"the Windows 7 hold-outs should finally feel able to make the upgrade"
Nope.
Sunday is a big day in Vulture Central. No, not the football. Sunday is three years to the day when Microsoft’s apology for the Windows 8 generation was released to computer makers. Windows 10 would hit end users two weeks later, charged with undoing the Metro carnage. The background In 2015 Microsoft was still reeling from …
I tried to upgrade my mail server at home a couple of months ago as part of a general 'refresh'. Unfortunately the upgrade process kept falling over at phase two. I tried to read through the log files but there was too much crap in there to make much of it. It looked like at one point it was failing to talk to its SSD but since by that point it had copied Windows 10 on, moved everything around and was supposedly just tidying up that seemed unlikely.
Anyway while trying to investigate this I discovered that after several years (lol) of it being unable to pull down any updates the update fixer actually worked and it found 600MB of Windows 7 updates. So I applied them and after it rebooted I decided I'd had enough.
I will try and upgrade it to Win 10 again eventually but I need to build my strength up first :-/
Agreed. I use Windows 10 at work, and it is acceptable... but only because I'm using the unavailable-to-normal-people LTSB version. I still prefer Windows 7 even over this. It looks better, it's more responsive and less tacky.
@Pro
What are the genuine limitations of LTSB?
Microsith say that all sorts of things don't and others are not supported. I have been thinking that it might be a useful thing to triy out at work as 10 has not "proved ideal".
LTSB, as far as I can tell - and I've been using it for quite a while - is just a stable build of Windows 10 that doesn't receive feature updates, only security ones - without any childish adornments whatsoever.
There is no "modern" (read:metro) interface. Calculator is the old one from Windows 7. There is no windows store. None of that, at all. There are no forced reboots for updates.
The newest currently is 2016 LTSB, which is based on 1607. The next one is coming in autumn, as far as I understand it, and it'll be called 2019 LTSC.
Just in case you *do* want the windows store, I believe it can be installed with a line of powershell, but I haven't actually bothered to install it, because I've had no need to.
There is no "modern" (read:metro) interface.
What about "Settings"? That's in the UWP style, and with the control panel being removed bit by bit, it seems unavoidable. Must accommodate those mobile devices that don't exist, you know!
I have noticed recently that start menu searching for "update" gets you nothing, but searching for "windows update" finds the "are we up to date" control. They seem to be progressively hiding more stuff.
I know people who love onedrive but I hate it. Isn't it supposed to be a local cache? Why is it always so much slower than a normal file system for reading even when fully synced?
Linux services for windows? Who will that please? Someone with an irrational fear of vmplayer?
Win10 may be used for work, but at home I fire it up every few months to run windows update and the odd game of defense grid awakening which was sadly never ported.
P. Lee says..."I have noticed recently that start menu searching for "update" gets you nothing, but searching for "windows update" finds the "are we up to date" control. They seem to be progressively hiding more stuff."
I just typed "up... " into the search menu and "check for updates" popped up before I could get to the third letter.
Don't know what build of Win 10 you are using or what you might have changed to handicap its functionality but what you describe is not the way it behaves.
And there is not and never has been a "are we up to date" control. Not a clue what you are talking about.
" ... and it is acceptable... "
Lol. To some people almost anything is " acceptable"
To me some things I can work with as "acceptable"/ Things like ink pens, toilet paper, dish soap.
But an OS? One that is 3 years old and still is only acceptable?
Acceptable? Really?
Exactly. Whilst you might be able to fool aload of numpties by a big number change, Windows 10 is still little more than Windows 8.2
Windows 10, even the latest version is still horrendous in day to day use. It's still the half Metro half WinForms hell,and it broken in so many way, where Win7 just worked (my pet hate is how I need to close all my programs and log out, just because I re-docked my laptop and the numbers of screens or resolution changes).
Pretending that Windows10 fixes Windows8 disaster is very very misleading. It fixes a small amount of the problems, but the vast majority are still there.
I installed a windows start button skin (In my case Classic Shell, but there are others) and voila - Windows 7 look and feel over whatever Windows innards you have. There are some issues with 10, principally the controlling of updates and telemetry. Anyone complaining about the interface when it's so easy to fix shouldn't be calling themselves an IT Pro.
"I installed a windows start button skin (In my case Classic Shell, but there are others"
Me too. It reduces how objectionable Win 10 is. But it hardly solves all the problems with Win 10, and it certainly doesn't make it as good as Win 7.
" Anyone complaining about the interface when it's so easy to fix shouldn't be calling themselves an IT Pro."
You have apparently failed to notice that the author of Classic Shell has given up the project, stating that Microsoft has made it so difficult for him to maintain compatibility that he's certain he would not have been able to do it much longer in any case. This speaks volumes about Microsoft's whole approach - happily sacrificing consistency in order to reduce configurability.
By the way, I have used Windows 10 with Classic Desktop - it's still horrible.
In addition to the problems still in Windows 10, each "feature upgrade" breaks too many things. One finance related piece of software has to be run as an administrator in 10, but worked fine in 7 (I never deployed Windows 8.x systems because just 2 weeks of testing revealed too many insurmountable problems with applications and training).
The 1803 release broke a local business' accounting package requiring a roll-back to rel. 1709. Fortunately only one of the five accounting computers was on 10, the others were on 7.
The new release every 6 months and only 18 month support is a pain in the ass to try to keep things running.
1511 was shit. 1604 was good enough for office machines. 1703 (?) broke loads of shit for us. 1709 works nicely. 1803 was a load of steaming crap as far as breaking stuff went.
LTSB is great buuuuuuut we needed 2 store apps and minecraft education so no go. Next LTSB looks like it wont play with MS office so that will nail a few coffins.
Linux is great for our web server, file server, mariadb server etc but no use for our 400 school desktops. Linux wont run over half of software we need to run so we are stuck with windows.
@Danny 14
1511 was shit. 1604 was good enough for office machines. 1703 (?) broke loads of shit for us. 1709 works nicely. 1803 was a load of steaming crap as far as breaking stuff went.Windows 10 was/is shit.
There, fixed.
Next LTSB looks like it wont play with MS office so that will nail a few coffins.
Try Office 2013. It was introduced before LTSB and therefore has no problems as far as I can see.
Linux wont run over half of software we need to run so we are stuck with windows.
Can Wine do it? How about a decrapified Windows PE?
For me, It's not simply that Windows 10' suffers from 'Fit and finish' issues. It's just B.A.D. (Broken as designed). MS seems to have the mindset that they own your PC (or at least control of it).
I use Windows 10 at work (because I have to) and Windows 7 on my multiple systems at home.
It seems to me that Windows 10 is worse in so many ways than Windows 7 as far as the basic premises.
Telemetry spying/tracking, frequent monolithic forced updates (which seem to often break things for me), an inferior 'flat' Metro UI, trying to force you to switch to only 'apps' (so you buy all your programs through the 'store'), etc. etc.
You are still watching TV with WMC? Does the program schedule service still work? I had engineered all the PCs and network to use WMC seamlessly until WMC failed to make the jump to Windows 10. I tried all the various hacks with little success. I even had problems with WMC under Windows 7. A key part of WMC was the use of HDHOMERUN. No other cable interface was even close to usable after Comcast turned on encryption. Every Windows 7 update I would have to refresh the HDHOMERUN drivers. Once HDHOMERUN acquired the capability to record cable content I made the jump to Windows 10. I did the free upgrade using a redundant drive on each of 2 laptops and 1 desktop. Then I put the Windows 7 drives back. I repeated the process for every Windows 10 update for about a year. Now I am running Windows 10 on 4 laptops and 2 desktops. I do a lot of experimenting with Windows 10 on one of the desktops with numerous self-inflicted problems. One laptop is an ASUS T100 tablet that came with Windows 8 so I have seen it all. TV with HDHOMERUN on Windows 10 is very nice. The content recording is far better because the files are generic format instead of the WMC proprietary. format.
