want to do a huge upgrade, so we picked up used i5 machines for all the desktops. Users are raving about the speed. There have been minimal complaints. My clients are all taking advantage of the FREE Windows 10 upgrade. My biggest complaint would be all the extra HOME like apps that are locked in the PRO version. XBOX, SPORTS, Solitaire, etc. I am playing with the command line removal of them, but I should not have to remove them at all in a domain environment. Users do not need any more distractions. They get google as a home page because if they end up on the default MSN, they get distracted too easily. All that extra noise in the menu is not needed. It gets reduced down to Browsers, Office, and Apps. Nice clean menu that is easy for them to follow. As for the upgrades, I do clean installs and use the media creation tool to upgrade. I have been pleasantly surprised at the fact all my devices are found and automatically upgraded. There is plenty of room for improvement with the OS. Anything designed by a committee is going to be a cluster-F. I have both a desktop and a SurfaceBook Pro - Windows 10 works great on them. Seriously, get over the minor stuff, quit your bitching, and move on. Microsoft is never going to come up with that holy grail OS on purpose. If you really think about it, Windows 7 was great because we were so happy to be off XP and wanted nothing to do with Vista. Windows 7 traits were a clean OS that was fast and responsive, similar to XP so users would not bitch, and ran applications with minimal tweaking. Windows 10 is the same thing. Turn off the Windows 8 tablet mode in the Settings (START -> SETTINGS -> SYSTEM - then Tablet Mode), make the menu look as close to Windows 7 as you can). At first I hated the wider Windows 7 looking menu, but then I realized my vision impaired users that needed the icons you can see from space liked the big icons in the menu. If anything, I am amazed Windows 10 is as good as it is with all the USER FEEDBACK.

[hplasm]

Re: Reality Check

Stockholm syndrome kicking in ok?

[Dan 55]

Re: Reality Check

PR syndrome...

[Roo]

Re: Reality Check

"If you really think about it, Windows 7 was great because we were so happy to be off XP and wanted nothing to do with Vista"

XP was a bag of spanners, but it was serviceable as long as you didn't let it talk to the internet - and the UI was consistent, productive and helpful.

Vista wasn't actually usable because super slow/hanging file copy destroyed productivity - I was willing to forgive the < 1 year old peripherals being unsupported - because peripheral vendors are just plain bad at supporting their products.

Win 7 had the killer feature of allowing the user to copy files without having to take a day off work to let it finish, oh and MS was supporting it with security patches (XP was thoroughly pwned by then). It wasn't really "clean" and it didn't seem "fast" when compared to Ubuntu 10.04 running on the same hardware.

Win 10 could be the greatest OS on earth, but the fact is it doesn't offer anything I want that I can't already get done just as well if not better elsewhere, and the stuff that's unique to Windows such as uncontrollable telemetry & mutating updates are things that I really don't want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Reality Check

They spying might not stop completely, but it will slow to a glacial pace when you no longer use applications and/or operating systems that have as their main purpose, to spy on you.

[John Savard]

The Problem

The problem with Windows 10, for me, is that unless you have the enterprise version, you have no control over how it updates itself - except by not connecting your computer to the Internet.

That is simply not acceptable.

Otherwise, the fact that it's gone further back than Windows 8.1 towards allowing older Windows applications to be convenient to use is a good thing. Possibly it's in need of a tweak to allow switching to a different interface style when one is using it on a mobile device, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know anything about those issues.

I think what I would like to see, though, is simply for it to start with the new-style screen, but when you click on "Desktop", it takes you to what is basically a Windows 7 desktop, even if you can also run new-style applications from there now. There's no need to get more complicated than that.

[jason 7]

Wow...

pretty much the same article now two weeks running.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Wow...

The times, they ain't a'changing...

[jason 7]

Windows 10 is okay...ish.

...till it breaks. And then you find all the new systems MS has put in place to make it easier to 'fix' just get in the way, slow things down or just plain don't work.

You find the longer you try to fix it the more it pushes you to do a full OS reset which loses everything. So after 6 hours of hair pulling you go for the reset. Nothing else to lose, after all it couldn't find the system restore points you know are there.

Then it pops up a window saying the reset can't function either.

Back with Windows 7 a quick SafeBoot and 5 minutes of under the hood tinkering had you a working laptop again.

Plus I love it when a customer hands me their laptop I then have to ask for the unlock password...which is their email password. That's so handy. Why not just push the PIN or tell them not to use the email password?

[AndrueC]

Re: Windows 10 is okay...ish.

First time I tried to install it on my home work machine something odd happened. I'd bought an SSD and decided to upgrade the HDD to Win10 then attach the SSD and run the manufacturer's image transfer utility. I've done this before a couple of times with other Windows versions and it's a painless solution.

Not this time.

I installed Win10 to the HDD, booted fine. All good. I attached the SSD..Win10 failed to boot the first time. So I removed the SSD. Win10 still wouldn't boot. Now I used to be a data recovery engineer so I know about HDD configuration and partition tables. So I used my old tools to dig around..and was flummoxed. The BIOS hadn't been changed and the PT and BS looked okay.

So that was that. Luckily nothing lost. So the second time I started with the SSD already in the machine and it was fine. But I wish I knew what went wrong the first time :-/

[Vince]

"In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

Well no... it's far worse.

Judging by the number of people who call up and have to bring computers into us to sort out whatever Windows 10 has completely broken and ruined that previously worked fine, and that's after they've had whatever the initial "upgrade" that was half-forced on them broke.

[jason 7]

Re: "In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

It's why I switched to Chromebooks and tell all my friends to do likewise.

[Efros]

Re: "In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

That works providing you don't have to do anything out of the ordinary internet/office stuff.

[jason 7]

Re: "In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

Its moved on a bit since then. But most folks can get by just fine.

Once you've used one for a while you realise how bloated and over complicated the likes of Windows and OSX is.

I can do 90% of what Windows does with 90% less hassle and resources. Isn't that the future?

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: "In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

so all your data belongs to Google now then?

Frying pan int fire.

[jason 7]

Re: "In reality, Windows 10 today is nothing like as bad as its reputation."

Yeah...but it works.

Other folks can carry on waiting for their updates and that Intel driver that they can't stop installing that crashes the screen.

[Howard Hanek]

It's THEIR Service Not YOURS

The philosophy of MS owns your machine not you came home in explicit terms when Windows 10 kept resetting assigned defaults to their products no matter what YOU want.

[Stevie]

Bah!

What was the Vista fuss about?

Ooooh, lessee, could it be the hours it took to install and configure? I did an XP install in about 30 minutes, from open the box to browsing the web. When asked to help with a Vista install I allocated two hours, stayed for three and a half and had to leave with the job still unfinished.

Or maybe it was the need for a Microsoft Passport to be set up, and the password for it to be demanded at regular intervals as the bundled app suites installed? \Or maybe it was the stupidity of even having supplied a passport credential and a license key, having to type in a sixteen digit CD license code AS WELL before the (windows bundled) MS Works (ha!) would start to install.

The experience was useful; I avoided Vista like the proverbial plague ever after.

[Kev99]

The biggest problem with Win10 is that it is a poorly written OS for tablets / phone based a touch screen based UI only. I was on the insider ring thru public release and it borked my laptop so many times I finally got rid of it. Unfortunately, the only way to get rid of it was to reformat my HDD since the "thirty day rollback" didn't work, even tho' ALL the needed files were there. Resetting the system clock back to the install date didn't help. The only way MS can recover, in my opinion, is to just update Win7 by plugging all the holes its lazy / incompetent coders left in and then fork that OS to touchscreen input.MS not only put the cart before the horse, they also forgot to put wheels on the cart.

[NorthernCA]

Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

Windows 10 is doing great. PC sales have been trending down for years. One reason is that PCs have reached a point of having sufficient CPU power since the Core 2 Duo days of performing the mundane tasks that comprise most computer users' reason for using a computer. Office tasks, email, Internet browsing, picture and music storage and viewing and listening, You Tube watching etc etc.. Only gamers and certain professionals are constantly hungry for more power. Windows 7 is a stable reliable platform, so a PC from 2009 is going to perform adequately for most casual users.

Windows 10 has been fantastic on the late model machines I have installed it on, mostly laptops. I even installed it on a 10 year old Quismo Toshiba Hardly ever even have to find a driver, Windows 10 has a very thorough driver inventory.

Not sure why you think there is any dominant public opinion that Windows 10 isn't great, but I think you are mistaken in your solitary opinion.

