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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm using Windows 10 because I want to run modern programs, but I still don't see the usability of the operating system to be as good that it was with Windows 7.

If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop.

As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the part of the continuous testing of any operating system.

Another important example is that I find it harder to find installed programs in Windows 10 than what it was in Windows 7, as Windows 7 grouped shortcuts installed by programs into folders, now I just see a big mess of shortcuts where I have to remember the name of the shortcut to be able to run it.

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agree to this. They had a good going with windows 7. The freaking windows 10 photos app intermittently hangs forever when opening a simple image file. I was just using Videos and it crashed when opening settings. Skype is still a disaster years after swinching from skype classic. The abomination that replaced control panel is designed intentionally like a maze from which you cant get out. I dare you to find the bluetooth pair button, or your wifi passwords.

They are not all bad, but the Modern UI is crap, stupid animations blocking the user from doing things. If i wanted eyecandy i 'd buy a mac or use a wobbly linux WM. MS please go back to making boring things that work.

I was invited to interview for a position working on the Skype backend. I have no idea if it is a good idea.. since I personally can't take Skype seriously or believe that it is something good to work on.

Is that something people at huge companies have to think about often?

Good money vs working on a product you believe in.

I went for a big company, put all my salary into investment, and retired at 35 as it turned out well. I was lucky, but I would choose big money and making sure that I put my money in tech investments that I believe in over working on something I believe in. If you don't believe in Microsoft, excercise your options early, and put your money working for you.

I think skype is good and important, it just isn't trending, but who cares. The problems are in the frontend unfortunately. It seems to be a Javascript app, and that s just bad choice for a real-time video app. Split mode doesnt work, scrollback fails on long conversations, can't control the placement of windows, designed for maximized windows, private mode disconnects randomly. And please do not ring all the devices in the house when there's a call, let me select only the one i m using its ridiculous, like a band playing the skype ringtone in the house.

> I think skype is good and important

There is no way you seriously think this...

Skype is atrocious, and offensive as a product.

I'm in a corporation currently "upgrading" from Skype to Teams.

Let me put it this way: Since chatting with Teams, I no longer think quite as badly of Skype.

IIRC Skype for business isn't actually based on Skype and a lot better than it.

omg its so annoying when you click on an image and the photo viewer hangs forever. I've installed 'One Photo Viewer' instead, nice and simple and works instantly https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9PM6W4F0XW3H

I have the old app binaries from upgrading one of my pcs and treasuring them.

Photo viewer worked perfectly for a year and then started hanging on about every third photo. None of the "fixes" worked so I just lived with it. About a week ago, it started to work perfectly again and I have no idea why.

wait.... i am not the only one whose image viewer takes like 10s of seconds to show up! It's so horribly slow that i instead open browser and then drag the image onto browser. I beat default 100% of time!

I really liked the default PDF viewer that came with Win10. But then they killed that.

https://www.irfanview.com/

UI is old, but is the fastest.

It's fast, because it's old

-- State of software, 2020

I initially wrote it off as my core i3 laptop with Windows being slow but then same thing was happening with my shiny new Windows 10 Core i7 workstation. It's really not cool. It all the UWP apps. The new Calculator opens much slower than the older application also.

Wow, I thought I was the only one too! Ridiculous how bad this damn app is. It just makes me more angry dealing with it now that I will know that it's not just my PC that's to blame.

Apropos of nothing, I will note that pretty much all of Microsoft's testers got laid off in 2014, shortly after Nadella became CEO, and were never replaced. Whether it was in motion while Ballmer was still CEO or not, Nadella still would've had to acquiesce to it for it to happen and bears responsibility.

At my work I have to look at details on images often. Photos have a zoom button that randomly disappears. And together with slowness and other bugs I had to revert to using Paint for viewing images, since I'm blocked from installing other programs.

I changed the file in Windows 10 so that the old Photo Viewer app was kept active.

Maybe it's trying to sign me in to some telemetry service and share my image with Cortana.

IIRC Photos used to also have a bug that if the folder have too many pictures, you simply can't go previous/next..

I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead.

I wonder if this is a way to boost bing usage.

they might be intentionally blocking multiple windows for settings page because of difficulty in synchronizing settings across windows.

P.S. Linux user

Activate Godmode ;-)

Create a Folder with the Name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Wow, so today I learned this is a thing. IDDQD. There can be only one.

For the lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Master_Control_Panel_s...

