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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Apart from the general slowness and crashes caused by the issues you mention, I remember UAC was way too intrusive (sometimes you would see 4 or 5 alerts in a row that would monopolize your screen), copying files was slow as a snail an tended to outright crash for large sets of files, and suspend never really worked in my laptop.

Anyway, how is a consumer product that provides a bad experience to the user (regardless of the reasons) "amazing"?

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Copying files is an interesting case study. Vista was actually faster but perceived to be slower. XP wouldn't actually tell you when copying was 100% complete. If you turned off your power supply the second XP's copy dialog went away you'd lose data.

Vista sped up file copying operations but fixed that bug, leading to a faulty perception of slowness. Worse, the progress bar behavior encouraged that perception of slowness. A progress bar that speeds up at the end will be perceived to be faster than one that is perfectly even which in turn is perceived faster than one that slows down at the end. And vista's progress bar usually slowed down at the end because it didn't properly account for those disk sync et al operations ahead of time. The result was a worse feeling experience despite what was happening under the hood.

Did this combine with the prefetch situation? It always seemed to me that the files were doing some sort of inspection of state as the dialog box progressed. Even things like Ultracopier seemed to run into this problem.

The "improved" aka "less annoying" UAC that we have by default now is as good as no UAC [1].

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=...

But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.

>As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together.

What a great new perspective.

I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.

Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".

All UAC ever did was further re-enforce the already deeply-ingrained MS convention of 'just click OK' without reading the dialog. It never told you why the program needed elevated access, only that it needed it for it to do what you wanted. And of course, the average user just wants their computer to do what they asked. I would see some users run a program and automatically move their mouse to the place the UAC prompt would appear, seconds before the prompt ever came up. That's a whole new level of programming people.

The only time I can think it ever came in handy was if the user had an unprivileged account and would need an admin to type in the password - hopefully the admin would ask the why question and dig into it before dismissing the UAC prompt.

To be honest, suspend still doesn't work properly, even in the latest version of Windows 10.

Lol, yep. My Win 10 desktop will suspend just fine, but then it wakes itself up for no apparent reason and just stays running indefinitely after that. I can't figure out what the cause is, but I've taken to just shutting it down in between uses.

This. I was playing Starcraft before bed, and just shut my laptop to suspend it... it was suspended until about 4 hours later, when, in the middle of the night my wife and I were awoken by sounds of zerglings dying. Very unpleasant, and quite surprising.

I'm a frequent sleeper and I depend on the feature. Next time your machine wakes up by itself, go to a DOS prompt and type "powercfg -lastwake" That will tell you how it happened.

For me, part of the solution was to go into the device manager and edit the properties for my mouse and my network controller. On the "power management" tab I disabled the "allow this device to wake up the computer" option. I only use the keyboard to wake the PC.

Additionally, when I left the machine sleeping overnight, there was some scheduled task that would occasionally wake the machine. There is a way to disable that, but I forget the specifics.

Cool, I'll try that sometime. I'm traveling for the next couple of weeks, so it'll be too late to report back here, but thanks in advance.

I really wouldn't be bothered by occasional wakeups if it would go back to sleep afterwards...

VirtualBox for example uses something called "wake timers" that wake up the machine right after it goes to sleep.

My computer does it, and typing in powercfg -lastwake just says "unknown source". I've disabled every wake event, update service, wake-on-lan, disabled the ability of my mouse and keyboard to wake my computer up, and it still does it.

I had the same issue. I think, your keyboard/mouse are allowed to wake up from sleep automatically and some glitch gives your desktop the impression that a key was hit. If you disable this in the device manager, this issue should be resolved.

I've been fighting with this literally since Windows 10 came out. My desktop PC wakes up every night, around midnight/1am, and will not go back to sleep. I've disabled everything single wake event in windows, there is no wake-on-lan(as a matter of fact it does it with lan unplugged and ethernet disabled). Looking in the power events just says the computer woke up due to "unknown source". It does not do it with Windows 7.

Usually system manufacturer's fault. A recent example where I work is Lenovo's recommended Intel wireless driver (the one on the Lenovo site) was over six months old and had known issues with causing machines to not be able to wake from suspend. Installing the drivers directly from Intel resolved the problem.

That's pretty much the best case scenario. A lot of chipmakers (Conexant, Jmicron, Intel in many cases) don't allow you to download drivers directly from them. So you are stuck with whatever the OEM provides. In some cases I've found that newer model laptops by the same OEM use the same audio/media controllers under the hood in some case and I can use the newer driver from the updated model.

Lenovo and Dell. Never again.

My next computer will be something from Microsoft's Surface line. They seem to be the only manufacturer who can make proper devices (everything working and power bricks which last more than 6 months - thanks Apple).

>everything working

I wouldn't ascribe anything that generous that to a surface device as long as they still use the marvel wireless cards, which have a storied history of causing hardware connectivity problems[0]. I largely enjoyed my Surface Pro 3 but frequently had the same issues. The Surface Book seems to have issues with sensing connectivity between the keyboard and screen, as well. Anecdotal, at work we even had a developer hololens go paperweight because the wifi stopped signalling. MS told us to junk it, unrepairable.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=marvell+wifi+surface+problem...

I've had a few Dell's over the years and have never had a problem with them. The trick at first was to buy from their business line - no bloatware and better support. Now I just buy from the Microsoft Store and they come with no non MS bloatware. My 2-1 Dell is a pretty good computer. I just wish it had a 3:2 display instead of 16:9.

everything working and power bricks which last more than 6 months - thanks Apple

Face it, sample amounts being so big, you're not going to find anything which always worked for everybody. Anecdotally, having worked for a Dell-only place and typing this on a 7-year old XPS, I never encountered severe issues. Only standard hardware problems caused by wear (HD/memory/keyboard keys failing after +5 years of usage).

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