[Pompous Git]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

Not sure why you think there is any dominant public opinion that Windows 10 isn't great, but I think you are mistaken in your solitary opinion.

Don't worry. You'll get to learn counting in your next year of primary school.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

"Not sure why you think there is any dominant public opinion that Windows 10 isn't great, but I think you are mistaken in your solitary opinion."

As you only joined The Register today I suggest you read this topic and similar that have been running for months - I think you might find that criticism of W10 is not, shall we say , unusual.

[Sean Timarco Baggaley]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

The Register is a niche website read by some, though by no means all, IT professionals. It's the very antithesis of "representative".

Lots of people in this thread are basically repeating the same bilge I've read over many, many years in this industry regarding previous versions of Windows. ALL versions of Windows "sucked" according to the opinions of the conservative, blinkered, addlepated bollocksmongerers known to everyone else as "the IT industry". Remember, many of those people wittering on about irrelevances like "Linux Mint" are the same people who will happily argue the toss with you about tabs vs. spaces, Vi vs. Emacs, and so on, and on, and tediously on.

This is the same industry that genuinely believes Unix design foundations laid down in an era of Winchester disks and Wang terminals are still even remotely fucking relevant today. They're not. The ONLY reason *Linux and *BSD are used at all is because it's a shitload cheaper to piggyback a project on those than to write your own kernel from scratch. They've survived because they are free. As in beer. Not as in speech.

Want to know why hardly anyone uses encrypted email? Because it's a pig to use. It's all very well coming up with the code. I'm sure some of you could write the relevant code in your sleep. Unfortunately, too many of you are designing the bloody UIs in your sleep and making the few genuinely useful features you come up with so insufferably painful to use, only masochists can be arsed to do so.

For the love of Codd, please, please stop banging on about Open Source this and Free Software that. You're utterly missing the point of IT, which was NEVER about the software. Software is a means to an end, and that end is making the user's life easier, not harder.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

This is the same industry that genuinely believes Unix design foundations laid down in an era of Winchester disks and Wang terminals are still even remotely fucking relevant today.

Yeah, because having overly complexified/prettiified crap (there is a german expression that reads like "clickybunty" I think) which breaks in "interesting" fashion and which cannot be fixed by helpdesk level 1 neither (should you, by the the good graces of luck and money even get to it) actually skilled support ABSOLUTELY is the way to go TODAY.

Enjoy your breakage, virus-ridden cancer and "imma so cool" incidental complexity. As well as the bold & stylistic interfaces that aare chasing the latest fads for kids released from art school in 6-month intervals (I'm also looking at you here, KDE)

For the love of Codd

In better times, an anti-prophet like you would have had his tongue ripped out for taking Good Names in vain. This would have been followed by a solid burning.

Software is a means to an end, and that end is making the user's life easier, not harder.

You have married into the wrong house, then. Begone.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

Sounds like you know jack sh*t about anything, but like to try to sound as if you knew it all.

It didn't work.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

"Software is a means to an end, and that end is making the user's life easier, not harder."

Of course. Hence the preference for software that does just that and doesn't get in the way by, for instance, trying to force updates and even complete OS replacements on users irrespective of whether they want it or not. Software, that, in a dual boot system, lives nicely side by side with other OSs. Software that doesn't come with an agreement to let it harvest far more information than is needed to maintain a normal commercial relationship with the vendor. Software that doesn't push advertising at the user.

Which software do you think meets those requirements?

[Roo]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

"This is the same industry that genuinely believes Unix design foundations laid down in an era of Winchester disks and Wang terminals are still even remotely fucking relevant today"

That's because the "UNIX design foundations" provide an abstract model which allows folks to operate in a common way across a vast range of hardware and software, *wthout* sacrificing the ability to plumb in application specific stuff as well. Meanwhile MS has created a few different "design foundations" and kicked them to the kerb - MS-DOS, Win16, Win32, NT 3.x, NT 4.x, RT to name a few.

"For the love of Codd, please, please stop banging on about Open Source this and Free Software that. You're utterly missing the point of IT, which was NEVER about the software. Software is a means to an end, and that end is making the user's life easier, not harder."

Making the developer *and* end user's life easier is precisely why I use Open Source software.

[Maventi]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

"This is the same industry that genuinely believes Unix design foundations laid down in an era of Winchester disks and Wang terminals are still even remotely fucking relevant today."

They are - there are more devices running software founded on this principle out there than there ever have been. Heck it was good enough for OS X, and that's a brilliant OS.

"Software is a means to an end, and that end is making the user's life easier, not harder."

Exactly, so when one spends more time using the tool than getting the actual job done, it's not a good tool. A good tool is one that goes largely unnoticed. For an ever-increasing number of people, Windows is no longer a good tool so hence this article.

Whether a good tool is FOSS is irrelevant but when you have an axe to grind I guess it's easy to forget that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Software has nothing to do with users and everything to do with programmers.

1) Grace Hopper invented software (the compiler) to make her programming easier.

2) Most software is written to scratch a personal itch.

3) Unix persists because "Worse really is better, yes polymorphic handles are elegant, and immutable version interfaces loaded on demand is very nice but YAGNI."

4) *I* recommend *nix as the programming model is simple, library driven with consistent I/O and event mechanisms oh and sane methods of software distribution.

Try a simple task, like say allowing your user to authenticate against a radius server at login.

3.a) Windows, write a COM custom CredentialsProvider (custom login box) and a COM CredentialProviderFilter(hide the other loginbox), create some magic entries in the windows register, which take absolute or relative paths depending on *which* directory you install into. Then Write some radius code.

3.b) Linux, stick four functions in a .C file and write some radius code.

Users don't count, in so much as their opinions on anything more complicated that ascetics is often of little practical value. We value our customer's opinions on *what* they require, but we humor their opinions on *how* it works.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Windows 10 is not cause of down trending PC sales

"you might find that criticism of W10 is not, shall we say , unusual."

And that accounts of problems and of serious underlying concerns are quite ususal.

[NorthernCA]

Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

Nobody said Windows 10 is a dud except this article. It's been great on the dozens of installs I have done. Even put it on a 10 year old Toshiba Quismio (had to hunt down a video driver) but on late model laptops it;s unusual to have to install any drivers unless you don't want the ones Microsoft provides.

Windows 10 has performed extremely well, not sure why you are dissing it.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

"Toshiba Quismio"

Is that so heavy that you turn into a hunchback?

[AlbertH]

Re: Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

Windows 10 has performed extremely well

Ahh! You must be using the special "insider" version that's unavailable to the General Public. The rest of us had to put up with an unstable, inconsistent, unreliable mess.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

You read so Northern CA as to actually be Washington.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

"Nobody said Windows 10 is a dud except this article."

You're new here, aren't you? It shows. You need more briefing if you're going to shill convincingly.

[oldcoder]

Re: Windows 10 is the best MSFT OS yet

Mostly because a lot of people don't like being spied on, and the software doesn't work very well.

[David Lawton]

"Windows Vista drove Microsoft's marketing team to despair, because when they blind tested it on users around 18 months after launch (on hardware capable of running Vista well), the users liked what they saw. They couldn't reconcile the positive experience of using Vista with Vista's noxious reputation. This was the Mojave Experiment, unfairly derided at the time. The lesson from Mojave was that a reputation sticks."

I loved that bit of the article, I remember Vista very well. Struggled to load file shares over the network, unbearably slow, was slower than XP at copying files from disk to disk. Add to that Windows had become very bloated since XP and so most did not have the RAM to run Vista smoothly even acer was pumping out laptops with 512MB ram with a vista sticker on.

Of course by the time vista got to SP2 the major issues had gone, and hardware it was being run out had generally more ram so it was not much worse than Windows 7 then.

But still does not change that Windows has gone down hill since Windows 2000 GUI wise.

[Anonymous Coward]

"unbearably slow, was slower than XP at copying files from disk to disk."

Indeed. I was dual-booting it with XP and used to reboot to it to do file copying.

[Pompous Git]

unbearably slow, was slower than XP at copying files from disk to disk

If you're still stuck with windows, robocopy is your friend. Even better is Beyond Compare and that's available on Mac and Linux, not just windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Telling people they are doing it wrong, when it comes to copying a file, is about as desperate as it gets.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Where are 'THE FACTS' that no one likes Windows 10?"

Amazon.com:

The 1-star reviews are on a par with the 5-star reviews (both are 36%)

Is this anecdotal? No its polarizing! Users are lazy, but here they chose to vote!