The Windows Master Control Panel shortcut, labeled All Tasks and also called Windows God Mode by bloggers and All Tasks folder by at least one Microsoft developer, is a shortcut to access various control settings in Windows Vista and later operating systems, including Windows 10. By creating a folder with a certain name, users have access to all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.

The shortcut is implemented by creating a folder with the extension .{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. GodMode was the original folder name used when the feature was publicised, but any name can be used.

Also for the lazy, since I had never seen it before: IDDQD is the cheat code for 'God Mode' in Doom.

I definitely realize that by writing this comment I am both identifying myself as not a gamer and reverse-dating myself. :)

And there can be only one is warcraft :)

Many of the settings aren't available on the new settings pages. You go to the settings for network, then click additional settings and it opens the old settings menu where you can find what you want.

It's terrible.

At least they finally put a screen brightness slider on the notification center.

Open start menu, search for x. Can't find it. Close start menu, open start menu, search for x, instant result. Sigh

Or search for a term like "System" and get results like this, all with the same icon:

1. Bing web search results for "system"

2. System Information, a program that shows a report about hardware and software in your computer

3. Settings, the modern control panel app, which has a panel called System

4. The old "System" control panel

5. "Change Your System Sleep Settings", or some other randomly-chosen specific setting from inside the modern System control panel.

With stuff like this, you would think the year of the linux desktop could be a real thing.

(if some distro could manage to provide a consistent UI ...)

Let’s just wait for Windows 11

Failing silently is so damn frustrating (instead of "there was an error", just pretending there are no search results)

It might work, it might fool me once. But you and me computer, we are working together all day! It gets old.

Have this same problem on Android. Not an MS exclusive. Maybe Apple is better?

I don't even bother with Windows search any more

There's a tool called Everything that somehow does a search across all files instantaneously and I haven't touched start since then

Use irfannview. Lightning fast.

I've never tried to find Bluetooth in Settings, but I just tried and found it pretty quickly.

Start Button > Settings Icon > Devices, which is in the top-middle, and has the subtitle "Bluetooth, printers, mouse"

But why bother? Without having any idea where it is I can still find it even faster than that.

Start Button > "bluetooth" > Enter

And with search autocomplete I only needed to get as far as "bl" before it suggests the right thing. And my desktop doesn't have wifi, but I only need to get as far as typing "wi" for the start menu to suggest the wireless settings anyway. The Control Panel always sucked, and the settings menu sucks on iOS or Android too. Typing in the start menu to search has been around since roughly Vista.

And their apps aren't great, but I haven't experienced anything like the problems you describe. They're barebones but fine.

The problem is that options are scattered on 2 interfaces now , some of which are grouped by hardware, others by concept and others randomly. Plus the new interface has 3 columns you need to scan. You may be right about bluetooth options, but you are not going to find wifi passwords via search.

The path is: Network & Internet -> Status -> Network&Sharing center -> <Connection name> -> Wireless properties -> Security -> show characters.

The fastest way to get to that is via a google search: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/find-your-wi-fi-...

I still don't know how you can see the password for a network without being connected to it.

Just want to let you know: irfanview is your friend. I had the same woes with the Ms default, needed to download this to view a texture file for skyrim modding and was kinda pussed I hadn't switched years ago. Great piece of software, unfortunately not open source but has been around forever.

All the last 5 months or so of using Windows 10, I thought this issue was only on my computer because I installed TechSmith's Capture app. Now I know it's not. Viewing/Opening photos is a very common task people do on PC. How could this have passed the QA tests is beyond believable to me.

Windows 10 search function is completely broken, it won't even find a program that's in start menu, not sure if it's because I disabled all the online functionality of search. If I want to find something online instead of my computer I use a browser. Thankfully there are great alternatives for the atrocity, such as Everything, it's mind-blowing how a third party program is orders of magnitude faster than native system search.

If you disable “Background Apps” in Settings, Windows 10 will “helpfully” disable indexing (backed by Cortana service?) as well, rendering your index completely stale, which manifests as items in start menu don’t show, apps deleted a year ago still show, etc. All the garbage “solutions” when you search for this problem online don’t help at all. This problem once wasted me hours.

Dang. I thought you may have inadvertently pointed me in the right direction as to why I can't even get my indexing service to start. But, no luck. Maybe I'll get around to putting more hours in to fixing it someday.

One of the reasons I won't switch from macOS to Windows 10 for work is how bad search is and the lack of a proper launcher like Alfred.

