They're obviously playing on the majority of users' ignorance. This is despicable.
MS have always been known for producing poor quality software, but they'd never been actively untrustworthy and hostile to the end-user... that completely changed with Windows 10
2.5 years later and I don't feel as if I've lost anything, I guess it was the push I finally needed to dump Windows forever
The core thing imho is: the software quality has gone up
- security - just remember Win9x which didn't even have security as a concept and exploit-ridden WinXP
- native Linux subsystem, ssh server
- decent shell if you care enough to learn Powershell
- a well set up AD/Exchange is blowing away all FOSS comparables due to the insane level of integration - it all feels like it's cut out of the same block, from an admin POV
What has gone downhill is the lengths of where MS decided to go to earn money. The market for selling an OS just isn't as huge as before - Apple provides OS upgrades for free since 2013, Linux was free the whole time and Googles Chromebooks don't need any major OS as they're essentially Chrome-in-a-box - and selling Office also went downhill since the competition in form of Google Docs and Libre/OpenOffice became actually usable even for corp and government environments. In addition, revenue from Bing fell through the roof because Googles dominance keeps growing and growing.
The direct consequence is that MS must keep earning money somehow: corps and governments will continue to be the biggest buyers (but the numbers are set to fall, given the rise of Apple but also the trend towards Linux in governments), but ordinary people? MS has to compete with Apple and Google's "free", and so has to subsidize with ads and boatloads of tracking.
Anyway I've gone off the rails a bit - what MS, or rather, power users, desperately need is Win 10 LTSB actually available for sale and not just for embedded stuff. Plain good old Windows Classic UI, no ads, no "magically appearing" "features"... aka Windows 7, only with optional features like the Linux subsystem.
did we read the same article?
there is no security as it's not your machine, it is under Microsoft's control and now they've been caught installing unwanted crapware with 16 month old vulnerabilities
(not to mention the OS is infested with undisablable adware, spyware and other unwanted uninstallable applications)
lip service to developers (bundled openssh et al.) doesn't hide that the core of the company is now demonstrably rotten
> (not to mention the OS is infested with undisablable adware, spyware and other unwanted uninstallable applications)
This is why I advocate for something like W10 LTSB - free of the experiments, but paid. If I had the option to switch to paid and only get security updates but no "features", I'd do so in an instant. I don't want to be forced to trade privacy for being able to use the OS.
Can you please provide at least a few citations? I've run ShutUp10 after the installs and upgrades and I don't recall seeing much of anything of what you report.
I've been meaning to ditch Windows (again) for a while and this is the final straw.
I'm picturing a very upset buccaneer.
I think this might be an indicator of a larger trend that's at its tipping point.
... then they go back to telling you "I've never had a problem with it."
I use Windows 10. I support it professionally. The underlying system is good. And then someone at Microsoft decided to completely fill all of those kernel upgrades, with a gigantic pile of spyware, adware, and useless crap. (4 GB+ of Windows Store videogames?!)
One of my laptops is a "windows 10 ready" work laptop with a 5400 RPM hard drive. Between defender, indexing, telemetry, and app compatibility scans, it takes over 60 seconds to get to desktop. If you load the task manager, the disk usage is 100% for hours. And any time Windows decides to install or compile something (without warning or even a notification, like rebuilding .NET) the entire computer becomes a useless brick. I used to be able to make the machine functional by turning off unnecessary, bloated services like Defender and Telemetry. Except every Windows Creators update they not only reset my settings, its disable Classic Shell, UNINSTALLS Core Temp and a WindowsGadgets re-enabling tool because they're "not compatible" (even though they work fine), and... they change the menus so that it's harder to find the button to disable Defender, and they make it harder (if not impossible) through Group Policy changes to disable those very same, taxing, services.
Try this: Install Windows 10, upgraded from 7/8/old-10. See Windows.old on your C:\? That's your old windows copy. Try to delete it. After all, it's useless right?--and takes over 20GB. Nope. Sorry. You don't have permission to delete it. That's right. Your own hard drive you don't have permission to touch. And, laughably, Windows will tell me "You're running out of HDD space, want to delete the old folder?", I say "Yes." Then nothing happens and the message appears again.
I tried taking "ownership", used admin account, I tried changing permissions. Nothing. A professional windows IT support employee should not have to look up countless articles TO DELETE A FREAKING DIRECTORY. Even after I took "complete" ownership of all that, many files still didn't set, and I couldn't delete the whole thing.
I'm half tempted to boot into a Linux Live USB and delete it by force. But then I realize, "I'm going to download an ISO for another OS, burn it to a USB, then shut down my machine and reboot it... JUST TO DELETE A FOLDER?!"
Oh, and this is Enterprise edition. So I'm running the edition that everyone says "if you care about tuning Windows, you should have already bought Enterprise." Thanks for that lie.
Load the performance monitor (button on the Performance tab in task manager), go to Disk and see what process is doing it. You may have something like full disk indexing going.
Regarding Windows.old,isn't that supposed to auto - clear after ~30 days? Also, the first two articles on a search for "remove windows.old" appear to confirm my expectation that the disk cleanup tool will remove it, possibly without even running it as administrator. Frankly this sounds like it's getting into "respect mah authoritah" territory.
For the games, are those preinstalled? I haven't seen such, but most of the Win10 systems in dealing with so far are either upgrades or business class machines. If you're getting Enterprise systems preinstalled with 4gb of games someone needs to talk to your supplier.
App telemetry, defender, compatibilty, etc.
>Frankly this sounds like it's getting into "respect mah authoritah" territory.
Yeah, it must really suck to have the burden of being able to delete files that aren't in use on your machine that you own, run, and paid Enterprise edition for.
What possible use could a professional system administrator need for changing files on a machine... except the exact use I just mentioned.
If you can't understand why having admin file access is important, then I suggest you never try Linux (or... Windows 7... or any IT job) because you will be horrified by the potential control you have over your system.
The standard solution to that is compeltely anticlimactic. Just run the disk cleanup program (diskmgr), and there’ll be an option to remove “previous windows installations”.
It IS possible to manually delete it, but you would need to do the “take ownership” thing; being an admin user does not immediately give you permission to override security on files owned by TrustedInstaller, but you COULD still take ownership.
That being said, the last time I checked it wasn’t easy to get the “take ownership” thing work recursively.
It seems to me that under the hood, Windows is actually reasonably good. But the user experience had been slowly going downhill for a while since Windows 8, even though IMO it’s still okay-ish, despite Windows 10’s many annoyances.