===========================================================

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Home-System-Builder/product-reviews/B00ZSI7Y3U/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one/186-4097220-0890636?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star

===========================================================

http://www.amazon.com

/Microsoft-Windows-Home-System-Builder/product-reviews

/B00ZSI7Y3U/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one

/186-4097220-0890636?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star

===========================================================

[willysnax]

MS Forgot Basic Consumer Needs

I lived through Vista and it was less frustrating than Win 8/10 has been. IMO, the biggest problem MS has created is believing people want the UI to be front and centre on their computer as opposed to being an unobtrusive framework for the programs (apps). A basic, universal design principle--I want my programs to perform what I need them to. I want my OS and UI to be as Out of the Way and invisible as possible.

With Win 10, you couldn't forget you were using Win 10 if you tried. The programs (apps now, whatever) have taken a back seat to this flashing billboard of a UI that is so unintuitive, it boggles the mind how anyone ever thought it had flow.

It may sound like a good idea having a consistent UI across all the different platforms but in reality, there is a reason other companies aren't doing it. The same reasons a mouse and keyboard aren't as convenient on a tablet, a desktop UI that isn't optimized for a mouse and keyboard makes for a horrible user experience.

I actually didn't mind Win 8.1 on my tablet and Win 7 on my desktop. It was a brief period of time, and the last time, I enjoyed working with Windows. Now, I hate Win 10 on my tablet, and the desktop is even worse. I have all the other concerns brought up in the comments here as well, but I wanted to point out the user experience because it's a blatant example of MS inability, or unwillingness, to get their ego in check and remember, that ultimately, consumers care about what their OS can do for them, not if it's a Win10 or a Mac, etc.

Imagine if a maker of electrical wiring started making their business about the homeowner adapting to the way their wires and outlets, etc worked because they wanted to implement the same DC plugs that work in your car into your house. That would be forgetting that customers want the end result of the power; they don't care about the brand of the outlet nor do they want to think about the internal structure of the home's wiring, they just expect it to work and stay out of the way. MS seems to have lost touch with the end result of what consumers want and expect. Until they can adjust their philosophy back to consumer-centric, nothing will change in their favour.

[ecofeco]

Re: MS Forgot Basic Consumer Needs

It's hard to explain to the smartphone kiddies how fucking bad the interface is.

When all you know is shit, you accept shit as normal. (I'm looking at you too website "developers.")

[Pompous Git]

Re: MS Forgot Basic Consumer Needs

When all you know is shit, you accept shit as normal. (I'm looking at you too website "developers.")

I couldn't agree more. Have an upvote...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Windows 10 Insider Preview was an exercise in "democratic design," with the hope that Microsoft would regain its reputation as a "listening company." .. "

"regain" ?

[PghMike]

Windows 10 -- why so broken?

I don't use Windows very often, but my wife calls me in when there are problems with her work machine. I was surprised by how badly Windows 10 handles the basics: it is far more buggy than I would have expected. To wit:

1 -- We haven't been able to configure it to run two displays at once. She has a largish Acer VGA display that worked fine with Windows 8, but when plugged into Windows 10, didn't appear to work, at any resolution. As a matter of fact, you can't even see the display in any of the configuration programs (why are there two?)

I assumed I needed a specific driver (but why not get a default configuration from a *VGA* display). However, by accident we booted it with the cover closed, and then it used the big display! But stopped using it when you open the cover.

Really, supporting a laptop screen + a VGA display shouldn't require any special configuration in 2016.

2 -- My wife has had to install printer drivers nearly a half dozen times, just to print on an HP 6180 ink jet printer. Again, is this rocket science?

Her personal macbook required zero manual configuration to use either of these devices.

[Sean Timarco Baggaley]

Re: Windows 10 -- why so broken?

1... is either a driver or hardware issue. That it works with the lid shut suggests a driver problem.

2... is very clearly a driver issue.

In neither case is Microsoft responsible for the problems. (I'm running a second display on this very PC. It's a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 and has given me no problems at all. Smooth as silk, and an excellent advert for Windows 10. Unlike the cheap, low-end Lenovo my dad has been saddled with, with its painfully slow processor, mechanical hard drive, and meagre 2GB RAM.)

I've had problems with my MacBook Pro over the years due to poor drivers, so this is hardly a Windows-specific problem. In each case, the offending peripheral was taken back for a refund.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: Windows 10 -- why so broken?

If it worked fine in Windows 8 but broke in Windows 10 I would say it clearly is Microsofts fault.

Either it should have been compatible, or MS should have warned against installing Windows 10 -but they wouldn't do that would they?

[AnoNymousGerbil]

Re: Windows 10 -- why so broken?

No. It aint Microsofts fault. You seem to have this silly notion that it's microsoft who write device drivers for everything? Well, guess what, they don't.

Issue likely is gfx chip drivers. Microsoft didn't make gfx chip computer is running, nor didn't they write drivers for that gfx chip. It's responsibility of manufaturer who made that gfx chip. Only they have requird information.

If they can't be arsed to provide proper driver SUPPORT for their gfx chip on windows 10, complaint to THEM!

[IT Poser]

Re: Windows 10 -- why so broken?

I have a similar problem when I use either 7 or 10 and connect my tv using HDMI. The easiest solution is to just reboot after disconnecting the VGA cable from the primary monitor.

I was trying to figure out what driver was causing the issue but the I switched to using mostly Mint. Now I simply connect whatever monitors I want on the fly and it just works. KB3086255 was the best update ever since it forced me to stop updating and pick another OS to use online. For now I disconnect the router before I play the older games I paid good money for. When this machine dies I'll try to find one that runs everything I use but I know that won't be with windows.

[Anonymous Coward]

This article doesn't make sense

Look at Microsoft's Win10 adoption numbers if you want to know what Win10 adoption looks like... it looks good, record adoption.

People have long used PC sales as a proxy for Windows adoption, but that link is now broken. People are upgrading to Win10 on existing hardware more and more often as there is no need for new underlying hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This article doesn't make sense

> record adoption

You can're really say that, as there are no previous "forced upgrade" data points.

All prior Windows upgrades had to be paid for, and usually only made sense when buying new hardware that could cope with the new OS.

And W10 _is_ a better desktop OS than 8/8.1 so those people who were unfortunate enough to buy a new machine with 8 have good reason to upgrade.

[oldcoder]

Re: This article doesn't make sense

Depends on the definition of "is".

When programs that worked don't work, devices that worked don't work, user interfaces that used to work don't work...

Having a working Windows 8/8.1 and a broken Windows 10 is good reason NOT to upgrade.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This article doesn't make sense

@oldcoder

Fair enough... in my case it was an upgrade to 8 and subsequent driver problems that got me off the MS merry-go-round. So have not personally had any pain with 8->10 upgrades as have not done any (division by zero problem!).

Now I just pretend to not know anything about Windows.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: This article doesn't make sense

NorthenCA - is that you?

[Sean Timarco Baggaley]

Second verse! Same as the first!

Interesting that the article referred to XP as if it were considered an example of shining perfection on its release and not, say, a product derided for introducing hardware-linked Product Activation and a "Fisher-Price" UI.

Microsoft, despite their PR department's repeated attempts to suggest otherwise, have always been a developer tools company and their operating systems are essentially a collection of APIs for their developer tools to target. That they just happen to include some consumer-oriented GUI features is mere icing on the cake, but it's developers they're after first and foremost. That's how you lock corporations into an ecosystem. Apple did it for consumers and are often credited with inventing the ecosystem concept, but Microsoft have been doing it – whether intentionally or not – since the 1970s. They just weren't targeting the consumer market.

UWA is there to brutally stab Win32 (and MFC) in the back and put it out of everyone's misery. (The reason for this can be gleaned from the name: the "32" stands for "32-bit". This is a truly ancient API and needs to go.) The universal app format also reduces development overheads for custom enterprise apps. And those are the apps MS want to attract.

MS couldn't give a sparrow's fart about the consumer space; there's little money in it outside the deluxe, high-margin sectors. They don't mind if *Linux and the other Unices eat that up. No. They want the enterprise customers. The "99%" are free beta testers, nothing more, which is why Windows 10 is being offered to us for "free". And that also explains the telemetry.

"But," you ask, "what about privacy?"

With over a billion users on Facebook, I think Microsoft are perfectly within their rights to reply with, "What about it?"

Clearly the vast majority either doesn't care about privacy, or simply can't be arsed with all the faff and palaver involved in crypto certificates and the like. We don't mind jumping through those hoops, but we're a tiny minority living in the really unfashionable end of the IT industry. We're not even on Microsoft's radar, except as potential developers.