It's absurd that Apple came up with Spotlight in 10.4 (15 years ago) and Microsoft still hasn't caught up with such a fundamental game changer.

See Power Toys Run

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

I've seen that one and others (eg: Wox), but nowhere near as powerful as Alfred. For example, you can't even just get folders.

There's an issue open here about this:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/3347

When I worked for a consultant to Microsoft in the early 2000s, they were excited about the powerful search features they were planning to deliver in Longhorn. But Apple beat them to market with Spotlight, and to my knowledge, search has never turned into a differentiating feature for Windows.

It's kind of crazy to think back to those conversations with Microsoft about their long-range plans. Some they have delivered well, like the transition to a subscription model for client applications. Some they have not, like native peer-to-peer social networking in the OS.

It was broken - very broken, so broken that you had to enter the exact text of the thing you wanted.

It was that way for years, but at some point recently they finally seem to have fixed it - I can now enter the start, end, or just part of anything I want to find, and it finds it! You know, the bare minimum you'd expect from a search function!

I'm actually a big fan of Windows 10, but it boggles the mind how long they left such a key part of the Windows experience in such a sorry state.

I find it ironic that an operating system called Windows won't let me open Settings in multiple windows. It's perhaps the greatest illustration of how Microsoft has lost their way in UI design.

To be fair, they were never good at it.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UX. XP was tolerable, but already started the decline with gimmicky UI stuff that made things actually worse.

I'll die on this hill.

Give me Windows 2000 with WiFi support and security fixes and I'd be happy forever.

Here you go: https://w2k.phreaknet.org/guide/

http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/1299806.html

There's a person in Japan that is actively (edit: maybe not active) working on modernizing windows 2000

XP through 7 at least had Classic mode, so you could get it looking like 2k. RIP classic mode.

Exactly :) Classic Mode made Win7!

Oh right, I forgot! The Good Place switch. Didn't fix everything afaik.

Yeah, I don't feel that Windows is meaningfully better than it's been in years, it just feels like the awful waterfall development is going to break it and introduce weird UI inconsistencies all the time and that's just the way it is.

Gaming on Windows is almost more confusing than it's been due to all the things and settings you have to make sure are set up right.

Meanwhile, I'm finding that gaming on Linux is easier than ever (at least on the limited selection, older titles I tend to play), and I no longer need to keep a Windows partition for that purpose. I still have a Windows 10 PC around, but I'm not really sure why I keep it.

I noticed a horrendous slowdown of the default image viewer. Double-clicking on a small JPEG file (less then 1MB) can take up to 20s to finally view.

Got so bad, that I now have MS Paint as default image viewer.

I kinda like the image viewer's ability to view other pictures in the same directory, but the performance and waiting time to view anything was just way too terrible.

It's all those little things where Apple really shines. Preview on the Mac is a fantastic piece of software.

Another example is Time Machine compared to the backup which comes with Windows. Microsoft have constantly mucked about with backup but have never managed to get it right. I can't imagine anybody relying on it. Time Machine is fantastic in comparison.

I can recommend ImageGlass.

Someone on HN recently said that was some kind of problem with the image viewer being. UWP app. Don't recall the details tho.

Definitely drives me nuts though - how hard is it to show a JPEG?!

I use a Windows 8.1 tablet for work and really like that while 8.1 has the same excruciatingly long load time for the default image viewer, the old one from 7 (or maybe going back to XP?) is still available to set as the default. As long as I avoid the fullscreen apps, I think I like 8.1 better than 10 for usability.

Are you referring to the WIndows 10 image viewer? Yes it is now a "Metro" app I think. The good news is that you can restore the old Windows 7 picture viewer. There are instructions on how to restore this if you Google. Think its a registry change.

Agreed. Windows 7's UI is blazing fast compared to Windows 10. Windows 7 inherited all the good things of Windows XP, while Windows 10 tried to look similar to both Windows 8 and Windows 7

I dunno man, maybe there's something wrong with your rig. My machine doesn't have lag like that. The start menu always opens immediately. As for finding programs, I never have trouble. I just press the windows key (brings up start menu) and start typing the name of the program I want. It shows up at the top of the search.

As I'm getting older it's getting harder for me to remember the names of the programs that I have. It's great that the search is working well, but it shouldn't be the only efficient way to find programs on my computer.

