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Comment by blauditore | Hacker News Reader

While you may be right, it's also a good thing for most Windows users, even if they don't see it. Windows 10 is actually a better OS than Windows 7 in so many ways, for power and casual users. Most (causal) users would probably never upgrade and thus miss out on new features and security updates.

After using W10 for a while now, I've recently been working in a W7 environment again, and it's terrible. There are many little details that have been improved from 7 to 10, and they add up, making the once-so-great 7 feel like Vista or XP.

(No, I'm not paid by Microsoft, this is my real opinion. :P)

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Yes, it's especially good when it kicks you out of the Internet connection, decides to restart your laptop while you're rendering a video, or you're in the middle of a livestream, or you're giving a presentation, and let us not even forget the whole "Something Happened" error [0] during the automatic upgrade to Windows 10.

The thing that marked my Windows journey as over was exactly this: an automatic upgrade...

...while I had people waiting for me to give a presentation.

And it lasted for longer than 20 minutes, at which point, I had to force shut down my computer (which of course, broke the Windows install), boot into the Linux distro I was dual booting, mount the Windows partition from there as read only (because starting from Windows 8, "shutdown" doesn't mean "dismount the partitions" in the Windows world), find the presentation and open it in LibreOffice. And the presentation went as smoothly as it could!

From that point on, I'm completely Windows-free.

So yeah, you can say that forced updates are a good thing, but once they interrupt you while you're doing something important, you probably will not want to touch Windows ever again.

0 - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

I definitely have my issues with it as well, but if you have Pro you can customize quite a few update options in Group Policy Editor, and even if you're on Home you can at least set "Active hours" to when you're using your computer so that it updates outside of that. Unfortunately it's limited on an amount of hours, so still kind of forced, but I've learned to accept it.

Forced reboot can be completely disabled (current uptime here is 75 days). Perhaps I tried other things earlier, but this is what finally resolved it for me:

https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...

Not that I need my computer up for more than a day or two at a time, but that does sound excellent, thanks for the link!

Some of those GPE tricks stopped working in the Anniversary Update. Any remaining ones may follow in future updates.

Disabling the Windows Update service and only enabling it when knowingly wanting to install an update (or Store application) has worked ever since XP, and is unlikely to ever cease working.

> unlikely to ever cease working.

I remember people saying that about the GPE methods a few months ago...

Last time I checked, the "Active hours" setting rudely informed me that I spend too much time in front of my PC. Said hours can't span more than 8h, or something like that.

You can disable automatic updates by marking your internet connection as "metered". Works for wired connections as well as wireless but you need to use the registry editor for wired ones.

While this might work, it's a dirty hack that really, really shouldn't be necessary.

Why should I know such weird tricks to be able to use my laptop to give a damn presentation?

Anyway, it's about two years too late to give me any recommendations about Windows. I couldn't be happier without it.

But when people say that automatic updates are a good thing, I have to intervene and call it bullshit.

I'm pretty sure that windows won't install s if you enable presentation mode.

Automatic updates are a good thing for the others that won't get infected or DDOSed by you, and a bad thing for yourself if the update breaks. It's probably net positive from a strictly utilitarian POV, but not from an individual POV.

The correct way to do network security in any OS is to block every programs from connect to internet unless explicitly allow by users.

It should also notify user a new/unknown program is attempted to connect to internet and allow user option to allow/block. Not the way it does now where every programs are allowed by default. However, that will be in conflict with the new biz model of win10 which is convert itself into a big Ad machine like Google/Android.

BTW, in my win10 configuration, I only allow Firefox, Chrome and Window Defender to connect to internet with Window Firewall. It works well, stable, reasonably fast and long uptime.

Best of all : No more force update from Windows.

Except that: 1. It is my computer, so it should serve my interests. 2. Linux doesn't have automatic updates, and it doesn't seem to get bot netted as much. 3. People would be less resistant to updating on their own if the updates worked.

Big client presentation, halfway through: Bam! Forced upgrade, then 'Something happened'. Welcome to Windows 10.

Pause the presentation, get out my MacBook and continue while cursing the Gods of timing, the computer, and everyone involved who thought that they knew better than the person actually trying to use the damn thing.

...you can schedule updates.

There are many small improvements in W10 with respect to W7, but there are also many things that are much worse.

It's a privacy nightmare, which takes substantial effort to address.

It now forces shutdown for automatic updates in various circumstances, including throwing away your session while in standby, which can be extremely inconvenient.

Settings are now split between the simplified "Settings" app, which has many options missing, and the old Control Panel.

And of course, solitaire is now an ad ridden resource hogging piece of shit that you have to install from the windows store, instead of the perfectly adequate version that existed in W7. (Not really important, but representative.)

We have one windows laptop for banking reasons. It is not a performance beast by any means. But whenever we want to do any banking we spend an hour waiting for the upgrade dance to complete. That is not a real problem, but the fact that you can't do anything with it while it is upgrading is!

To much time is spend in the update while nothing else is possible. One update after the other. The amount of work done by the update procedures while holding an exclusive lock on the whole PC is deranged.

The problem is that there's some sort of conservation-of-awesomeness law in play for Windows releases. Every improvement Microsoft makes to the core OS must be balanced by the addition of spyware, Modern UI, "Update your PC now (Y/N) [No] Assuming yes..." and other insanity.

Just give us the good stuff without the crap! Is that so hard?

Yeah, I have the impression that MS often rolls out new stuff too early, causing it to be unstable or disliked by users. I really wonder why they're doing this, considering how huge the user base of a product like windows is, and thus what the consequences are.

But to be fair, also great stuff emerges out of this. For instance, I really liked flat UI when they introduced it, and a few years later other large companies adopted it too.

There are many annoyance to a power user in Windows 10, but there is one that should put off even a casual user: the frequently unresponsive start menu.

Start8 and 10 by StarDock have been the best 5€ spent on Windows software.

I used to have that issue - but I block SearchUI / Cortana from making any TCP connections to the net with Windows Firewall.

The start menu is supper fast and search is actually usable for me now.

Yeah, I've come back to my win10 box having rebooted itself when I have had documents open. Win7 never did that.

Also, win10 can't be skinned (colours yes, design no) - I actually liked the old 'glass plate' look and tried to find themes online. Nope, sucks to be me. Stupid flat design has to be preserved.

Then there's all the phone-home stuff spread around that you need to disable.

I miss my old Win7 box - it Just Worked™.

Invasive update rebooting has been a thing by default since XP SP2, it however used to be the case the override switch to disable it was less well-hidden.

Similarly, by the way, no Windows version had supported custom theming since XP - if you wanted the XP themes back on Vista/7, you were SOL too.

Also, telemetry has been a thing since at least Vista, and any version since (including 10) let you disable most or all of it as a choice during installation.

The update reboot thing in win7 could at least be continuously postponed for 4 hours at a time, instead of 'now or in 15 minutes, that's it'. I'd also never come back to a update-force-rebooted PC on six years of win7, whereas I have several times in the 11 months I have had win10. Win10 is qualitatively worse in this area, even if the same tickbox exists on both versions.

Fair point on the theming, but the telemetry thing is much more pervasive in 10 than in 7.

I miss my Win NT 4 box the entire OS ran in under 100mb iirc and it performed very well on a range of hardware.

But most of all I miss Windows 2000 where the Win9x UI met the Win NT kernel. It had some annoyances (Find tool used to be fast and not require indexing to find by name - that went away in 2000 and never came back) but it was relatively lightweight. It supported the graphics card, USB devices,and applications that I used. Most importantly it didn't do a bunch of shit without telling me.

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