The rest of the world is happily sexting, and tweeting compromising photos at each other, while confronting random strangers in Croydon about the bombings in Belgium. (Then acting all surprised when they learn, the hard way, that "Freedom of Speech" does not mean "Freedom from Consequences".)

Microsoft have already ceded most of the low-end and mid-range consumer markets to their rivals. They can try and claw some of it back, but most of the money – as Apple have repeatedly proved – is at the high-end, so why even bother targeting anything else? The tightwads of the population have repeatedly shown they don't mind trading personal data for free stuff.

This is why even the cheapest, Atom-powered Surface Pro 4 model costs a fair chunk of money. MS are primarily aiming at corporations. Big corporations. Big corporations who need custom software, and vast quantities of IT kit to run it on and manage all the bits and pieces. Apple aren't playing in that space, and *Linux is too fragmented and politicised to be a major player. You can build a UWA app for Windows 10 using point-and-click tools so easy to use, almost anyone can do it.

For the old guard, there's still *Linux and *BSD. (In other words: Minix, or Unix. Or you could always use OS X, which is also, er, Unix. So much for choice and innovation, but that's IT folk for you. They make most conservatives look like love-happy hippies by comparison.)

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Second verse! Same as the first!

"MS are primarily aiming at corporations."

But are the corporations going to buy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Second verse! Same as the first!

MS are primarily aiming at corporations. Big corporations. Big corporations

Can't someone teach them to use a urinal instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Second verse! Same as the first!

I work for an outfit you may have heard of. It is the world's 5th largest employer. Hence the Anonymouse...

Do you really want your medical records - better still your psychiatric records monetised in Redmond?

The firewall rules would make any network pointless as no Win10 box could be allowed to connect to it. And as Sun pointed out years ago, "The Network Is The Computer" (TM and all that...)

I feel for the poor buggers who have to keep the "Upgrade" to Win10 "Updates" from happening.

And our systems are locked down hard enough that you just about have to enter a password when the mouse moves.

I just got Win7 this year. And fortunately hardware from this millennium to run it on.

[Herby]

Well, it is just "different"

And that IS the problem. Users are (I include myself here) LAZY. They don't want to change their ways unless there is a compelling need. Do you take a different route to the grocery store just "because". I doubt it. Sure the road may be nicer, but it may take you out of your way. If you only want to buy groceries why should I need to bother with the nice new route when it doesn't gain me anything.

The underlying problem is that software doesn't really "wear out". It will work the same way as it did one year ago if it hasn't changes. The problem is that parts DO change for a variety of reasons, but take great pains to hide the changes. This is so that users will see the familiar face of the software and think that nothing has been done that effects them (life goes on). Then someone comes along and changes things just to be fancy (there is a road construction near my house where this is going on), and the "old" way becomes "functionally obsolete". Yes, it worked nicely, but we are going to improve it.

Now everyone asks the big question: WHY?

And nobody can come up with a good answer. In the case of W10 the hardware hasn't changed, and the users haven't changed, and everyone is asking the question why has the software changed?

Some of this probably goes back to the service life of WXP. It was first released in 2001 (I don't use it so I may be wrong here), and continued for over 10 years. Sure it has service pack update, but by and large it was pretty stable for that period of time. Users now look back and wonder why can't recent operating system releases be as long lived, and will continue to complain about changing their habits.

Me? I use Linux at home and it has done the job for me quite well. My desktop machine was running Fedora 8, and I have recently gotten a new desktop running Fedora 21. I can update it at my will, when it prompts me that things are available. I do it on my OWN schedule. The interface has been quite consistent over the years (even though I massage things to my own way of doing things). No complaints.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Well, it is just "different"

XP's long life was the exception rather than the rule. Every other Windows OS before and after came out on the same sort of release cycle as MS Office. The reason is simple: revenue stream.

And that explains why W8 didn't ship with the W7 UI. It had to look sufficiently different that users thought they were getting something new. Same with Vista - the underlying OS changed to cope better with multi-core processors but most ordinary users wouldn't have noticed the speed difference. So Vista had to look different from XP so users thought they were getting something new. Microsoft could have changed the underlying OS and retained the same UI but that wouldn't have sold anywhere near as many copies.

And MS do have to sell product. They can't afford to keep bugfixing for free forever. Well, if they ever got all the bugs out they could. But since new security holes often exploit some bug dating back to Win95, I doubt that's going to happen any time soon.

XP's longevity was down to the exponential growth of the internet. People who didn't previously have a computer bought one just to get on the internet. Newbie sales funded bugfixes for 10 years. And then internet growth slowed down, as it had to. No more XP revenue stream, so hello Vista. W7 was released earlier than expected because Vista was such a dogshit sandwich. W10 was released earlier than expected because W8 was a double-decker dogshit sandwich made with mouldy bread. Otherwise it would have been a 3-year release cycle post-XP. Because money.

Now, if I read (and remembered) correctly, MS are going to switch to paid updates and it will be Win 10 until the end of time. Makes a lot of sense for MS, financially. Would have made even more sense for users had Win 10 not been a sandwich slightly contaminated with dogshit. Maybe future point releases will change the UI enough to make it more usable, maybe not. I'm betting that MS will make such an arse of forcing paid updates on people that their already tarnished reputation will drop lower than a snake's testicles.

Some commentard may respond to this by saying that MS doesn't care about home users, it's going after corporate sales. Which is crap. Home users funded XP for 10 years because sales to them outnumbered sales to corporate users. But even if they didn't, think of people asking their IT department why they have to use such shit at work when they're using Linux at home and it's a lot better than W10. Doesn't need many of them before corporate policy changes. The accounting department may stick with Windows so they can run Sage, but most of the rest don't need Windows.

[arctic_haze]

Is there a blessing for Windows 10?

Just like in the case of the tsar in Fiddler on the Roof, there is a proper blessing:

May God bless and keep Windows 10. . . far away from us!

[Captain Badmouth]

Anybody else have the suspicion that the officer in charge of the win10 project was "Tay"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't he the XO of the Good Ship Galactica?

[anonymous boring coward]

Yes, and we all know how it turned out to be in the end. (No spoiler, just in case someone is getting the box set.)

[Bibbit]

Mel & Kim anyone?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Pbot6IAzE

[RichardLConway]

The Windows 7 UI had elements in common with all versions of Windows going back to Windows 95. People had years to get used to it and feel comfortable using it.

Windows 8 threw all that away, and Microsoft got derided for it, quite rightly. Windows and computers are tools which people use for many purposes, serious and trivial, day in, day out. To change the way a tool can be used, when the current userbase runs into billions, makes no sense at all.

So when Windows 10 came with merely a nod to the Windows 7 Start button, Microsoft were right to be panned for it. I tried to use it and like it for a week, after which I was driven, gibbering, to install Classic Shell, before I tossed the computer out the nearest window.

Failing to listen to your customers is the fastest way to run down and eventually destroy any company, no matter how big.

Take note, Microsoft, before it is too late.

[TeacherMARK]

I wish...

I wish there was an operating system that I could install that could run all my programs... AND DO NOTHING ELSE! No 'apps', no unwanted updates, no data harvesting, no bloatware... And have ONE control panel, an easy basic start menu and a 'windows explorer' for 2016, not 1995.

The idea that Microsoft builds products based on user feedback is a joke.

[quartzie]

Unfinished but necessary

Windows 7 was a success, but it was aging and that showed in the cracks.

The old windowing system and rendering were completely useless on HiDPI screens, and many hardware enhancements were only possible by generally hacking drivers onto an aged kernel.

Windows 8 brought a lot of necessary new guts, with an unfortunate interface.

From what I can see on my Surface, Win 10 is basically an evolution of that, with many things I used to dislike in Win 8 resolved.

My pet peeve is probably about the forced updates, which I hate on both Windows and Android.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 is going well in corporates

Ok, so a few churnalists and teenage scribblers have got over-excited about 'telemetry', but the majority of corporates will have Windows 10 deployed by end 2016

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

" but the majority of corporates will have Windows 10 deployed by end 2016"

And what will they be blocking with their firewalls?

(I had a happy moment yesterday. A client was fooled by the latest version of "We're from Microsoft" - it was "We're from Talktalk" and of course they had all the account details because of the data breach. The user installed the stuff as requested and then the Indian criminal on the other end started to get frustrated and turned on Eventviewer.