Still using 7 on old machine with 4GB maxed-out-RAM and despite occasional problems with external drives it works well.
Also works well on netbook and the 7200rpm 750GB drive uses a lot less power than the old 250.
Interesting to note that I actually did try running 10 on both but it was just too slow.
Unless M$ are nice and reduce the price of 10 upgrade for older but compatible systems (maybe call it 10L) then people are just not going to move.
Oh the LTSB saga. We had Mickeysoft in last year to help us get our head round how we're going to go about a W10 deployment. Considering we have a very polished and reliable (although admittedly quirky) W7 deployment regime in place, LTSB looked to be the immediate answer to the very un-corporate standard version. Plus in typical Sysadmin style everybody immediately donned the tinfoil hat approach to the constant "diagnostic" data leakage.
Originally M.Soft came in like henchmen. "NO YOU CANNOT USE LTSB. IT'S FOR CASH MACHINES AND LIFE SUPPORT ONLY". It felt like we were under the cosh, one "but we're not interested in your damn store" away from being waterboarded.
I'm assuming they got ejected from a lot of offices as this year they deployed another soldier but this time as a "free training session". The LTSB interrogation turned into an agony aunt. Instead of being pistol whipped, it was "please, I beg you, as a friend and ally, please do not use LTSB as you'll miss out on all this great stuff".
And so the W10 Disney Magic Kingdom Tile edition will soon be deployed.
And so the W10 Disney Magic Kingdom Tile edition will soon be deployed.
As far as I know, you get the licenses for both Enterprise and Enterprise LTSB together and you get to pick. Why the hell does your boss even care to listen to M$'s droids?
If you have a Windows 7 computer, you can upgrade (though that's really a misnomer) to Windows 10 for free. A properly activated Windows 7 to 8.1 machine will activate Windows 10 without a problem. Download the ISO and create bootable media with it and install from that. I believe that if you have enogh disk space, you can always go back; just keep the Windows 10 Activation Key because you can use it for a clean install if necessary.
Fundamentally, I would never do this to a physical machine but I have upgraded Windows 7 Pro VMs just to give it a go. It offers no compelling advantage in speed, usability or aesthetics; just a pain in the ass for care and feeding.
> Not while there are features that disappear with the upgrade. I'm not the only person who
> uses Media Centre as a television
Well, yes. While I seem to be in the minority here, and quite like Win10 for desktop/tablet use, the machine I built 10 years ago which sits under the TV and runs all my home entertainment with Windows Media Center will be staying on Win7 for obvious reasons.
Put the menu system back the way it was, stop pushing your solutions in my face, and let me turn off the Phone Home feature and we'll talk.
Also put the file explorer back to XP's style and stop burying the context of new windows.
"I would also be thrilled to have actual window borders back."
Just fornicating *NUKE* the entire "the Metro" interface changes that happened between 7 and "Ape", including the 2D FLATSO, "the Metro" in general, UWP, pastel blue on blinding white backgrounds, oversized non-intuitive shapes pretending to be buttons, and, as you mentioned, "practically BORDERLESS" windows that are hard to grab the edge of for re-sizing.
I used to have 3-pixel border widths configured in XP. i think you can still set that in 7. Of course, it all disappears in 10, because, MICRO-SHAFT knows BEST on how YOUR computer should look.
/me points out that APPEARANCE CONFIGURATION should _REALLY_ be an "accessibility" issue, because old eyes can't see those HORRIBLE 'the Metro" colors very well, at least NOT without eyestrain...
icon, because Win-10-nic is a *BIG* *FAT* *FAIL* and deserves to *DIE* a *HORRIBLE* *DEATH*.
Micro-shaft needs to DO WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT, and *STOP* trying to HERD us like CATTLE.
JohnFen writes:
I would also be thrilled to have actual window borders back.
That's just a theme, at least as far as the "desktop UI" bits go. Even though MS puts more restrictions on these than kernel drivers (themes have to be signed by Microsoft, a service they refuse to offer at all to third parties, while the far more dangerous kernel drivers only have to be signed by some recognized CA), it's quite possible to do. I haven't found any MS theme to be acceptable as-is since Classic, personally.
Where's the Phone Home feature hidden? I's a bit of code somewhere - a binary? So who knows where it is? One of the last updates of Win 10 on my gaming rig pushed most of my older games into unplayable state so I'm full well ready to start digging since I'm going to copy the games and saved data to an external then wipe and reinstall anyhow. If I can find that fucker and make it so it doesn't work, I'll suss it out on the reinstall and get it gone and do all updates manually. It's not like I do anything with the gaming rig other than play games with it..
Personally, I cannot believe how unstable Windows 10 is, today. I'm not a rabid anti-Windows-10 hater. I use Windows 10 professionally and at home and I have been developing on Windows-based platforms since 2000 and I feel that Windows 10, in 2018, is about as unstable an operating system as I have seen in a very long time.
To put a number on it, my workstation up-time is measured in hours! Even on the hated Windows 8, I could go for over a week without restarting, without a BSOD and without a total failure of Windows Explorer or some other vital piece of the shell. And that's on a developer desktop that gets all kinds of abuse thrown at it.
It's like being on Windows '98 SE all over again. Multiple restarts a day -- and most of them involuntary and unannounced.
I don't like the Slurp. I don't like the Store. I don't like Metro or Modern or whatever but even if you write all of that off as the status-quo and just accept it, Windows 10 is still failing to perform its basic function: providing a stable operating system, i.e. a thing that runs applications.
Every time I debate this with colleagues, we come to the same conclusion: Microsoft don't care about Windows anymore. They'd be quite happy if you were connecting to Office 365 and running stuff in Azure from Mac OS or Linux. Cloud matters; desktop does not.
Same here, my Windows 10 devices simply work... My main use laptop is measured in weeks/months of uptime, not hours or days.
I assume, like a lot of Windows problem users, there are inherent issues that most likely lie with the hardware.
I can only go by experience, personal devices work flawlessly, and a network running 300+ Windows 10 devices that cause me no problems at all as a Network Manager
I'd have to second the idea that something is seriously wrong.. The app store packaging structure seems more sound that the old windows installations, but of course there is a cost. Winsxs. All those identically named dlls that once we the bane of your existence are all lovingly and separately registered in winsxs each with a truncated guid, like signature. File corruptions can be identified and fixed automagicly with sfc, but god help you if somehow the sxs registrations go awol, or you think you can simply copy a file in to replace a corrupt one.
The OS is strong. (The failure rate of updates, given how they do the feature updates, is way lower than I would have expected ) I'd guess you've got some corruption in your sxs manifests. Wipe and reinstall i'm afraid.
Stop error codes are still viable and the crash logs are better than ever.
Unabashed linux fan. Windows is stuffed, but not in the way you describe. Its surprisingly durable.
Personally, I cannot believe how unstable Windows 10 is, today. I'm not a rabid anti-Windows-10 hater. I use Windows 10 professionally and at home and I have been developing on Windows-based platforms since 2000 and I feel that Windows 10, in 2018, is about as unstable an operating system as I have seen in a very long time.
You must be doing something very odd then, or running on dodgy hardware. I'm not a huge fan of Win 10 myself but it seems at least as stable as previous versions. My laptop at home is only rebooted if an update requires it (so perhaps three times a year) being left in sleep the rest of the time when I'm done with it. The PC I use when working from home has always been fine but to be fair I don't use it much.
