Microsoft Germany says Windows 7 already unfit for business users
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
GWX control panel to prevent windows 10 installing over your windows 7: http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/ O&O ShutUp10 to try and regain privacy in win 10: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Win 10 reports to Microsoft corp what programs you run, when and for how long by default. Reports other data on what you do with your computer (they call spying telemetry) Nearly impossible to turn off, and they keep turning it back on with updates. And your computer is going to need rebooted often with updates, so hope you weren't working on anything too important that you needed to save before reboot.
This man says it better: https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-10-sucks.html
For large companies, I think Windows 10 could actually be really nice and efficient to use. It's faster and has some important new features (the new task manager is way better, especially for developers). It's just the retail version which includes a lot of garbage to compensate for the lower revenue.
If they would earn their money, and make actual useful innnovation, instead of being beat at their own UI game by third parties, like windows management, and keyboard macros etc etc, then 10 would be awesome. Hell even windows 10 task manager is crapper than the third party alternatives.
Sorry misread the comment. Never looked into any 3rd party software to do this.
> now what about 1/3 of screen so I can use this 55" 4k monitor properly
That sounds like a harsh thing to bash Windows 10 about but hey what ever floats your boat. If its 3 Windows of the same program Then you can use "show windows side by side" and while it might not "snap" how you want have a look at AquaSnap to help better manage your Windows. Single License is $13 but comes with a free trial to give it a try first. There is prob a OSS alt, but I've not looked.
https://support.office.com/en-GB/article/Turn-off-or-uninsta...
You can turn off in atleast Pro (never tested them in Home, but if GPE is disabled in home, these changes be done in the registry But you are going to have to make a note of what changes you make.)
Auto Restart: GPE -> Computer Config -> Admin Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update -> "No Auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled auto updates...". You might want to look at the other options in there as there might be other things you might wish to turn on/off.
One Drive: GPE -> Computer Config -> Admin Templates -> Windows Components -> OneDrive -> prevent the use of OneDrive for file storage.
You can remove all of the Windows apps with a powershell script, and then you just have to shove a modified start menu layout in the default profile before capping the wim file to roll out your installs from.
Trying to keep that "one Windows for everybody" idea going is hurting them.
I don't like the "reclaim your privacy" windows 10 apps simply because the ones I've used have made a hash of it. Maybe he one you linked to is better but I've always felt better doing these changes myself so I know what changes to undo later if they break something.
After using one such tool some months later, I wanted to use the Fast Windows Insider build to get Bash for Windows but one of the privacy options remained set and I manually had to do though every one to find the one that didn't unset. Also had friends have update issues as some of these tools black holes MS update servers.
You can turn off most of the telemetry in home/pro but if you want to turn off all the telemetry upgrade to enterprise edition.
Never had the options turn completely back on with updates. What I have had if I run Insider builds then from build to build some settings can be reset as they are basically fresh installs on top of your existing install. But never had options change from normal updates.
As for the reboot thing the default is a pain in the arse. But it's an option that can. E turned off in group policies (can't remember if you can do it outside of GPE as I make most of the changes I need at the same time in GPE)
So you didn't try it.
> but I've always felt
Stop feeling, do some testing instead.
O&O Shutup even suggests doing a system restore point before doing any changes and its settings can be restored easy.
Maybe I should of said: "I believe setting the options yourself so you know what options you have set" would be better? The "feeling" was more to the fact that if you make the changes yourself you will get to know your machine configuration better.
I expect MS to abide by the law and respect the privacy settings set in my Windows install just as I expect every other OS/Distro to do the same.
But the trade-off is that Windows 10 is a fantastic desktop operating system for most users. I also wish that there were a better alternative. But Linux is a nonstarter for most people, and macOS has all of the privacy issues of Windows with a UI that is stuck in the year 2006. This leaves you with the only other option being Windows 7, who's end of life is near and is full of security holes at this point. The choice is pretty clear I think.
I'm curious why is Linux nonstarter? It starts faster than Windows and easier to manage updates and install software. Also as far as I'm aware Apple isn't in the advertisement business so the privacy issues are not the same.
Anyway, there are plenty of reasons that people don't use Linux and you can find a lot of them with this search term - https://www.google.com/search?q=why+don%27t+people+use+linux
If you need convincing that next to nobody runs Linux on their desktop, you can read about that here - https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+desktop+market+share
Do you think I should have summarized all of the search results instead of just linking them?
What in fact is so meaningless about responding in this way?
Do you really think the question posed was so insightful and hitherto unanswered that we should all spend time considering it deeply here in this thread?
Honestly I find it extremely insulting that, in every thread about Windows, there are twelve or so people here who come here simply to wonder out loud why nobody uses their favorite non-Windows operating system or to extol it's supremacy (and how could anybody else possibly ever think otherwise??). That's crap.
Because as soon as an average person can't install Microsoft Word they get frustrated and give up. I wish it wasn't the case but every single non technical person I have tried to push Linux to has had zero interest.
Oh, give it a break dude. What's your favorite OS? They all suck in many, many ways.
I've been using Windows 10 since it was released and I think it's the least suckiest OS that can be had right now.
I develop Cordova apps with no problems. I create .NET software, no problems. When I'm done I go over to my couch where I have a Windows 10 PC plugged into my TV and I play Rocket League, watch Netflix, browse YouTube, etc etc etc...