Yup, the malware couldn't connect with the server. And as soon as the criminal went to the next attempt and mentioned bank accounts, the client got cold feet, shut down the computer and called me. By the time I got there he had learned that Talktalk never contact their customers by telephone.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

I dont think Talktalk ever contact their customers except to threaten legal action for payment of bills for services they cancelled ten years ago?

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

but the majority of corporates will have Windows 10 deployed by end 2016

George Bush, is that you?

[Hans 1]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

>but the majority of corporates will have Windows 10 deployed by end 2016

Exactly, because, if they had a clue, they would have switched to Linux back in 2001.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

Have they had their legal depts check the T&Cs?

[Joe 37]

Re: Windows 10 is going well in corporates

No they won't.

Point me to one large scale deployment - as in 100k or more devices.

[Hans 1]

@Andrew Orlowski

XP was a dog, a bloated piece of crap ... 2x the memory requirements for a "fancy" ui compared to Windows 2000, when it came out.

Saying Vista was any good pre-SP1 is utter non-sense, they never fixed the memory issue (needing 2x as much RAM because it was allocating crap twice).

You, sir, have no clue, WTF are you doing in IT?

Ohhh, a customer of mine has memory issues on 2008R2, because it is caching like mad until it has eaten up all RAM, it even attempts to cache the paging file ... Windows, the OS for the clueless ... and the server has 32Gb of RAM - enough, one would think, for a file server (sort of) ROFL. Not sure this is fixed in 2012 or 2016.

[anonymous boring coward]

Here is a little analogy for the MS fanboys:

Sugar tastes nice, but makes you pig-fat, gives you diabetes and rots your teeth.

Windows 10 looks fairly modern, and runs faster than 7, but makes you MS's biatch.

[Hans 1]

>Windows 10 looks fairly modern, and runs faster than 7, but makes you MS's biatch.

On what system does Windows 10 run faster than XP ? XP runs faster on my box than 10, or 7 ... and the bloody thing is in a VM.

7 runs faster in a VM than 10 in on the host HW ... so, what are you smoking, I need some of that for the mother in law!

Oh, and, if you do not take bootup time into account, Windows 2000 in a VM beats the others hands-down ... my host OS is Linux .... boots faster than any windows I have seen wakes from sleep ...

[Pompous Git]

On what system does Windows 10 run faster than XP ?

On three w7 systems I have seen recently, svchost.exe was consuming anywhere up to 98% cpu, so virtually any OS would be faster. Last chap I upgraded to Cinnamon Mint as the best fix has thanked me several times since.

[Hans 1]

Windows 10 takes longer to load the desktop (after entering username and password) than Windows 7 takes to boot (with automatic logon).

[anonymous boring coward]

Windows 7 sometimes runs well, but for me the experience has been that it gets bogged down by Microsofts hopelessly inefficient updating system (even when not actually installing anything). And by some unknown background maintenance crap that can drive one crazy. It's just way to busy doing nothing useful.

So far Windows 10, despite all its flaws, hasn't done that to such an extent.

Windows 10 has also "borrowed" the in-RAM compression feature from OSX, and seems generally more frugal with RAM -so works better on lowly laptops for that reason.

I haven't said anything about XP yet.

I liked XP, apart from being much more resource hungry than 2000, which it was based on.

NT4 and 2000 were very nice, and XP was OK once hardware specs cought up with its demands. Vista should have been a slightly improved XP, instead of the hog it became.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which VM??

"On what system does Windows 10 run faster than XP ? XP runs faster on my box than 10, or 7 ... and the bloody thing is in a VM.

7 runs faster in a VM than 10 in on the host HW ... so, what are you smoking, I need some of that for the mother in law!"

On what VM, Linux? An outdated VM? Seriously - how can you make claims like this without quantifying what the VM is. You sure it was not a VM written for XP but not any of the newer OS?

Lot of Linux trolls are apparent in the voting here.

[Brent Beach]

"runs faster than 7"

Makes me wonder if you ever used either.

My experience is that both XP and 7 give instant response to keystrokes, while Win 10 almost never does and can take several seconds to display a keystroke in a browser - for example, when entering this text into Chrome.

If I could move my two netbooks (4GB, 4 core) back to win 7 I would not hesitate.

[anonymous boring coward]

You probably need to turn off some predictive "help" feature in the browser.

It's unlikely that this particular issue is Windows 10 specific, altough it could be specific to a browser version for W10.

[King Jack]

Diabetes...

@ anonymous boring coward

Good points but sugar does not cause diabetes. A diabetic fails to manage blood sugar levels automatically and at times needs to eat sugar quickly or pass out if they fail to keep it under control.

[Chemist]

Re: Diabetes...

"and at times needs to eat sugar quickly or pass out if they fail to keep it under control"

Usually if they've had too much insulin.

http://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-topics/Diabetes/hypoglycemia/Pages/index.aspx

[Brian Allan 1]

Not bad after the third release...

We installed Win 10 three times and uninstalled it twice before the latest version was reasonably usable.

We're found this is fairly normally for Microsoft's operating systems, i.e.: the third release is usually close to functional!

We now have two of our seven PC (desktops and laptops) running Win 10 with only a few outstanding issues with drivers and software compatibility. This is one heck of a lot better than VISTA and Win 8/8.1, which we never got fully operational, but not nearly as good as Win XP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh heh heh!

I just - for the 2nd time this week - headed for the Start Button to - in this case, fire up Windows Update, to see if <i>I</i> had the reappearing nag patch - only to realize I'm still in Mint!

I've been trying various distros since 2001, and running Mint since 2012, but never spent more time in Linux than in Windows. Presumably that implies just how resistant I've been! Until last Patch Tuesday anyway!

rofl

[azaks]

predictably stupid Friday afternoon revenue raiser...

>> Windows 10 isn't the saviour of the PC industry after all

In other news, my car performs really badly when I try to use it as a boat.

Nothing is going to bring back the PC growth days of old. Unless you are a gamer or actually need computing power, the PC/laptop you bought 5 years ago will still meet your needs. Shelling out money so that your PC can sit at 90% idle instead of 80% idle isn't something that excites most people. And for the majority that just do email and web apps, a tablet or phone is cheaper and more convenient.

Making unrealistic claims and when they don't happen saying "I told you so - its windows fault" is just fucking stupid. The PC era is over - just get used to it and stop drawing stupid conclusions from it.

>> A range of companies including HP Ink and Northamber blame Windows 10 for flagging sales.

No they don't - do you read your own articles? They said the "anticipated growth" hadn't happened, but that wouldn't sell as many ads now would it?

Comparison to Vista - WTF? Vista sucked because they changed the driver model without working enough with the hardware vendors and chaos ensued, and because of stupid things like overly keen UAC prompting. Not sure I can see the comparison.

>> As late as three weeks before launch it was unusable.

I used it on my primary desktop and laptop for at least 6 months prior to release, and don't remember it ever being "unusable". And citing your own similarly-biased article hardly adds anything to contradict the fact that this is just your opinion.

I wish you would stop writing these stupid, fanboi-fodder pieces and just report facts. Outside of the rabid Linux hardliners and the tinfoil hat wearers, does win10 really have the dire reputation you are claiming?

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded to Windows 10 on my laptop fairly quickly last fall. It works fine. The speed is on a similar level as 8.1 (better than Win 7 used to be), as is battery life. UI is acceptable or even pretty good, usually does not get in the way.

However, I still have Windows 8.1 (with Start8) installed on my desktop/gaming machine. No, I will not upgrade that to Windows 10. The main reason: the forced upgrade attempts, the sneakiness, the data collection, and the nagging. I simply don't feel like I can trust Microsoft any more, the feeling I get with the Nadella Microsoft is something similar to a skeezy adware vendor.

Is the upgrade reluctance rational? Of course not - Microsoft can already push whatever they want into earlier Windows versions as well via "security updates". But at this point, accepting the update feels like

giving in to the strongarm tactics and I just can't bring myself to do it.

[Brent Beach]

Many problems with win10 noted and yes they are problems.

For me though, the big problem is that it has made my two small laptops (netbooks) virtually unusable.

The original article mentions the periods of no response. That comment should be in capitals with exclamation marks.

If I were typing this comment on my win 10 machines it would take 2 or 3 times as long. On this humble win 7 machine, characters appear as they are typed. On my very old XP netbook (1GB, atom processor), characters appear as they are typed. On my two win 10 netbooks, there is almost always a short delay - quarter, half, one second - and sometimes a long delay - 5 seconds. For the first hour or two after the win 10s are turned on from a cold start, the delays can be terrible.