My PC at work is left on all week and only powered down over the weekend. I'm a software developer (albeit a high level one) so my work machine gets a lot of stress. At the moment it's typically running three or four Visual Studio instances, two of which in debug mode spawn web sites and services with the third spawning an application and another web site. The machine is also hosting a Linux Postgres server and an Elastic search server.
It's been many, many years since I'd describe any Windows version as unstable. So called BSODs are a rarity and have been since Windows XP SP1. If you can give us more information perhaps we can help sort out what sounds like an annoying problem.
"You must be doing something very odd then, or running on dodgy hardware. "
I can't speak for the OP, but the Surface Pro I'm familiar with blue-screens several times a week. Utter rubbish hardware, but what do you expect from a no-name vendor at back-of-lorry prices, eh?
I would say one of three things:
Bad CPU cache, bad RAM or bad HDD.
I had problems once with 10 that later turned out to be a very slightly flaky RAM stick, had to do some extensive tests but eventually one of them showed up a rowhammer related problem.
I also determined that many machines which do not update are damaged in some way: never under-estimate the power of a fan clean/repaste of CPU.
A good tip is to load CPUID or a similar tool, if with moderate use the temperature spikes then take machine apart and clean it properly.
I did this on mine and found that the thermal paste had turned to grey powder so it obviously wasn't working. Newer ones use a cheaper compound that is optimized for a lower core temperature and degrades rapidly the hotter it gets.
Found a few which do not update due to hardware. More, though, due to something wrong such as permissions. Looks like language packs can cause havoc, as can trying to use the domain admin to update a PC. Going over to the original non-domain admin user under which it was first built sometimes works.
To put a number on it, my workstation up-time is measured in hours!
Yep, I have to agree with other commentards here. I have four windows 10 machines (three here, one in the office) running 24/7. The only time they're restarted is when the update system unpauses itself and does its business. Which is once every five to six weeks on average.
I have seen maybe half a dozen BSODs in the last decade, and all of them were caused by faulty drivers or overheating hardware.
If you disable the auto-reboot and take note of the BSOD information it should point you in the direction as to what the problem is. If it's not the same driver causing the problems, or the crashes seem to be random then you most probably have one of the following (in no particular order): Overheating, faulty motherboard or memory, insufficient/faulty power supply. If it's one device that's always crashing it could be the driver, or perhaps that device itself is faulty or doesn't have sufficient power available.
"Most current problems seem to be caused by dodgy graphics drivers. I guess we could blame that on MS for not isolating the drivers properly..."
Well, when they LAID OFF THEIR QA TESTERS a few months before they release Win-10-nic, expecting The USERS to become their new Q.A. department via FORCED UPDATES., you get the expected QUALITY PROBLEMS that Win-10-nic has had since it was PREMATURELY EXCRETED from Redmond.
And yeah, driver bugs are probably the number one cause. Legacy driver support might actually _FIX_ that, but NOOoooo you MUST submit your signable Win-10-nic (new, shiny) driver binary to Micro-shaft, pay them the toll, and have them code-sign it on your behalf so you can be ALLOWED to load it in Win-10-nic. Real legacy driver support does not exist, as far as I can tell...
[real legacy driver support would allow you to continue using drivers that work perfectly in XP, 7, or even Vista, instead of requiring re-writes to work in Win-10-nic, including 32-bit drivers on 64-bit operating systems, but we can't have THAT, now can we, because then Micro-shaft wouldn't be able to COLLECT THEIR TOLL... which means to HELL with open source drivers, particularly software-only drivers]
This sounds like hardware problem.
I recently put together a new pc but had it assembled for me in a shop (because lazy & recovering from accident), and had some BSOD problems for the first few days. Figured out it was something to do with the videocard, tried re-seating it and haven't had a single problem since, uptime measured in weeks.
I had this same problem happen to me a few years ago, where fixing the problem was as simple as re-seating the videocard in that machine.
The only issue I have had with Win10 on my older pc, was that the Win7 upgrade tool didn't properly take ownership of all files, causing me some problems until I figured that out.
Windows actually crashing is usually something that happens as a result of problematic hardware, or bad drivers.
Our economy was in a sorry state already: Industry, mining, and agriculture were all but bankrupt en unemployment soared. Then IBM with Intel and Microsoft introduced the PC - it's called the era of digital transformation now. Instead of boosting the productiviity of typists compared to IBM typewriters, the PC undermined it. A disaster became total when Apple and Microsoft introduced Windows. Within a decade the old industrial zones had been replaced by high-rise office blocks. All tthese office workers added to corporate and government costs without contributing to useful production.
The popular press that used to like XP, vomited vitriol onto Vista, only to like to Windows 7, then to cast scorn on 8, so as to praise 10 again. But nobody seems to have found any differences between them except for the version numbers.
The problem is that if you buy a PC that's certified for Windows 10 and a software suite that requuires Windows 10, you won't know which version of Windows 10 these might work with.
"Every time I debate this with colleagues, we come to the same conclusion: Microsoft don't care about Windows anymore. They'd be quite happy if you were connecting to Office 365 and running stuff in Azure from Mac OS or Linux. Cloud matters; desktop does not."
I wish I could give you more than just one upvote.
After interacting with the massive Microsoft contingent at a recent Linux conference, I came away convinced that Microsoft no longer sees any future for Windows as a 'serious' desktop OS. The company already makes most of its money on the enterprise back-end. I suspect they'll continue to dumb Windows down until it becomes some sort of 'lite' Android/Chrome-like platform for consumers to run 'apps' from its Store. Everyone who wants more than that will shift to Linux. (Or the Mac.)
That's been my experience too - my (work) Win10 machine rarely makes it more than a few days without crashing. A number of colleagues have reported similar; we've been collecting information on these incidents to try to diagnose them.
In some cases, we've pinned down specific causes. Symantec AV was causing one set of BSODs by making valid calls to a documented kernel function - a verified Win10 bug. The Dell DerisionPrecision craptops we have also tend to shut down spontaneously because the BIOS doesn't turn the CPU fans on when necessary,1 and Win10 halts the machine if it decides the core temps are too high.
In others, we just get a dirty Windows crash with no dumps or useful event-log entries.
We're using these machines for exactly the same workloads that we used earlier Windows releases for, and they are much less reliable. Like, orders of magnitude less reliable.
And then, of course, there's the "Windows decided to fuck you over by installing updates and rebooting overnight" behavior. Everyone at Microsoft who signed off on that misfeature should be fired.
1Recently possibly fixed by a Dell BIOS update, so again this is a real problem. The fan-control issue isn't Microsoft's bug, but halting without warning and with no subsequent log entry sure as fuck is.
Whilst this is the obvious strategy and I have previously pointed out that the EoL for Win7 would be the best opportunity for Linux for a long time, I've not seen a real gearing up of Linux (desktop) for the Enterprise... Which is a shame,given once business accepts Win10 and Office365 etc. and reluctantly deploy I don't see many stepping outside the MS walled garden...
I've not seen a real gearing up of Linux (desktop) for the Enterprise
Nor will you. There's no overriding direction and no ultimate authority to dictate such a drive.
Thankfully, as from what I've seen of IT corps of late, they are much more concerned with devising some sort of scheme to make more money off people who've already paid them on the back of whatever Yo-Yo fad is currently in vogue in the guise of a new feature.
Gnome Shell is a passable desktop (although I believe Red Hat defaults to the more conservative fallback session - presumably they are quite happy to let the gnome monkeys do their thang in the eventual hope of shakespeare and not shit). KDE is getting there with Plasma 5, but the others are either too niche for Enterprise desktops or much too antiquated looking.
A company, like a singular user needs to have the will to implement the 'Linux Desktop, Dressing it up or trying a Lindows isn't going to work.
"I've not seen a real gearing up of Linux (desktop) for the Enterprise."