And then somebody like you comes along who can't seem to make it work.
So I guess let's have your list. What exactly do you think is broken?
- my computer wakes up randomly around 1am, every single night. I've tried troubleshooting the issue for months, and there doesn't seem to be a cure. I've disabled the ability of devices to wake up the computer, I've disabled the wake up packets, I've disabled wake up timers, I've even disabled windows updates completely. In the final act of desperation, I went back to Windows 7 - no issues. As soon as I upgraded to Windows 10, computer wakes up every night. powercfg -lastwake just shows that the computer has woken up because of "unknown source".
- Dragging windows between different monitors is a joke - if you hold your cursor in one corner of the window, when you move it to another monitor, it's a lottery where it will be. Maybe the cursor will be on bottom right corner, maybe it will be in the middle, maybe it will be off the window entirely, who knows.
- I had an "Epson Scan" application to use my scanner. Except that one day I switched on my computer, and it was gone. I found out that windows deleted it completely, because it "wasn't compatible with Windows 10". Except that it never told me that it did that, and the application works perfectly fine. I was in a hurry as well, and I spent 30 minutes scratching my head wondering where the app went.
- Network stops working from time to time - just shows me "there's an error with the network device" and only a reboot fixes it. That's with an Intel I217-V network card which is supported by Windows 10.
- The start menu is a mess - I've had several things pinned to it, then after an update they went all over the place, and had ads interleaved with them. Ended up paying for Start10 in the end.
- Speaking of Start Menu - in Windows 7, you could click on start, then start searching instantly, and also get results pretty much instantly. Windows 10 - you click start, then wait for stupid cortana to load which takes several seconds, then you search, and then you have to wait again. Much slower than windows 7.
- Photo viewer stopped working completely one day. I use it to browse photo files every day, and then one day I got an "internal system error" when trying to open it. After searching the web for the message I gave up on trying to fix it - it still doesn't work to this day, I had to switch back to the old Windows 7 photo viewer.
- Usability is attrocious. The "show" desktop button is literally 2 pixels wide, and there's no way to make it wider. Dragging windows near the top of the screen automatically pins them to that monitor, so you can't move the window to a different monitor anymore - you have to let go, and try again. You also need to do it quickly enough to make sure it doesn't snap to the edge of the screen or you will have to do the whole process again since you lose the ability to move to different monitor at that point. You could disable this behaviour in Windows 8.1, but you can't in 10.
- Minor nitpicks: File explorer decides randomly I think, which devices to show on the left - it has my drive C and E, despite the fact that I use my drive D all the time, and almost never open E. Removable devices sometimes appear on the left, sometimes they don't, it's a lottery. In network manager, when you move the cursor next to a network device, first it gets a faint blue outline, then a dark blue outline, but they don't overlap. What are they for? The first one doesn't do anything, it's not even a selection outline. It just looks amateurish and doesn't add anything.
- You can disable tracking, and it will just come back after an update or two. I'm 100% sure that one is actually illegal.
- Webcam is not detected in Windows 10, unless I unplug it and plug it back in, works perfectly fine on the same machine on Windows 7. That's probably a driver problem, but I frankly don't care.
The waking up probably comes from the automatic maintenance (it should start around that time) which you can disable.
Cortana is annoying, so I just deactivated it on my pc, after that the search is as fast as it was on Windows 7
Nobody ever used the show desktop button, I'm quite sure Microsoft forget it exists ;) go for Windows+D
You can disable the snapping, one of the few things I ever did in the registry because it's just awful when you use multiple monitors.
I use a script which disables all the tracking stuff, just let it run once a day and you are fine.
I never saw any of the other things happening but I have quite a few other bugs myself, like a taskbar which crashes on every reboot, meaning i have to restart the explorer process. But still, all in all Windows is running OK-ish on an absolute level if i compare it to e.g. Ubuntu on my Laptop, where it would shut down because the cpu got too hot, you could not change the resolution, the monitor lost it's signal from time to time, etc. and yet it seems to work perfectly fine on my pc. So I have to agree with WayneBro, no matter what your favourite OS is, they all kinda suck.
Just today I was working on my Mac Pro and after waking it up for like the fifth time to run my app in Xcode, my USB mouse stopped working. As a matter fact no mouse that I plugged into it would work. Turns out I had to restart the machine and reset the SMC by holding a special keyboard combination.
That's the kind of problem that I constantly get on a Mac. The kind of stuff that doesn't go away, there is no fix for it. All the Windows stuff you mentioned can be fixed one way or another permanently. I won't bore you with a huge list of my own gripes but honestly everything is fixable and I don't know why people single at Windows at all.
Before my current computer I was purely a Mac user. These days I run into more issues on my MBP than my SB.
While I myself tend to complain a lot about Windows, I have to admit that I almost never take the time to dive in and really fix the problems. So in absolute numbers I do absolutely spend more time fixing any other OS than Windows but I probably complain about it the most.
Well, this is a trick that works well. People get to invest their personal effort and time into something and that investment becomes part of their identity. On that point, feeling attached, one will be less likely to criticize and will be more likely to defend instead the object of own investment. I come to believe that it wouldn't be that far-fetched for such hoops to be deliberately ignored for acting as such a handy rite of passage equipment that creates and maintains the *nix communities.