Ghost of Windows past spotted haunting Yorkshire railway station It is said that we can never truly escape our past. And there are few companies where this is truer than Clippyzilla itself, Microsoft. Behold a relic of Windows supposedly gone still hanging on in the fine Yorkshire town of Selby. The Armagard digital signage mounted on the wall of the Selby railway station speaks of happier …
I'm not typing this on a laptop running Windows 7 because our IT department is too inept to properly roll out Windows 10 without borking everything up. Nope. They didn't try to start the roll-out just 4 weeks prior to support officially ending (the last, really we're ending it NOW, ending) either. Just imagined that.
Are you having a larf. Downgraded more like if some of the [cough][cough] corporate builds I've encountered is anything to go by.
I did throw my toys out of the pram when my laptop was upgraded without me having the chance to 1) say no, 2) say 'not today' or 3) come back next year.
After a week of intermiable visits to the IT Manager responsible, he finally admitted that the corporate build was unusable by developers. I got the developer tools installed but would they run? like heck they would. There was a reason that we had local admin privs with W7. Corporate Policy dictated that no one outside the IT dept was to have those rights. Eventually they relented but it was too late. The damage was done and I left four weeks later.
The company went fatally TITSUP less than a year later after being taken over by some Vulture Capitalists.
>I did throw my toys out of the pram when my laptop was upgraded without me having the chance to 1) say no, 2) say 'not today' or 3) come back next year.
Lol... After the same crap, i tried the simple task of resizing an image on my newly mangled win 10 laptop this morning. The pop up window had a width and a height field and a"maintain aspect ratio" checkbox which I checked. I typed 100 into the width field and the height field came up with NaN. Tried 100 in the height field and the width field changed to NaN. Gave up. Does no one at MS check code anymore?
Also my laptop seems to have caught a dose of Vista and gives me a pop up nearly everytime i do something... Aarrgghh
Why not simply patch with Opatch? The yearly fee is very reasonable, and it also patches over 600 applications on the PC, if they are present. I've been using it for some time now, and haven't been pwned yet! I'm not a shill for Opatch, just a Windows 10 hater. I have to fix all my clients problems with Win 10, and can't get them to go back to 7, which for some reason they liked, but are fixated with the "latest and greatest" Windows OS.
Oh, well, at least 10 is more secure; but at what cost? Every feature update borks the entire device and makes it unusable. I've even had people who bought a new machine, just so the latest update would work, when they already had a machine that was only 2 years old. Talk about masochism!
My old laptop died a while back, so for home use I bought a micro desktop with some home usr incarnation of WX pre installed.
Whe I first fired it up, it took me a good forty minutes after the initial forty minutes of self updating, to make the thing into a semblance of a 'normal' OS.
Deleting preinstalled apps that were good for nothing and trying to find things like the control panel and the now almost useless task manager, etc, etc, etc
And don't talk to ke about the dross that comes with any patch doomsday.
I can't speak for all IT Admins, but maybe they - like me - were hoping Microsoft would extend it a little further.
Again, I can't speak for all institutions but mine is full of old computers that just won't run Windows 10 properly.
Of beancounters who see a working computer and think "that works - no need to replace".
Of budgets that shrink year on year. So as much as I'd like to upgrade, I can't until the equipment is capable.
An institution that comprises of just me in IT support managing hundreds of users and hundreds of computers.
If you want to blame someone for "borking everything up", then blame Microsoft for making 10 too different to 7 to make the transition smooth.
well , my I.T dept must be doing something right. I havent had any trouble with windows 10 apart from the stupid interface , but once i got a few shortcuts on the start manu ,
its pretty transparent ie i dont see the os , i just start vis studio and ssms and get on with my day.
win-R is very handy , all the old stuff you'put in there is still the same
Given the Rejects of Redmond's inability to reliable patch Bloat 10, making Patch Tuesday nothing more than a game of Russian Roulette with the box, is one better off running Bloat 7 even though it is unsupported. Either way you are taking significant risks with the OS, either you get hit by ransomware or you get your files wiped out or box borked by the Rejects.
I don't know where it is chiselled in stone that "You have to upgrade your software at all times OR ELSE". This is obviously the thing for desktop computers, epsecially if you like a bit of a game of chance, embedded systems run by a different set of rules, the most important being "If it works don't mess with it". Despite what the IoT evangelists tell you its not considered good practice to dangle appliances on the Wild Web -- there's too many probers, too many script kiddies and what-have-you to spend your life playing whack-a-mole with them. If they're networked at all they should be communicating with a local control server with the rest of the communicating capabilites sufficiently buttoned up that nobody can get in -- and just as important -- no process can get out.
A lot of the kit that's made has to go through a fairly extensive and involved test and ceritification cycle. This takes for ever and is fundamentally incompatible with the Agile way of doing things (which looks more like the "Spray the stuff at the barn wall and see what sticks" school of programming). The Windows release cycles and test methodology are too hasty and slapdash to trust anything to -- OK, an information board isn't going to do any harm if it malfunctions but what if that system is running the positioning and scanning equipment of an Open CAT scan device (a half-ton of machinery whizzing around next to your fragile body.....). The upgrade cycle could literally take years so there's a need for a stable release, one that might not have the latest tricks in drag 'n drop or fashion in icon design, just something that people can rely on.
Personally, I wouldn't use Windows for any critical application. But 'I' don't get that choice. Real programmers build castles in the air so they love the freedom Microsoft gives them to make wonders out of trivia -- and they can always point the finger elsewhere when everything goes belly up.
Maybe I'll give the right flavor a spin sometime. I don't know if I have a computer old enough that they support it to have it run stably, though.
I kid you not. Latest version of Mint going on a 6 year old laptop? Installed and ran fine. Current gaming machine with a spare HD so W10 and Linux couldn't see each other and have a fight over who got to control the boot process (which is stupid anyway, the BIOS should get to control that)? Failed 5 out of 5 install attempts for various reasons.
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