Nor will you. There's no overriding direction and no ultimate authority to dictate such a drive.
It's just a question of momentum and motivation. Plus a bit of time.
The truth is that it Linux is already a better client than Windows in every real sense. It's cheaper, with more than adequate functionality. It's easier to maintain, deploy, configure. It has all the software most cubby-hole denizens will ever need - even Microsoft Office, now available in a handy cloud format. And it's available from multiple vendors - something that big purchasers prefer, in every other product category.
Of course, enterprises won't switch without a compelling reason. What we're seeing right now is a sort of 'super-cooling' of the desktop landscape. Soon it will need only some tiny nucleus to trigger a sudden phase-change.
Recall that at the start of the 1980s, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," yet by the end of the decade the company had completely departed the desktop. Apple and CP/M similarly ruled the office in the late 1970s, but were barely a factor ten years later. Today, the unshakeable Intel CPU stronghold is crumbling under the onslaught of cheaper, faster chips built by multiple vendors based on the ARM architecture. Such shifts are always "impossible" - until suddenly, in retrospect, they look inevitable.
We've already seen a few big Linux implementations. (I think Schleswig-Holstein is still going open-source, though they seem to flip-flop every other week.) Microsoft will continue to make the Windows desktop increasingly problematic. And the US (ably led by Trump) will continue to make US spyware-infested technology less attractive. (Especially in fiercely independent economies such as China and Russia.)
In the end, Linux won't need a corporate cheerleader - it will simply become the default commodity option. It's hard to see any other possible outcome. Microsoft was a capable steward for desktop computing in the 1990s. Today, the company has clearly given up any intent of playing that role. The only other plausible option is Linux.
I'd like to switch my work machine to Linux,1 but it's just not practical. I have to do a lot of Windows development, so I need Windows either as the host OS or running in a VM all the time, whereas I can comfortably do Linux and UNIX development remotely. I have to be connected to a corporate AD domain for various purposes. Our main VPN client is Windows-only. I have to use Outlook as my work email client - and bad as Outlook is, the Outlook web interface is an order of magnitude worse. I'm frequently compelled to fire up some part of frickin' Office.
So I keep corporate-installed Windows as the host OS, tweak it as much as possible, run Cygwin, and have SUSE and Kali in VMs for when I need them.
Under Win7, with a relatively usable Dell laptop (Latitude E6540), this was workable. With Win10 and a much worse line of Dell machines, I don't know that it will continue to be.
1Preferably a systemd-free distro.
if Wine can simply have 100% XP compatibility [and application developers STOP USING '.Not' and other shared libs that have license restrictions for "not using them on non-Microsoft operating systems"] it would be possible to target XP (or even Windows 7) and have windows applications run PERFECTLY on Linux with the Wine layer.
It's a great concept. But Micro-shaft DELIBERATELY put roadblocks like "licensing" for ".Not" [and strong-armed inclusion of it as a dependency in nearly every DevStudio since 2003 (if I remember correctly) - it takes actual EFFORT to remove _ALL_ of the ".Not" dependencies for 'new application' wizard generated stuff, even MFC C++ statically linked applications!!!]. And since the ".Not" license quite literally FORBIDS installig it on Wine, it's hard for a software company to OFFER SUPPORT for you if you "install it anyway".
So yeah a bit of a catch 22 but I _DO_ like the idea. Perhaps an XP clone like ReactOS has a good shot as well?
Interestingly there are various references in the interwebs to ways of bringing hot corners back to Win 10. Interesting because I've never met in person anybody who actually wanted the damn things. I've met many ( actually everybody ) who had had experience of them and wanting nothing greater than to get rid of the bloody nuisance. It's like there were two different worlds
Some time ago I updated both tablet and desktop from 8 to 10, its a couple of months that I went back to 8.1,. I really pissed off from the shit M$ trying to put into win10, candy shit app on every re-installation of the OS, UI like shit I could not even customise the fonts on the desktop (thanx to bad eyes). Not that 8.1 are "panacea" , but believe or not they are running BETTER on the tablet and I can play my games on desktop without problems that cause shit apps like gamebar. Things maybe be better with win10 in a couple of years (I doubt, I am talking about bugs as the endless shit of spyware they are putting in wont stop) but at least I have faith on some projects like ReactOS
I think it will be macOS - when Win7 goes out of support - at least I'll be able to use the same applications without any sort of emulation (very bad when you also need a fully working color managed workflow) and my imaging devices will work with the OEM drivers fully supporting them - including firmware updates.
Just bad Apple is now so blinded by the iPhone sales it cares too little about its desktop market.
Windows 10 is still "meh". Nice kernel improvements, but the UI is still being dumbed down to appeal the most clueless user. The new control panel is an example of how to make complex to find and modify system settings.
Let's also wait how well its data slurpage works well with GDPR - it the latter puts a wooden stake through the vampire "telemetry" code, maybe Win10 could be worth a try....
Give Microsoft and Apple two more years on their respective trajectories, and Windows 10 will be much better than MacOS. Apple had a pretty good, stable, if not particularly efficient, OS back at 10.9, but have been loading it down with bizarre UI mechanisms and endless iPhone integration features that forget that a computer screen is not as private as a phone screen (seeing a presenter's phone text messages pop up in the corner of the projector screen during their presentations is only funny the first few times it happens..).
I also wouldn't assume that macOS is sending less information, by the way. Quite a few macOS services send private data for remote processing; it's just that Mac users are less likely to notice it, given the smaller number of IT/network professionals in their customer base. There's a Mac app called "Little Snitch" that can be quite informative in discovering these, but to skip to the chase, here's a guide to turning off most of the offending services if you're worried about them: https://www.macstrategy.com/article.php?190 If you're unfortunate enough to own a Touch Bar laptop, you should pay attention to the "typing suggestions" setting in particular...
Apple's current trajectory is to have no desktops at all in two years, and to kill the laptops in five.
They haven't cared about macOS for at least five years.
They keep saying that they do, but there's no actual sign of it to date.
On the bright side, Apple have enough cash to fail totally for two or three years and still resurface with a new product. Maybe they'll go into cider production or something.
"They haven't cared about macOS for at least five years."
I'm not a Mac user, but I've felt that Apple was being smart enough to leave the Mac OS alone - to maintain continuity for fans who've come to love it and rely on it. (Exactly the opposite of Microsoft's Windows strategy, which has been to f**k up the OS and infuriate long-time fans as much as possible.)
Could you elaborate on what Apple has done to harm the Mac world?
Yes, you're not a Mac user. Apple change macOS every year, and horrifically break things every time.
Eg El Capitan broke half the USB devices in the world because Apple rewrote the USB stack and interpreted the standard in a different way to everyone else on the planet, most updates have introduced massive security holes (get root by pressing Enter?)
The OS software APIs are poorly documented, and are often deprecated and removed without notice or even a suitable replacement. Even core ones - eg they've decided to deprecate the audio and video APIs used by almost all of the professional audio and video applications. On an OS that's primarily used by audio and video people.
Apple are directly and indirectly killing the professional applications. They killed several directly - Final Cut Pro is no longer even vaguely usable as everything "Pro" about it is gone.
No touchscreen support. At all. Sure, you can install 3rd party drivers but you could do that in Windows 98 for $deity's sake.
macOS can only legally be run on Apple hardware. Which is ancient, almost impossible to repair and so fragile that the keyboards actually physically break if you sneeze.
The keyboards have horrific ergonomics and they keep removing keys. It's now basically impossible to use (eg) Avid on Mac without buying a 3rd party keyboard.
The mouses have horrific ergonomics.
I could go on.
Some of this is driven by a desire for form at the expense of function and usability, but it's clear that much of it is that they simply don't care - presumably because macOS doesn't make them much money directly.