Then of course, when you turn on the netbook and it shows the orange screen installing updates for 20 minutes. Occasionally as long as an hour before you can log in to the machine.

MS has managed to turn my netbooks - both 4 GB 4 core machines - into bricks.

MS has no one to blame but itself for the death of its products.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsofts Agile has failed

Windows 10 is proof that Microsoft's Agile development has failed. Releasing features that don't work or do not behave as advertised simply turns users and customers away. Even worse, Office 2016 has so many bugs and other undocumented/unwanted feature glitches that the product is as useable as MS Office 4.3 released in 1993. Nadella has to get his hands around the project management strategy of all the Microsoft teams if he plans to make and product produced after 2016 palatable to general consumers as well as corporate IT departments. It is not a matter of nobody wanting Windows 10 as much as they do not want to have the experience of running software that does not work. We did that with Vista and with the first release of Windows 8. Time to fix the bugs and release 10.1 and Office 2016 Service Pack 1.

[Hans 1]

Repeat after me, if I have drivers, an older Windows version IS ALWAYS FASTER than a newer one, the ONLY EXCEPTION to this rule is Windows Vista, because it needed twice the amount of memory Windows 7 needed (due to a bug they never fixed).

MORE BLOAT CANNOT RUN FASTER, STFU!

FreeBSD 10.2 still runs acceptably well on a 486, Linux 4.2 still runs acceptably well on a pentium II. Windows XP does not run "acceptably well" on desktop hardware (due, mostly, to "Upgrade to Vista-Windows Updates") ... in a vm on a decent OS with recent hw and without inaccessible network shares it is acceptable. Windows 7 lags in so many areas it is not even funny anymore ... Windows 8.1 takes anywhere between 15 seconds and 15 minutes to open the firewall panel (on an idle HP laptop, 2015 i5, 16Gb RAM, SSD), FFS, the OS has been installed without vendor BS, the only non-MS software on the box is cygwin and openvpn (except for HP drivers). AGAIN, 7 boots faster than 10 loads the desktop (from the welcome screen), on the same hardware, no additional desktop apps installed (10 has Office 2016, cygwin, and openvpn, 7 same except no office).

Sadly, I do not have a W8.1 license for the x99 i7, 24Gb RAM, dual 500Gb SSD, so I cannot really compare that to the other two.

I am not saying Windows XP is better at running direct x12-optimized games, nor 8[.1] or 7, for that matter .... but that is about it.

All Windows versions I have seen so far have unacceptable USB support.

[Hans 1]

Oh, and both Linux and FreeBSD fly on the big box.

[James O'Shea]

Err, Hans, m'man... so sorry, but that is simply not so. It may well be that most new Windows versions are slower than previous versions, but not ALL of them. Example: I, personally, have an Asus laptop which shipped with Win 7. It also shipped with 4 GB RAM and a 750 GB drive and a quad-core i7. First thing I did was to max the RAM, to 8 GB; I did that the instant I took it out of the box, before even turning it on once, so I never actually ran the laptop in factory condition even once. Second thing I did was to get the largest drive I could, a 1 TB unit. My laptop has remained in this configuration for closing on five years now. I split the drive into two partitions. When Win 8 came out, I cloned the primary partition onto the secondary (so that I'd have all my old software and all my data) and updated the secondary partition to Win 8... which stunk, so I went back to Win 7. When Win 8.1 came out, I updated the Win 8 partition. For a while I went back and forth between Win 7 and Win 8.1, until I noticed that I was spending most of my time in Win 8.1 because Win 8.1 was, simply, noticeably faster on the same hardware than Win 7. I say again, Win 8.1 was noticeably faster ON THE SAME HARDWARE than Win 7. Same hard drive. Same RAM, Same CPU. Same everything, including software, as I'd cloned the system from the Win 7 partition. Win 10, on the same hardware, replacing the Win 8.1 partition, is (slightly) faster than Win 8.1 was, which makes it _significantly_ faster than Win 7, ON THE SAME HARDWARE. It boots faster. It loads software, both Microsoft and non-Microsoft, faster. it behaves better when connecting to a network, both wirelessly and via Ethernet. It behaves better when connecting to my personal hotspot to go on the Internet when I'm on the road. And, as I put the firewall to block MS's telemetry on the hotspot, I think that I've tamed the spyware, too and MS can't turn it off by playing registry tricks on doing anything else as my hotspot doesn't run any MS software at all.

Whenever someone states, categorically, as you did, that newer versions of Windows can't be faster than older ones, I just look at my laptop. I can't possibly be the only one who has hardware that RUNS FASTER WITH WIN 8.1 AND WIN 10 THAN WITH WIN 7. I just can't. For one thing, that laptop simply isn't that special, it cost me $700 at CompUSA (this was well before they killed their brick-and-mortor stores) and it's most definitely not top-of-the-line. Barely middle-of-the-road, actually. Shouting to the effect of what is and isn't possible when at least some people can see actual, live, direct, evidence to the contrary is not the best way to build credibility. Sorry, but there it is.

[[e-mail]]

People will move to other O.S's

I chosen to cancel my Windows 10.x migration and decided not to proceed with it because of Microsoft forcing people to use Windows 10.x, turning computers into Ad machines. Windows redstone is not a turnaround for Windows business and I have declared that windows O.S. is now a flop than before. Please do not expect people to use Windows 10.x if Windows redstone comes. Windows as a platform is dead so companies should stop developing computers with Windows. Windows is next Internet Explorer and the market share of Mac's and other platforms will grow faster than before. I have plans to stop using Windows in our family over long term and ban my 100% immediate family from using Windows O.S. as Windows 10.x became a flop like Windows 8.x was. If I keep Windows 10.x if it was a failure, I will loose more application compatibility and some websites won't work well on Windows 10.x.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 = Windows 8 SP2

And Windows 8.1 = Windows 8 SP1.

Some cosmetic and subtle changes, yes. But fundamentally they are the same.

It's the same with Windows Vista. Windows 7 was really Windows Vista SP3. The code base between Windows Vista and Windows 7 is too similar. The small gap between the two release dates also suggest that Windows 7 was the 'unofficial apology' for Windows Vista from Microsoft.

[Gaius Maximus]

Can't have anything to due with the UI, can it?

Superficially, bring back 3D. It helps. Otherwise, give us back keyboardability. EVERYWHERE! If I have no choice but to reach for the mouse, or, worse, the screen, then it's broken. Touch is simply inferior, as demonstrated by decades of failed touch-screen add-ons for monitors. Touch is suitable only as a kludge, resorted to only on small devices, and only because the Star Trek computer is not yet a reality. And even then, keyboard and display will often prove preferable because of the privacy they offer. Can you imagine a train or plane full of 'executives' barking orders into their phondleslabs?

[swschrad]

my problem is that GWX malware, and it's apparently self-modifying

month after month, Microsoft has put me through spells of being unable to apply critical security packages, then relenting but trying to sneak their mal-OS into my Win 8.1 machine by another devious path.

I DO NOT WANT IT. I WILL NOT INSTALL IT. GET THAT THROUGH YOUR GODDAMNED FUCKING HEADS!!!

I barely got 8.1 tamed, and now you weasels want full time phone-home spyware unstable SAAS crap OS windows 10 on everything? I have a fire pit. if that slop gets on my machine, it goes in the fire pit, and I get an up to date Mac. the Power eMac doesn't cut it any more.

got it? quit it. QUIT IT !

[ZZLEE]

Lissen all the time

I new Redmond was lost the first 10 minutes after loading the preview when I was flashing drivers and they locked my computer to ask how liked WIN 10.

Back to Kindergarten boys and learn something this time.

[WatAWorld]

Hardware marketers have only themselves to blame

Hardware marketers (and their marketing and chattering fanboys) have only themselves to blame for slow sales of PC, laptops, and over the next few years, tablets and phones.

What in the world caused you guys to think that a giveaway of an operating system designed for existing computers would boost PC sales? You were always dreaming in technical based on the fabrications of your own imaginations.

It wasn't MS, it was yourselves and your peers in hardware and industry news who deluded you.

A new version of Windows designed to run on existing hardware is no more likely to boost hardware sales than a new version of Linux or OS X.

If you want to boost hardware sales you have to give us new hardware that does stuff old hardware won't.

Virtual reality, now that will likely boost hardware sales.

It is not of Linux and Microsoft to sell hardware. It is your job. Nobody is going to do that for you.

