I’m still on 7, but I’m about to buy a new laptop and I think one of the criteria is going to be one that has 8.1.
I don’t want Cortana. I don’t want updates that install at an inconvenient time for me. I don’t want personalized ads. I don’t want cloud computing in any way, shape or form. I don’t want Microsoft to feel able to help itself to anything on my computer at any time for any reason.
If I do get stuck buying a Windows 10 computer, I suspect that I will use my install disc for 7.
This is a large number of bad apples spoiling it for everybody. There’s a lot of malware–some of it serious–being spread by components that were already patched, often months or years ago. When given the option to “install now or later,” a far-too-large number of people will choose “later” FOREVER (or turn off updates altogether), with repercussions for everyone who shares a network or Internet with them.
There’s no way to win, so the best answer seems to be “let them delay for a while, but then make it happen.” If you can come up with a better alternative, I’m sure Microsoft would love to hear about it.
I have a computer that I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 a few months ago. I don’t use Cortana. I don’t see any of the personalized ads you’re referring to. I don’t use cloud computing (although I use Mozy to back up the computer, but I was doing that before I upgraded to Windows 10). I’m not sure what you mean about Microsoft helping itself to anything on my computer. I don’t really care about the updates; I think the default time is about 3am one day a week or month.
I can’t remember the last time my computer was turned on at 3 am.
You should be putting your PC to “sleep” most of the time instead of Turning it off. That way it can wake to install updates and go back into standby.
On tech sites I visit, Windows 10 has been generally well received. However, a big issue is the huge amount and types of data that it sends back to Microsoft. Microsoft is trying to change its licencing model from a one-off payment to a service-based model (q.v. Office 365) and it’s a tricky journey. One preview build of W10 had advertisements built-in, for instance.
No, the solution is to actually prioritize making updates that don’t require restarting your computer. I can’t believe it actually got worse instead of better. AT least in in Windows 7 I occasionally saw updates that didn’t need a restart. Now they all do.
They went to so much trouble to make the OS stable enough to continue running for months at a time, but then they want a restart every couple of weeks. They expect us to shut down programs instead of leaving them open, when we’ve got all this memory to keep them open.
I realize that some updates really can’t ever be made to work without restarting. But there are plenty that could be applied in place. Those should be the priority. And there should be a push to limit those that can’t. Stop with all these incremental changes to the kernel, for instance.
I haven’t seen much hate for Windows 10, myself (though I’ve also not been actively looking). The update process had a few areas where I think it could’ve been smoother, and as someone said, the default privacy selections earned some criticism, but overall it’s been fine (I came from Windows 7).
I think Windows 8 tried to be too many things and didn’t serve the desktop realm as nicely as it could have. On tablets and such, it seemed to work better, but I’m perfectly fine with the transition to 10 and don’t see a huge departure from 7.
All in all, I’ve had very minor issues and a generally good experience.
Good point. We definitely did seem to be moving away from the restarts at one point, but now its back for nearly everything.
A well-designed, layered, modular OS really should hardly ever need a full restart of the machine. Windows isn’t exactly that OS, but I think the current restart regime is probably just lazy.
Some are sideways. There doesn’t appear to be a rhyme or reason. It’s just how they’re displayed and doesn’t alter the actual picture. I work with pics quite a lot and it’s annoying.
Windows 10 has several nasty gotchas
With all that said, did you like Windows 7? Windows 10 is like that but slightly better. The various integral OS features are a little slicker, a little cleaner feeling, with much better looking visuals. I haven’t noticed any productivity difference, really - faster boot times and slicker search is negated by driver compatibility problems with older development tools. Basically a wash.
…Are these people completely fucking high? Like, every single time I see something like this I shake my head and laugh, but this seems even more retarded than usual. Or maybe it’s just because I actually care about technology, as opposed to, yanno, people. Either way, this article is just absolutely stunning for me. Really? “We’re going to oppose this great technological advancement because it seems a Little like Communism”?! I’m just completely at a loss here.
They won’t give up on the tiles thing, it is hard to find so many things, default settings use your Internet connection to share updates with other Windows users, default settings have a lot of privacy concerns, default color customization options are worse than Win7 or WinXP. I worked on one machine that insists on having a black task bar with dark gray text.
But it is fast and stable, and better than Vista or 8. Not better than 7.
The forced updates have been a surprising sticking point with me. My husband upgraded his laptop and is on a home edition of Windows 10. Friday night, we want to watch something off the laptop and as soon as he turns it on to do so - booong, it’s time to update! You put it off once so we’re doing it now! Oh, well, I guess we’ll wait to watch things, then. The worst thing is it takes time to realize this so we’re already 3 minutes into whatever we wanted to see and THEN it pops up with an un-delay-able prompt. And it keeps happening even if we try to change the scheduled time because we have no schedule where we know we’ll never be doing anything at X o’clock but also remember to have it on.
And personally, apparently they don’t care about Surface Pro 2 support since it’s more than a year old now, even though it’s their own hardware. If I upgraded to Win10 there’d be display driver issues and I can’t deal with that. I need my computer working 100%. It’s been a known issue to them for months and no fix. At this rate, I wouldn’t even trust the fix so my Surface Pro 2 will probably never leave Win8.1. Which is fine anyway, it works great for me. It just feels weird to not upgrade on purpose.