"Windows 10 will be much better than MacOS"
That seems doubtful, given that a number of the things that makes Windows awful are also things that Microsoft appears to consider mandatory. The reality is more likely to be what it is right now: Windows 10 sucks in ways that MacOS does not, and Mac OS sucks in ways that Win 10 does not. Which is "better" depends on your particular tastes and needs.
I think I've managed to solve most of my issues with Windows 10 by spending more money and time.
Slow updates etc solved by building a relative monster (for me) of a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7, 16Gb Ram and a large SSD.
The data slurping I've most fixed by spending hours after every update to slowly reset all the privacy setting I've meticulously managed and which MS does it's best to reset and hide.
On my small laptop/netbook I've solved the problem of it being unable to install updates due to a lack of memory (supplied with W10 and 32Gb) by giving up and using a combination of not updating, not using it, and using an Android tablet instead.
My windows phone issues I solved by buying an iPhone SE.
So really I dpon't know what everyone complains about. There are no issues with W10 that can't be solved by spending a lot more money, spending a lot of time or not using it at all.
"HP Probook 450 G1 from 2015, chipset is incompatible since Spring 17."
Not true. Check that your BIOS is at least 1.31 (the first one with Win10 support) - preferably the latest 1.46 (with the latest Intel security fixes)
A few weeks ago I installed the very latest Windows 10 Pro edition on that particular model and it worked just fine out of the box. Any missing driver upon installation was installed automatically from Windows Update. No need to download anything from HP. (except the BIOS and FW updates)
Thanks for the tip.
I was originally able install to 1607 and it worked ok, but started freezing after the 1703 update.
I went to the compatibility matrix here: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05195282
which said "EOS version 1703" from so I gave up after that.
I think I had at least BIOS 1.40 though, I can always just try it and roll back again!
HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G2 here, 2014-15 model as well, same board family and same Haswell CPU.
The chipset is compatible. Your problem may be the TPM chip that broke w/ the April Update.
There's a firmware update on HP's site (however, I haven't done it and I'm running fine).
To misquote the late great Douglas Adams
"There is a theory that states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what Windoze is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” Several times.
The last two words are my addition.
Is still as bad as it was from the start.
You can get it to not force a reboot during your standard "working" hours, sure, but you can't dictate when it downloads the updates.
Right when I'm in the middle of playing online games is NOT the right time to take over my bandwidth.
It shouldn't be hard - if there is constant use of the CPU, GPU or HDD, coupled with network activity - the user is probably doing something that requires those resources in use, and doesn't want their OS to hold their network and disk access to ransom until they are done.
Why it can't just notify that there is an update ready to be downloaded and let me download it when ready... I don't know. It was an option in Windows 7.
But even that would kill performance in Windows 7 - I never got to the bottom of that, but when there was an update ready for download, everything slowed down until installed.
There is also no way to <br>
a) shutdown the PC leaving the update pending - it now forces the update installation, even using the command line. - Fantastic when you need to shutdown the PC quickly for whatever reason.<br>
b) fully install the updates (including any restarts needed) - so you tell it to install updates and shutdown when finished using it, and then when you need to hop on quickly the next morning, it has to go through the post-restart update process which takes its time. <br>
slow shutdown or slow boot after updates. PICK ONE MS! or better yet, let us pick.
Or, you know, go the *nix route and be able to update practically everything in place.
gah
Most Windows updates don't need a reboot either, but anything that changes drivers or kernel services needs to reboot. You can't update the Linux kernel without a reboot, and you can't update linux drivers without updating the kernel. You can't do a macOS update without a reboot either.
"You can't update the Linux kernel without a reboot, and you can't update linux drivers without updating the kernel"
You can, actually, but you have to install special software to do it -- that's not how it's done out of the box for most distros.
But even if you're updating the kernel, you know what you don't have to do? Reboot after the update. The new kernel won't get used until you reboot, but you can update your system then continue to use it until you're good and ready to reboot it.
But even if you're updating the kernel, you know what you don't have to do? Reboot after the update. The new kernel won't get used until you reboot, but you can update your system then continue to use it until you're good and ready to reboot it.
That's the case with Windows too. Until you reboot, you have not updated the system.
This is a "can vs. should" question. The NT kernel architecture is perfectly able to do a no-reboot update - like macOS's mach, it's actually pretty easy to swap services in and out (and unlike Linux modules, they can be compiled independently of the kernel version being installed into). However: can you be sure that all of the innumerable userspace applications that run on the installed base of Windows systems would recover gracefully if that call that "always works" returned an error? Sure, you can "kill the clients", but that's taking an kernel-first view of the system, when the people who paid for the system only care about the applications it's running.
If your goal is system stability, a reboot is better than trying to show off and do it live. That holds true no matter what OS you're using. The best way to get uptime is through redundancy and hot-failover, not by juggling bits of the kernel while your application is running on it.
Almost all Linux drivers can be updated without restarting the machine.
The only exceptions are ones you (or your distro) chose to compile into the kernel - which can be anything from everything right down to nothing (depending on whether you consider CPU microcode to be a driver).
Embedded Linux systems tend to compile everything into the kernel because that boots faster. Server tend to have everything as a module, desktop somewhere in between.
In fact, most Windows drivers can also be updated without restarting.
It only seems to be MacOS that can't do that.
Speaking of slow shutdowns, has 10 got any better with aborted shutdowns? Let's say you go to shutdown, an application asks if you want to save first and you abort the shutdown long enough to save and close that application cleanly, then shut down properly.
Last time I tried that 10 crashed horribly.
In a personal capacity I've tried Windows 10 three times, and every time has been a miserable experience.
The main problems have been sluggishness (which I put down to memory issues) but more importantly, continual and unfathomable network problems.
Wifi fails to connect to known spots. Home networks are 'unknown'. NAS boxes vanish. I've looked on so many forums and basically concluded that this is something that a significant proportion of uses are suffering from, but there appears to be no clear 'cure' (don't start with Linux here, please).
Meanwhile my Win 7 machines, iPad, phone, NAS box, PS4 and even the damn TV all manage to cope fine in the same environment. It's pathetically bad.
And no, Microsoft, I don't want effing Candy Crush in my start menu. Grow up.
Your NAS is using an old version of samba, and is defaulting to CIFS/SMB1, which is highly insecure.
To mitigate it, Windows 10 disabled SMB1 support by default. You can turn it back on (I'm not going to tell you how, because you shouldn't, but it's not hard to find the instructions), but you're better off to log into the NAS and change the samba config so that it defaults to SMB2 or later.
I agree with you about Candy Crush, but it was easy to delete.
>> And no, Microsoft, I don't want effing Candy Crush in my start menu. Grow up.<<
I've found that if you install Windows 10 (both Home and Professional) without an Internet connection you don't get Candy Crush and all of the other 'rubbish'.
If you make another user account after the install of W10 then make sure you're disconnected from the Internet when you sign into the new account for the first time or that account will get Candy Crush, etc. even if the main Administrator account didn't get it.
I'm not sure if running something like O&O's ShutUp10 before connecting to the Internet has something to do with it as well but that's how I've done it and so far no sign of Candy Crush and it's ilk returning. The next major update to W10 may be a different matter, of course.
What also "helps" get Win 10 on more machines is that the new batch of processors and motherboards are hard coded to make installing Win 7 on them either very difficult or impossible -- I believe the terminology is "not compatible with Windows 7." So if you have an aging machine that you want to update but keep the same OS (like what I'm looking to do in the next few months), you'll be SOL.