[itzman]

R U an MS droid?

Into the backlog, reviewed with stakeholders, given lowest priority. Low priority in backlog are the ones you never do unless they become high priority.

sure sounds like it.

Can you translate that into Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

No new hardware here!

Because Windows 10 runs fine on the NAS, net top, laptop, PC and 2-in-1 I upgraded for £0 from Windows 7/8.1!

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: No new hardware here!

We get it JJ. You love Window 10. In your particular Universe it is fine and the answer to 'Life, etc'.

For the rest of us in our Worlds we are having huge issues with it.

From the Telemetary to the forced updates is it giving many of the readers of this forum a hard time.

I hauled up the White flag last October. No Windows 10 for me. Far too many of the things that work perfectly fine on Windows 7/Server 2008-R2/Server 2012-R2 are just failing for reasons that change with the time of day and the phases of the moon.

Our IT dept has releaed a dictat saying they they won't support W10 until late 2017 at the earliest.

That sends a clear message to everyone that it is a support nightmare. Many of the IT Team are running it and having issues with Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and a host of other business software that even Windows 8.0 does not have. Does that not tell you that all is not rosy in the Windows 10 world?

I don't expect you to upvote me for this post but please stop telling the world that Windows 10 is perfect. It clearly is not.

Ok?

[Michael Habel]

I think Mr. Orlowski may have overlooked the more nutter parts of said mud.

At the risk of calling him an outright shrill, why hasn't Mr. Orlowski not bothered to address some of the larger White Elephant's in the room?

Such as trust? Why should we trust that MicroSoft has 'our' best interests at heart when they're essentially ramming Windows 10 down everyone's throat? What about the fact that it's no open secret that Windows 10 raison d'être is to spy on its users, and report back to Redmond so as to better target ad's at said Group?

Furthermore why has Mr. Orlowski failed to mention that the majority of End-Users will no longer have any kind of control over their 'System(s)' since such Updates that fall, (And indeed HAVE FALLEN!) can and, will brick such Systems. The best part about this is the fact that MicroSoft have since stopped publishing any kind of useful KB Articles (Implying that they were ever useful to start with... But, I digress.); And would now go as far to infect such 'Critical' Updates with even more nefarious Malware behind our backs?

Mr. Olowski has failed to address the question of trust. I mean so what if MicroSoft had to recant a bit on the Windows GUI to replacate those die-hard 2k~W7 users. Sure it's nice to see the conced on such things, now and again. But, the man left a huge gaping hole with which you could drive a lorry through.

And, it's of my opinion, that this is why Windows 10 is and will continue to be such a failure. The bigger question going on from here is how can the big M regain such trust as it has, lost... Is loosing to Windows 10?

If these concerns were only applicable to just Windows 10 only. I'd say that would be one thing. But, everything I have brought up here also effects Windows 7 as well. Perhaps, and to a degree we can still afford to play the game of whack the spyware mole on those systems. But, with the way things are going.

1. Who has time for all that? And.

2. How can we continue trusting a corporation that's actively embedding hidden Malware into as many Updates as it possibly can? Sure it's just the anoying GWX today... But, what of tomorrow?

[Bibbit]

Ban this filth!

"I remember running Vista on a Mac tower"

Dirty, dirty, dirty boy. You should have quotes like that on a premium phone line.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ban this filth!

Apple = great hardware, shit software.

I don't understand your objections...

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK FUCK FOR LINUX

that's all.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I hide an update...Microsoft you need to respect those decisions.

Microsoft, if you lose the trust of your customers, you've had it.

If a customer has selected the Windows Update option:

'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them.'

in Windows 7 SP1,

then de-selects and hides that update to prevent it installing and showing up next time, that means categorically, that the customer does not want to install that update 'point blank' or be offered a revision of that update in the future.

Its not a difficult concept to respect.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: When I hide an update...Microsoft you need to respect those decisions.

You have to talk louder. The mutually competing engineering silos can't hear you over the loud yelps of the marketing clowns and the fapalicious moans of the design gurus

[Stolen Time]

Strange new bugs

The underlying OS seems very stable. Converting the C: drive to use SATA just worked, whereas on W7 it was a nightmare. I'd expected the desktop-style apps to be unstable, because there presumably are all sorts of compatibility issues making them work with the metro interface. But I've not had any problems.

What is disappointing by contract is that the new metro-style apps fail in strange new ways. You would think they would be a showcase, but I've suffered from them just not starting... from the calculator to the Windows store. It happens repeatedly, for no clear reason, and I know I'm not alone because the web is full of arcane fixes such as powershell scripts (I haven't found one which works for me though). Switching user can be an adventure, too.

So it's academic for me whether the new interface is not quite as easy to use, and whether I'd trade that for convergence with a tablet. It's not stable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Strange new bugs

"Converting the C: drive to use SATA just worked, whereas on W7 it was a nightmare."

Anecdote is not evidence, but fwiw my near decade old business class laptop (which is what I mostly use these days) has a "Windows Vista" sticker on it but in reality it dual boots a genuine Win7 Pro and a recent Linux, and the best £50 I've ever spent on technogear was replacing the original hard drive with an SSD. Can't remember any problems in the migration.

But it'll be the last Windows I use routinely.

[Chika]

Re: Strange new bugs

Converting the C: drive to use SATA just worked, whereas on W7 it was a nightmare.

I've converted any number of W7 machines to do that with no problems whatsoever. What on earth were you doing that caused a nightmare?

[Daniel Snowden]

It's not the UI that's the problem

I wish they'd sort out the ridiculously high disk activity that happens for around 5 minutes after logging in. I've found this is something that a lot of users are complaining about.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's not the UI that's the problem

They are probably just imitating the horror of baloo file indexer.

[Chika]

Re: It's not the UI that's the problem

I know that earlier NT versions tended to do that when the Server and Print Spooler services got mixed up. To fix it you made one dependant on the other so that they always started in the correct order.

Could this be something similar?

[James O'Shea]

Re: It's not the UI that's the problem

I've rather wondered about that, myself.

The thing is, even with the high activity level, Win 8.1 (and Win 10) can still be used at that time. At the equivalent time with Win 7 I can get very little done, at least on my Asus laptop and on the hand-built desktops which have Win 7 around here.

I have noticed a lot of network traffic being intercepted by my firewall around those times. Why, if I were a suspicious, paranoid, cynical old git I'd almost think that MS has been doing a lot of, ah, 'telemetry', for a very long time. Certainly the Linux machines around here (mostly Fedora just now) don't do anything of the kind. The Macs are, if anything, worse than the Win 7 machines.

Doesn't matter, a good firewall sitting on non-MS (and Apple) hardware is your friend.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's not the UI that's the problem

They delay a lot of services starting straight away to make boot up fast so people can use the box much sooner than with XP. The problem is that when they need to kick in its fierce. On the whole I'm very happy with it at the start up speed gain is such a big plus. Hopefully in time they will tune it better so the disk activity peak is less noticeable and not just wait for SSD speed improvements magic it away.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's not the UI that's the problem

Noticed this too, an SSD - Trim at work?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of the original article was that windows 10 killed MS's reputation

What was bad about windows 10?

1. slower on the average machine than windows 7

2. Force update for existing users running on older hardware without regard to network bandwidth caps

3. Offensive amount of spyware even when forced upgrade users had purchased their old working OS, not free upgrade as advertised when cost was you had to sell your profile to unknowns

4. Offensive Marketing scheme to pretend that windows 10 was anyone's idea but Microsoft's, with only the blind fanbois thinking they had any input into the "design"

5. Offensive amount of shills posting on technical forums that windows 10 was great when clearly this was not the case, it still is not finish, secure, coherent or stable

6. The UI was a utter mess along with only partial migration of control panel dialogue to "new" settings system, crappy bodged metro again when the start menu works better with keyboard/mouse input.

Microsoft were generally trusted by the majority of users however those users who still haven't noticed that things are not improving is reducing by the second. That Microsoft were so determined to move from the pay once to pay unknowns forever model that they removed their original customers right to choice says how much MS have moved away from a IT company with integrity, that they went further and ostracised their real technical community says just how blindly they were rushing over the cliff.

So yes MS have lost a lot with this move and given that the only people left to help them find their mistakes are people as blind as themselves then increasingly WinX will be a security disaster. Let's see your fanois fix anything, faith. slogans and mantras will not anyone and the cliff edge is just a blind step away

[James O'Shea]

Re: The point of the original article was that windows 10 killed MS's reputation

err...

"What was bad about windows 10?

