Ridding the world of EEEvillll [Windows 10]

In My Humble Opinion
41

The best advice is to try to keep your OS updated and patched as rigorously as possible (that doesn’t necessarily mean upgrading, until patching support is withdrawn for the version you’re on).

Unfortunately, like (or perhaps more so than) everything else, things sometimes break. The risk of running an unpatched OS needs to be weighed against the risks of breaking it during patching.

The fact that the blame will be apportioned differently for each of these risk outcomes doesn’t help, and neither does it help that the statistical size of either outcome is no comfort to the individual victim.
And the reality that if you do one of these things, you see less of the outcomes of the other, leading to complaints like “Why did I need to patch? All it did was break my webcam!”

In my experience, dealing with webcam driver that was broken by an update is typically very much less painful than dealing with a malware outbreak that took root because of relaxed patching. YMMV

42

IME, I prefer Windows 10 over any previous version. Yes, there’s a few changes they made that I don’t like, and there’s a few changes to the UI that took a bit of getting used to, but that’s just part of the game. The main thing I like about it is that it is noticeably faster than Windows 7. When I upgraded my previous system from Windows 7 to Windows 10, it booted in less than half the time, and after I fixed a couple minor driver issues, I even got significant frame rate improvements in games too. If it were just a balance of UI improvements I like vs ones I don’t, given some of the monitoring and patch changes, I’d probably have preferred 7, but the speed definitely makes up for it. But if you don’t notice or need the performance improvement, I can’t really blame someone too much for sticking on 7, other than that they missed the free upgrade that they’ll eventually have to pay for.

Other than that, I don’t think anyone would reasonably try to say it isn’t clearly superior to Windows 8 or Vista. I’d learned to tolerate Vista, since I had it at work for so long. And even though 8 was better than Vista, I hated it compared to 7.

As for XP, yes, it was really nice at it’s time, but Windows 7 (and Windows 10) are just strictly better. Everyone I know who’s said that (yeah, anecdotal, but I work in technology, so I have a lot of exposure) was pretty much someone who hated the idea of learning a new technology, even though I think the learning curve to Windows 7 or 10 is pretty minor. Every single time, even when it’s almost universally said to be better (like XP when it was new or 7 when it was), there’s always someone saying how much better the old one was. In a previous job, I’d started not too long after they’d finished migrating to XP, and I constantly heard people saying how much they prefered windows 2000 or NT. And the same goes for their server versions too, and those have pretty much always been the case where the newest is better than the last (though I do HATE the metro UI on 2012, the underlying OS features outweigh that).

I’m not one to say get on the bandwagon, but particularly when it comes to technology, if you’re clinging onto stuff from 5-10 years ago, especially against the general consensus of people who work with that stuff, you probably need to let go. And the older it is, generally the better your reason for clinging has to be. At this point, the only “good” reasons I can think of for XP is that some software someone needs isn’t compatible with newer OSs, though that’s generally more just admitting that they haven’t upgraded or looked for alternatives in the last decade. But hey, expecting a government employee to upgrade their system more than once every 20 years is sometimes asking a lot, apparently. And, yeah, that last one isn’t an exaggeration, they HAD to use XP because it was able to emulate 16-bit mode, because it had been THAT long since the code base had been touched, and their argument was that 15k lines is just TOO much to revisit (which it most certainly isn’t, that’s really not very big at all).

43

Were they in the habit of leaving unsaved documents open overnight? I don’t see how else Windows Update could make you lose work.

44

If it’s a wifi connection, you can set it as a “metered connection”. Windows will not do updates over metered connections.

Of course the assumption is that you have at least one non-metered connection (or a wired connection, which can’t be set as metered) which you periodically connect to. I’m not sure what would happen if you only ever use metered networks.

45

My anniversary update came when I was on vacation and I didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with it. There was vacationing to do! I was pretty annoyed because it reset all of my settings. When I got home I realized that I before I left home, I had set a restore point (I don’t remember doing it, but I think I was worried about interacting with alien wifi) and was able to go back to my previous settings. It’s the only issued I’ve ever had with it in since the original upgrade from 8 to 10.

46

Yeah, regular patching/security updates are definitely important. Nobody sane just lets their OS just languish without any updates or patches.

From what I can tell, the big gripes with the way Windows 10 has done their patching is that it doesn’t let you choose which patches you can apply, nor when. Plenty of people may want to schedule a big patch for when they’re going to be handy for an extended period, like over a weekend, not on a Monday evening. Or they may want to have it download overnight, not during the day, or whatever. Or they may want to stagger the downloads over a period of time to avoid blowing through data limits.

My thinking is that even though I keep my system rigorously patched and maintained, there’s nothing about Windows 10 that really screams that I must upgrade. I have a desktop PC, have no interest in Cortana, and I reboot as infrequently as I can, and after-hours anyway. So Win 10 doesn’t buy me much. I figure I’ll end up moving to it whenever I next get a major hardware update and have to reinstall Windows, but for the current incarnation of my “Ship of Theseus” computer, I’ll stay on Windows 7.

47

I agree. This is Microsoft’s heavy-handed reaction to the problem you mentioned in your first paragraph - not all users ***are ***sane about patching - the trouble is that given the choice, many users will answer "never’ to the question “when can we update your computer” - and that leads to outcomes that Microsoft also gets criticised for (e.g. “OMG Malware is rife, why can’t MS make a secure OS?!”).

48

I installed a printer in Win 10 this morning. I don’t like the cell phone interface, but once I find where things are, it isn’t much different from 7.

49

Yeah, I don’t feel like the new settings and system apps have the same gravity as the old style ones, but they do the job.

I guess the transition was easier because I’ve already had to traverse something similar previously when upgrading from Exchange 2007 to 2013 - it used to be an application, now it’s a web page.

50

You can schedule restarts and also set it so it does updates at a time of your choosing.

51

What is this about advertisements in games?

Reminds me of that Gunsmoke joke, “She is the only one in town.”

52

Personally, now that they’re saying that Win 10 is the “last version” of Windows, I wish that Microsoft would go more down a more Unix/Linux style path, and develop multiple desktop environments that users could choose between. Otherwise what I fear is going to happen is that they’re going to periodically hijack people’s systems and change their desktop environments all around as part of a planned “update”, and just piss people off monumentally for no good reason.

I mean, if someone really loves the Win 8 interface for some reason, they could use it. Or if they’re old farts like me, they can stick with something XP/Win-7ish if they so choose. Or even a single-button Mac/Apple style environment if someone really wants that.