They're not "hard coded". The newer CPUs have features that the kernel in Windows 7 doesn't support. Take the example of the new low-latency clock-speed adjustment features of Intel's Kaby Lake and later CPUs: the CPU will throttle its speed semi-automatically, but the kernel needs a method of knowing that this is happening, and overriding it when it isn't appropriate. Without those hooks, the hardware can't be used optimally - you get worse battery life, or slow performance. Windows 10 has these hooks, Windows 7/8 do not.
There's also the question of drivers for the support-chips on the board. Once Windows 7 stopped being sold as a pre-install, motherboard manufacturers no longer needed to write chipset drivers for it, or test their BIOS with it.
So yes, you could shoehorn Windows 7 onto one of these boards, but it wouldn't perform properly, and some I/O mightn't work.
It's not a conspiracy, and there are board suppliers who have solutions for industrial and commercial users who need Windows 7. You can go to them, but it won't be cheap, and you will not get the very latest CPU and chipset if you insist on running a six-to-ten-year-old OS that cannot properly take advantage of it.
The OS in itself seems pretty stable. But the underlying attitude isn't. The whole "We'll force you to keep our favoured apps in the Start menu where we decided to put them." thing i.e. unmovable and unremovable just stinks.
And the simple networking is just plain crap. I find that shared folders and even the whole other device will just randomly refuse to be seen. Which I put down to them wanting domestic and SOHO users to use their Godawful "Home groups".
See also elsewhere on el reg their removal of proper Onenote 2016 to make users use the shitty cut down store version.
1999 - Bah Windows 2000 heap of junk give me NT4 any day
2001 - Bah Windows XPensive heap of tellytubby junk give me Windows 2000 any day
2009 - Bah Windows 7 heap of junk, give me XP any day that was a decent OS
2018 - Bah Windows 10 heap of junk I'm sticking with good old Windows 7
(we'll skip over Vista, 8, 8.1, as the less said the better)
"In general every other Microsoft OS sucks badly..."
I've used literally every version of Windows, and I have never experienced this flip-flop that people keep citing as fact:
Windows 1.0 - weird but interesting (what's "multitasking"??)
Windows 286/386 - considerably more usable, but still fairly weird.
Windows 3.0 - fantastic!!
Windows 3.1 - even better!
Windows 3.11 - and still more better!!
Windows 95 - nicer
Windows 98 - incrementally nicer
Windows NT - never crashes, shame about the UI
Windows Me - not exactly better (but not horribly worse)
Windows 2000 - stability of NT plus UI of 98 - what could be better??
Windows XP - Windows 2000 for the masses
Windows Vista - oops!
Windows 7 - Vista UI plus viable 64-bit - it's all good!
Windows 8 - WTF???
Windows 8.1 - WTF continued
Windows 10 - OMFG!!
No alternation of any kind. From version 1.0 through 98 Microsoft made steady, massive improvements - then introduced amazing robustness through the separate NT track. Windows Me and Vista were the only notable mis-steps, and they came several versions apart. Whereas the more recent Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, all hideous blunders, came one after another.
Disagree about Windows 98. Less stable than 95.
Disagree about Me, a heap of crap.
Vista was terrible, I tried it and reverted to XP.
W8 was shocking, but W8.1 is to-date their best effort. Most stable, once you get the drivers. You can configure everything, switch off metro, add a start menu, HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL OF UPDATES. Faster than W7 in my experience. The last true OS that the user owned and controlled.
W10 is WAAS and for that reason alone should be avoided like the plague. Not least but for out of user control updates.
In Windows 7, you have a proper and logical start menu whose goal is to make it easy to do things and not to push apps through an app store where Microsoft profits.
In Windows 7, you can choose which updates to download, when to download them, and when to install them.
Windows 7 is pretty; Windows 10 has the dog-butt ugly flat look.
Windows 10 is slowly replacing the control panel of Windows 8, 7, Vista. But as it does, what was once 1 step is now 5 steps.
Windows 7 never tries to trick you into giving Microsoft your email to log in.
Windows 7 has a full backup program.
Windows 10 took away the free games and replaced them with games with ads. Why? The games were stable, all you had to do was keep them and do nothing else.
The Windows 10 email app is pure garbage. Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer lets you download the old pretty good Windows live mail program. So you email program choices are garbage, Thunderbird, or something that costs money.
I do not want the app store icon put back on the taskbar after every update. I do not want my telemetry and privacy settings undone after every update. I do not want to use the illogical and confusing Edge browser so stop bugging me about it; I don't care how much faster it is, if it is difficult to use that is all irrelevant. Windows 7 has none of those annoyances.
I have concluded that the purpose of Windows 10 is to make money off you after day 1. I don't care how much better it is in other areas, when it is annoying and difficult to use, all that other stuff is irrelevant. A program or OS should focus first on making my life easier; but Windows 10 cares not about that. It only cares about making Microsoft money after the first day.
Several good points there. However...
"Windows 7 has a full backup program."
WinXP had a FULL backup program. If you're satisfied with the Windows 7 backup, it is still included with Windows 10.
"The Windows 10 email app is pure garbage. Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer lets you download the old pretty good Windows live mail program."
I'm sure you're the first one around here who would call the Live Mail program "pretty good". I thought it was just a rehashed, dumbed-down Outlook Express.
"I do not want to use the illogical and confusing Edge browser so stop bugging me about it"
Neither do I use it, but it doesn't seem any more illogical or confusing as e.g. Chrome. You're still free to use IE if you want the full Win7 experience. ;-)
I'm a Firefox user and Windows doesn't bug me about Edge.
well, he might be the first to call it pretty good, I'm the 2nd. And there are quite a lot of folk who share this view. And, even though it does have a few (infuriating) quirks, I've been happy with outlook express / live mail since... hell, since 1990s, I think. Yes, they never bothered to implement some basic, reasonable precautions, etc. (same as web-base hotmail inteface, it took them about 20 years to get convinced about ctrl+N combination). But, looking broadly, , it's the most useful and pain-free FREE contributions MS have made towards the progress of human civilization.
ok, ok, a disclaimer: "...in the narrow field of free e-mail client". Narrow, but pretty vital over the last 25 years or so.
Actually, I struggle to name any other MS (software) to be that useful. ICE was good, until they decided to to make the installer about 3 x as large, performance at best the same as before, and insert ads. IE - you know it's there, let it be. ... yeah, that's about everything that the MS have ever done to us...
Sad but true
Microsofts Windows audience is not tech savvy desktop users anymore though! Its people slowly being accustomed to being bent over and anal probed on a daily basis by facebook and google/android. It works for Google and Zuckerberg, why shouldn't it for Microsoft (it will too)
"the Windows 7 hold-outs should finally feel able to make the upgrade" -- Not here!
Not till Windows 10 actually works well with music production software like Cubase Pro and DJ software like Traktor.
I have tried and tried but the OS is just a nightmare and kills off creativity within minutes (creating music etc requires a working machine that just lets you get on with it).
Sadly with Windows 10 I spent more time trying to workout why ASIO was failing after an update, oh and the display driver was forcibly replaced with a non working one that just BSODs the machine!
Creative Update my arse!
the Windows 7 hold-outs should finally feel able to make the upgrade
How? I own a Samsung laptop, a few years old, but still perfectly usable in Windows 7. During the Great Nag I finally decided to try Windows 10, but the installation failed because of hardware incompatibility.
The hardware in question is an Intel processor with integrated GPU, about as vanilla as possible. I need hardly add that none of the Linux distros I've installed has had any problem with it.
Windows 10 is not an apology for Windows 8. It's retribution for our rejection of Windows 8!
Windows 8, unlike Windows 10, can be redeemed. Classic Shell to get rid of the start screen and to block the corner hotspots (bye bye charms), Old New Explorer to get rid of the ribbon, a custom theme to get rid of the flat look, and if you're a scorched earth type like me, a script with install_wim_tweak to forcibly evict all the apps, including Windows Store.