1. slower on the average machine than windows 7"

Not on all hardware. My Asus laptop runs faster with Win 10 than it did with Win 8.1, and it ran faster with Win 8.1 than it did with Win 7. Sorry, but them's the facts.

It may well be that I just got lucky. I doubt it.

"2. Force update for existing users running on older hardware without regard to network bandwidth caps"

Err... nope. The only machine running Win 10 around here is my laptop. The other Win 7 machines are still running Win 7, and GWX has been banished into the Outer Darkness from whence it came. Win 10 does some things quite well. It has severe problems with certain hardware, for which there are no drivers, and therefor will not be running on any machine which needs to talk to that hardware. Ever. Or at least not until drivers for said hardware exist. I'm not holding my breath, some of that hardware is old enough to legally buy alcohol here in Deepest South Florida. Still works, though.

"3. Offensive amount of spyware even when forced upgrade users had purchased their old working OS, not free upgrade as advertised when cost was you had to sell your profile to unknowns"

Firewalls are your friends.

"4. Offensive Marketing scheme to pretend that windows 10 was anyone's idea but Microsoft's, with only the blind fanbois thinking they had any input into the "design""

It's bloody _Microsoft_. Offensive marketing is what they do. Always has been, always will be.

"5. Offensive amount of shills posting on technical forums that windows 10 was great when clearly this was not the case, it still is not finish, secure, coherent or stable"

One more time... it's _Microsoft_. It's what they do. That kind of behavior has been The Microsoft Way (TM) since they were headquartered in New Mexico.

"6. The UI was a utter mess along with only partial migration of control panel dialogue to "new" settings system, crappy bodged metro again when the start menu works better with keyboard/mouse input."

It's worse than that, actually. I only put up with it 'cause of the sheer glorious speed. If it were as slow as Win 7, I'd be using Win 7.

"Microsoft were generally trusted by the majority of users"

Not here, mate. I trust MS about as far as I can throw Steve the Monkey-Dance Boy.

" however those users who still haven't noticed that things are not improving is reducing by the second. That Microsoft were so determined to move from the pay once to pay unknowns forever model that they removed their original customers right to choice says how much MS have moved away from a IT company with integrity, that they went further and ostracised their real technical community says just how blindly they were rushing over the cliff.

So yes MS have lost a lot with this move and given that the only people left to help them find their mistakes are people as blind as themselves then increasingly WinX will be a security disaster. Let's see your fanois fix anything, faith. slogans and mantras will not anyone and the cliff edge is just a blind step away"

It's too late already. Once certain older hardware finally dies around here, the last of the MS machines will be converted to some variety of Linux, and new machines will be either Linux or Macs. My Asus laptop is nearly five years old. I'll be replacing it soon. It will not be replaced by a Windows laptop.

[HKmk23]

Windows 10...

Possibly the hardware is critical. For me W10 is wonderful. I started with windows 3.0 so I think I know what I am on about.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Windows 10...

Hardest game in the world!

25 years, fan and boy?

(Forced updates, telemetry being hardware independent)

[Pompous Git]

Re: Windows 10...

Possibly the hardware is critical. For me W10 is wonderful. I started with windows 3.0 so I think I know what I am on about.

Hardware is definitely critical! If it won't run stable on standard hardware (Intel i5, ASUS MoBo, Intel chipset, ATI graphics) what fucking use is it?

First machine was an XT clone running DOS 2.1; no Windows in sight. Third machine ran Windows 286 in order to run PageMaker and CorelDRAW!

[Sproggit]

"It's the Economics, Stupid... "

No disrespect, Andrew, but the issues with W10 go far, far, deeper than interface design. As I see it, there are three major problems:-

1. Users Have Become the Product

With W10, Microsoft elected to get on the "free product" bandwagon and turn their user base into their product, "selling" their community to advertisers and market research analysts. Selling your users down the river is not a good way to make a popular product.

2. Leasing To Extremes

Rather than charge users a one-off fee for the purchase of their OS, Microsoft aim to make money through a range of subscriptions, such as charging people to disable advertising in the previously "free" desktop games. using this model I expect people to end up paying far, far more for their OS than they would for a one-off purchase, because the payments could be levied for years. For example, the "annual fee" model for disabling advertisements in the "free" games is such that in 2 years Microsoft will recoup more revenue than they would for charging a hardware vendor the [typical] $15-$25 license fee for the OS. So users will end up paying *more* in cash terms for a "free" product.

3. Windows is no Longer an OS

Anyone who has taken a basic CS course would quote you the function of an Operating System as: "an abstraction from the hardware, task scheduling, memory management and resource allocation" and precious little else. Microsoft seem intent on fooling around with the "OS" in attempts to compete with i.e. GNU/Linux, but the net result is that the result is actually *less* effective than it would be if they just thought of it as an OS...

I'm sure that the UI is relevant to the perception of less technically astute users, but the bottom line is that MS have lost the plot with W10. I can only hope that the world wakes up to this sooner rather than later, and that we can have a Windows 11, which would be Windows 7 with a tidy up and the latest DirectX please...

[Palpy]

Re: "It's the Economics, Stupid... "

MS are, after all, a corporation. They're in business to make money. It appears they see a way forward with monetizing user data and advertising, and giving away the OS. For now. So yes, they're going to try to make money from users one way or another.

As far as the classic deffy of an OS, yep, I think you nailed it. I expect the squishy bit happens when designers decide what is the best way to present the abstraction to the user. As many have pointed out, the Windows interface evolved. For some time, it appeared that designers understood that they were working on a firm design foundation. Then someone in MS decided to force a change, and with Win 8 they threw a couple of decades of sensible evolution out the window.

Bad idea. As much a bad idea as trying to introduce arbitrary novel features into a daffodil genome. (Well, in a way. I mean, metaphorically or something. Cut me a break, it's booze-o'clock.)

I've thought that MS GUI designers really should look carefully at the GUIs in Linux distros -- not because they are admirable, but because there are so very many ideas competing for user buy-in. It's a seething mass of OS interface evolution. Why not learn from it?

And, as long as I'm making an utter fool of myself, I'll second Mr. Baggarley's contention that MS is doubtful that the Win32 API will provide security and innovation into the future. If that's so, then that's a major reason UWA apps are being pushed at users. Maybe.

[Terry 6]

Disappointing

Apart from the spyware and the forced updates which have changed settings and start menu from how I'd left them my main feeling about Win10 is pure disappointment. I know most of these things have been mentioned in various places, but I need to list the ones that break it for me. Others may have a different list.

The start menu is a dog's breakfast, since they dump their "apps" into alphabetic locations and make moving them impossible ( except by complete uninstall where that is possible). And, some can't be uninstalled even with Ccleaner. Then sorting programme links into related groups ( Graphics/Office/Utilities/etc ) which is how I like to do it, is made really complex because they've made this an indirect approach. OK, not everyone likes to organise the start menu, or even uses it- but that's no reason to make it difficult.

Documents are still buried and stored by default in a weird mixture of real and virtual folders that conceal them from direct contact. Which may not matter if all you do is launch programmes to open them, but is a pain if you want to actually copy/move/backup/find/group/email a selection of them.

Controls for settings etc. are spread out into various different sets of locations, which takes thinking and recall time to find them when needed.

But Microsoft have form here, not just the stuff quoted above. It runs deeper.

We used to use MSMoney. They updated that, and then the change they made meant that the data files it produced couldn't be accessed from the original version without the updates. So after a reinstall or on a new PC we had to download the updates after we'd run the CD before we could have our household accounts back.Then they dropped it. And when they did they pulled the updates from the web site. I used to dread my copies of the updates getting lost or corrupted - to the point of obsessive duplication.

Or the cursed Ribbon in Office. Not just the ribbon per se. But that fact that you can't tidy away any of the unwanted or unused menu items. The only way to get a menu of just the stuff you need is to create a whole new drop down menu and then completely hide the original one.

None of these things are keeping faith with the user. None of them consider the needs of the users.

[Credo]

It's about time Microsoft reviewed what it's CORE values are.

Ok.... Here's the same computing life story which many of you will remember..

I'm an ancient user, started selling Olivetti / Olympia WP's and PC-DOS Via AMSTRAD, MS-DOS 2 and Windows with no number,.. and OS/2 as a mildly amusing diversion.

Core value 1).. Windows is an OPERATING SYSTEM - it's a holdall for the users key applications.

Core value 2).. It must be RELIABLE, It must be SECURE, It must WORK consistently.

Core