After that, Windows 8/8.1 become a really decent OS. One that doesn't force updates, one that doesn't break at least twice a year for feature upgrades that no one asked for anyway, and that doesn't try to monetize you at every turn. It doesn't screw up your carefully chosen drivers or uninstall things without asking, and it doesn't change your settings. There's no Candy Crush installations or ads in it.
All of that bad stuff is new since Windows 8.1, and makes Windows 10 far, far worse than 8 ever was. It's ridiculous to have to use Classic Shell and other such programs to get a usable UI, but you still do with Windows 10 too. They just shrunk the dumb start screen down, but it's still full of those stupid touch-oriented tiles.
Windows 10 isn't a compelling anything other than a compelling reason to abandon Windows. It's not any better than it was three years ago, because the most profound things wrong with it are still wrong with it. Windows 7 hasn't had the equivalent of a feature update (SP1) in 7 or 8 years, and it's still more popular than Windows 10, and that's with Microsoft's unprecedented and ongoing effort to force 10 on everyone, without which it surely would have flopped so badly that Windows 8 would look successful.
You want to talk feature updates, MS? Stability is a feature, and so is having control over my own PC. Keep your timeline and Acrylic and gaming mode... I want the kind of control over my own PC that I had with every other version of Windows (over updates and everything else) and maybe I will have a reason to reconsider. Otherwise, you and Windows 10 can go hand in hand while you take a long walk off a short pier (and for extra points, tie an anchor to Windows 10 first).
I was part of a group that went to Redmond for a week to act as guinea pigs for Microsoft's training materials for Windows 8. We were supposed to stick with the program and just make suggestions about how to improve the training materials. What actually happened was total shock at the dog's breakfast that was being presented to us as "the new Windows". We were horrified and protested loudly to any Microsoftie that dared to enter the training facility. It was obvious even then, before the official launch of Windows 8, that Microsoft was already aware the market response to 8 was probably not going to be "good". Shortly after my trip to Redmond a colleague made the same trip to sit in in the training materials for Server 2012 and the horror intensified!
So here we are lo these many years later and, yes, Microsoft has performed yeoman work to clean up the mess and make 10 so much more pleasant to use (and Server 206 and 2019, too). But you really do have to wonder at the thinking processes that were followed that allowed Microsoft to squander the general goodwill that had built up around Windows 7 for the travesty that was Windows 8. Satya and crew would be wise to keep it all in mind as they keep the rapid cadence of change rolling in Windows and the various Cloudy bits.
Windows Subsystem for Linux is surprisingly good ... it's good enough that my main rig is fitted for all of the software I want to run from both worlds. (And a wonderful program called MobaXterm makes it ridiculously easy.)
Still, although progress has been made in the UI, I would like to see Microsoft admit for good that their mobile efforts have failed, and optimize Windows 10 for desktops, which is still where 99.9% of its installations live. Come on Redmond, just a couple of beveled edges on those buttons would make us feel like we're using a computer again, and not an overgrown phone.
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Many comments cover concerns over Win10 Slurp. So why is the media giving Microsoft a free pass? First up below is Microsoft being presented as a biometrics-privacy human-rights-abuses champion. Next, is the MSM taking pot shots at Facebook for dressing up Onavo as a VPN when its really a sneaky analytics privacy violator. Yet isn't that what Win10 is?
Its a work in progress at all the above! Ultimately we are all victims of Banksters. Its 2008 all over again, because of how big tech makes promises to Wall Street. Compare the Wall Street promises to what the Chairman thinks Microsoft does? How is this schitzoidism personality disorder escaping scrutiny vs Google / Facebook? All 3 are abusers!
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https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2018/0714/978671-microsoft-regulation/
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-16/don-t-break-up-facebook
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2917799/microsoft-windows/microsoft-fleshes-out-windows-as-a-service-revenue-strategy.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-30/if-microsoft-finds-another-linkedin-deal-chairman-is-all-in
"So why is the media giving Microsoft a free pass?"
Because, with a small number of exceptions, the tech media consists of a bunch of untrustworthy hacks who are happy to say whatever they're paid to say. Prior to the 90s, there were only a handful of tech media outlets that could be described that way. After the 90s, there are only a handful that can't.
The end of support for Windows 7 in January 2020 will be a decisive and critical driver for the long heralded rise of Linux.
As more and more people realise just how easy it is now a days to have a dual boot machine, by simply selecting that option from from nearly all the main Linux distros from their live DVD (iso) download.
When people do that, they will realise that a) they have literally nothing to lose, and have resulting in literally losing nothing of the original Windows, and b) have become aware of just how advanced Linux has become, to the point of comparing favourably with the legacy of Windows.
It will finally be up to users whether they select the existing Windows or the Linux system, each time they switch the PC on, without ever having to lose the option.
The end of support for Windows 7 in January 2020 will come and go and absolutely nobody will notice except for the tech media. Anyone still on W7 at that point will stay on it indefinitely or until their hardware dies, but that won't be a simultaneous mass event.
"The end of support for Windows 7 in January 2020 will come and go and absolutely nobody will notice except for the tech media."
It might be a repeat of the XP EOL, postponed by Microsoft coz people wouldn't budge off it. XP is still popular in lots of places.
I was surprised on Monday while I was checking out what hardware and software all the office computers, in the seniors place I volunteer at, are running. Found a Windows XP server, a Vista desktop, a 8.1 laptop, but most where Windows 7. The one outlier was the laptop they gave me to use, I had installed Linux Mint on it to replace what ever Windows version was on the HD that was half dead. The screen on that laptop is also on it's way out, I'm thinking of replacing it with a dual boot ARM based laptop, Linux (Devuan or Mint) and Android.
I told the boss that Win 7 is due to EOL in about a year and a half, he said he knows, but didn't seem worried. Would not surprise me if they stick with 7, they seem to hold Windows 10 with the same low regard that I do.
I guess few people really want the bug* that is Windows 10, but soon we won't have a choice anymore.
They've already artificially limited W7 to specific CPUs (even though it apparently worked with the OS pre-"update") and whatnot.
*bug=Covert listening device, or bug, commonly used in espionage and in police investigations.
Been using it since it became available, despite MS claiming it to be niche usage case only, we use it on *everything* - mainly due to registry & policy features not available in other versions that stop or limit slurp.
It's entirely possible to install 'apps' using Powershell to install store or just the individual bits you want / need (news and weather are the most popular). We have a lot of laptops, mainly Panasonic CF-52's running various vehicle manufacturer diagnostics and have not experienced any crash, incompatibility or installation issue. We install Classic Shell, Office 2016 & Palemoon as the default browser but have to fall back to IE11 on occasion - in every case due to compatibility issues with manufacturer training providers... Don't suggest Chrome as anything Googly is verboten, as is facebook & twatter....
WRT dual boot, I can do work & superfluous stuff in Windows, why would I choose to do work in Windows, then reboot into Linux to do the superfluous stuff just to 'stick it to the man'?
Windows10 is a mess already by itself since its first version.
Completely unusable unless you disable all the Microsoft spyware crap using 3rd party tools.
Windows10 RS1 and RS2 when all the known Microsoft spyware crap is off become usable but still full of bugs anyway with the system doing wrong things for unknown reasons all of a sudden while the same thing never happened using Windows7 SP1
But Windows 10 RS3 and RS4 are a shame. So full of bugs and a new spyware mess like never before. Microsoft is the worst.
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I have solely been using Linux for 15 years with only the odd foray into Windows once in a while but I'm starting University at the age of 50 this Sept so have gone with the flow, bought a new laptop with Win 10 on and have been very surprised.
Windows 10 with a fast processor and SSD is usable, genuinely usable, and dare I say it, I quite like it. I have been a Windows "hater" for a long while and while it'll never be my preferred OS (I dual boot Fedora and Win 10) I won't get tearful when it boots into Win 10 by mistake.
My opinion is totally ignoring the stuff forced upon me and snooping / data leakage because since I'm off to Uni I've been told to accept things as they are an concentrate on the course (so I've even joined in with Facebook et al).
With the new laptop it did take me 2 or 3 days to get Win 10 setup with all the software I wanted / updates etc etc and at the same time Fedora 28 went on and took about 1.5 hrs to do the same thing.
Over the last couple of days I've been reading the comments. Mostly the usual stuff (welcome back Bob - I was getting worried we'd have to start putting the spare CAPS into storage).
As I've thought about it I've started to wonder if Microsoft see Windows as becoming a kind of front end for a web/cloud/internet based computing system. Kind of like a global thin-client.
That'd explain things like the importance of Ondrive in their thinking, moving to a cloud based Office subscription, deprecating OneNote to a Store item and removing user control and customisation of the start menu, hiding settings/control panel etc etc.
Computing as a service, rented from Microsoft and mediated through a Windows Interface?
>" Windows Subsystem for Linux. Allowing a developer to run Bash on Windows, via an implementation of Ubuntu, was huge and a clear sign of changing of attitudes within the bowels of Redmond."
I've been using MS SFU for fifteen years. Even that was long after they built their OS to support it, and long after they adopted *nix networking.
The decision to move to their *nix subsystem to Linux binary compatibility is a clear sign of changing attitudes in the *nix community: it used to be that "portable" meant you could recompile the source to run on your platform. Now it's, finally, becoming a luser/ script kiddy product for people who don't understand computers.
Having *nix users actually noticing that Windows has a *nix subsystem is a clear sign of another change in the *nix community: with the widening user base of Linux users comes Linux users who aren't wilfully ignorant about Windows. Still, there's clearly a vast base of existing ignorance.
I've been saying since the Apple Mac operating system became BSD based that the OS wars are over, and Unix won, but no one told Microsoft. I guess I was wrong, Microsoft noticed, and are slowly becoming Unix like most every one else. They are just a little slow.
Poor Quality Assurance has killed many a large corporation, and the way Windows 10 is going could ruin Microsoft. Distributing new features and leaving old bugs unfixed is a triumph of marketing over reliability that will haunt Microsoft for years as customers leave in droves and the support team struggles to maintain an unstable and confused code base.
Unfortunately, if Microsoft crashes it could damage the world economy too.
Poor Quality Assurance has killed many a large corporation, and the way Windows 10 is going could ruin Microsoft.
While the rest of the world continues to see them as "the Windows company," MS no longer sees itself in that way, and it appears from their behavior that they are doing their best to get out of the Windows market as we've known it. Windows is just a bit player in terms of MS profits these days, and it takes a disproportionate amount of resources to eke out that profit compared to the cloud stuff, and those development resources don't scale down as sales drop. With the PC sales numbers in decline and MS showing no evidence that they have even the slimmest bit of faith in the continued utility of the platform, no doubt they have predicted a date where under the old way of making money with Windows, it would cross from being a mild profit maker to a break-even, then into loss.
With "cloud first, mobile first" Nadella, this had to be a sign that Windows as we'd known it had outlived its usefulness to the company. Either it was going to have to be monetized in a big way, or it was going to have to die. Or both!
If this was the plan, MS would have to bring their full monopoly power to bear against their customers, forcing users of previous Windows versions into the line of fire so that they can be plundered mercilessly. MS has never been shy about wanting as much money as they could possibly extract from their customer base, but this was a line they would never have crossed back when they saw Windows as the golden goose.
That was always the thing that made me wonder, ever since the early days of GWX. How can a company behave this way and expect to keep their customers? Surely they must understand that you can only push people so far before they overcome vendor lock-in and inertia and look for shelter from the abuse dished out. The only conclusion that made any sense was that they had no intention of keeping their Windows customers. The aggressive forcing of Windows 10 in order to get people onto the monetization platform, and the merciless monetization of users once they succumbed to the Windows 10 pressures, would result in significant short-term revenue gains at the eventual cost of the Windows platform as we've known it. The monetization would continue until a tipping point was reached... eventually a suitable replacement for Windows would be found (whether something Googly or a Linux distro or both, or neither), and the few early movers would become a trickle, then a torrent, and finally all of that pent-up resentment at MS would trigger a mass exodus.
At that point, MS would be free to become the cloud services company Nadella wants them to be.
I question how well this would really work. Cloud services are inherently platform-agnostic, but if it is Google that ends up being the vendor that takes over as far as the local OS maker, they will have just infuriated all of their Windows-using customers who will have just welcomed Google representatives into their premises to oversee the changeover right at that moment when trust of MS was at an all-time low... and Google is also a cloud-services provider.
MS may want to shed their "Windows company" legacy, but if they do, they also shed their primary feeder into their own cloud services. Sure, MS cloud services are making money now, and lots of it-- but from whom? Windows customers, I would think. They may not have made as much as they wanted on the front-end, but the front-end drives the back-end. Getting rid of the front-end because the back-end makes more money just seems really stupid to me.
To the computing public, MS will always be the Windows company. If Windows is seen to be in decline, people will infer that MS is in decline, even if they hear that MS profits have never been higher. There was a point that AOL profits were never higher too, yet they were already doomed, even though neither they nor the investors knew it yet. If you take away people's natural on-ramp to the cloud services world and give them the idea, however mistaken it may be, that MS is in trouble, that could be all the prompting needed to drive customers into someone else's cloud.
Time will tell, of course. Maybe I am wrong about MS wanting to kill off Windows as we have known it (as a general purpose operating system), but I can't see any other way that treating their own customers like they have makes any sense at all. If MS could have abused their customers and monetized them mercilessly to improve the bottom line and keep the Windows platform strong and vibrant, why didn't they ever do that in the Gates or Ballmer eras? Did MS have higher regard for customers before now, or did they just not like making money as much as they do now?
"I question how well this would really work. Cloud services are inherently platform-agnostic"
That is completely un(anti)true!! Do you not know that if you develop for any cloud platform (i.e "Azure") Your data AND your application logic becomes hopelessly vendor locked?? That is the whole point and ultimate goal of being a cloud vendor!
Hmmm, no. That's already changing, at least for the engineers that demand reliability, not dependent on just one vendor's product, and availability via multiple networks, data centers, and so forth. This won't be true of the largest concerns. Everyone will be seeing these as baseline requirements going forward. A really nice niche will be as a factor making all the needed arrangements (contracting) for smaller concerns for a piece of the action, just as international trade factors do now.
I've been using Windows 10 since the day after it's initial release. The problems I've experienced have been:
1. None at all.
2. See 1.
Please don't bother to tell me how "lucky" I am. I'm using the same bits as everyone else. NO broken updates, NO update interruptions (I tell Windows to perform the updates in the middle of the night when I'm sleeping), NO issues with application software, NO BSODs, a faster UI, and frankly, I couldn't care less concerning someone else's opinion of what the interface should look like. Every piece of hardware I use has worked flawlessly with Windows 10.
If the above offends you, tough.
Its so good at finding intermittent problems on machines that perfectly good units with single bit errors in the memory/CPU cache get scrapped or (most likely) sold on to unsuspecting phools as "Linux compatible".
Explains why shortly after 10 escaped (launch is hardly a fair word) many older machines ended up on Greedbay and Craigslist for a lot less than RRP.
I wouldn't say that Rowhammer was discovered purely for the purpose of enriching the pockets of memory manufacturers but the tinfoil hat is on at this point.