Thanks for posting this. I thought it was just me or my laptop or my hardward config. Or the thousands of photos. YES the lag after hitting the windows icon... or searching or trying to open a folder with more than 100 items... it is very real and annoying.

just to counter... i'm on a desktop that's a few years old, i7. win10. start menu loads instantly, settings loads in maybe 1/4 of a second. YMMV?

Same, but on a new laptop. Ryzen 5 4500U. Maybe it'll degrade with time, but I remember how bad the Windows 10 start menu used to be on a fresh install. Nearly unusable. It's fine now for me.

Probably the icons for the Windows Store entries were already in the cache for you. Things work the second time, but the fact that it's unpredictable makes the experience less smooth than what it was before.

Also I have things like ,,Candy Crash Friends'' icon that's very bright, takes my focus away on what I want to do, and I don't know how to turn it off, as I don't find it in the settings (to tell you the truth, I haven't even played it, but I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, so I don't want to try other games right now).

Why don't you remove those things?

I've changed the way I launch applications since W10. Now I just hit the Windows key and type the name of the app or setting I'm looking for. The search is very quick and usually throws what I'm looking for. Here are two examples of how I use this that I think are great:

I created a quick ppt or xls file yesterday, not sure how I named it. I hit the Windows key, type Excel (usually you don't need to type the whole word, specially if it's a frequent search) and it immediately shows the Excel shortcut and a list of the last few files I've opened.

The other case is I wanted to modify the action when closing the laptop lid. I know that setting is somewhere in the power configuration, but can't remember exactly where. So I just hit the Windows key, type lid and voila! there's the setting

This is the way to go and so much more efficient. I don't understand or use the new Settings because I don't have to. The search is good enough, albeit barely. What really rustled my jimmies was when Bing was down (which I don't care for and don't use), but it caused your local search (from SUPER-key) to also be down, due to its tight integration with Bing. Silent failure with an all-black window, the worst of all.

Does anybody know how to fix the problem of the taskbar's icons getting stuck to "orange" (notification)? This is for me a problem especially with Skype as I never know if somebody posted a new message into the chat or not (but it happens as well with other programs).

Better explanation of problem is for example here (none of the proposed workarounds work for me): https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4qlgqp/taskbar_i...

I didn't have this problem in Win7.

The main problem I have with Windows 10 is the forced restarts.

I've been using Win10 on multiple machines since release day and I have never once seen a forced restart. That was a problem on Windows 7, but I honestly don't know how people are still having this problem with 10.

Do you regularly restart?

I typically don't restart my MBP for months at a time. With Windows 10, it'll tell me I need to restart after updates. I can ignore it to a point, but eventually it just reboots without asking, and whatever was opened at the time is lost.

To me nothing better exemplifies W10 "we know better than you" attitude than the desktop shortcut regressions. On W7 if you want a desktop shortcut to Notepad you open Start, begin typing Notepad, and when it shows up in the menu you either click and drag it onto the desktop or your right-click it and hit "send to desktop create shortcut". Neither of those work on Windows 10 without third party software.

Amen. I've used all the versions of Windows for a couple decades and there seems to be a randomness to their improvements. Updating is just a fact of life, something we must do, it doesn't inherently come with "upgrades" for us as the consumers.

What % of the improvement in computer technology has come on this slow crawl of OS, vs all the hardware, browser apps, etc?

For me even with the newest Windows version installing PyTorch with compatible CUDA was not as easy as it should be, and even now I'm not sure if I can use mixed precision training. If I would have stayed on Windows 7, it adds one more uncertainty in the hardware-software configuration that I don't want to spend time with.

Yeah you just have to give up on the "modern" UWP apps and change back to classic ones, even when they are third-party.

Use the Control Panel instead of settings, Everything for search, IrfanView for an image viewer... the list goes on. Just remove all UWP bloat and telemetry. You'll find many scripts on the internet to automate that.

The control panel is just a big mess of old and new with a set of overlapping functionality. You need to know both because some features are in the old control panel and some in the new. It's hard to comprehend how a multi-billion dollar company hasn't been able to straighten this out since Windows 8 release in 2012.

The search function also still basically sucks.

What are your specs?

I upgraded my Core 2 Duo machine from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and it definitely struggled.

But my Core i7 machine has no trouble with Windows 10.

Intel Core I7-8750 H, 16 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080.

It's a beast when it comes to mathematical computations on a laptop, that's why it's so frustrating that simple things are so laggy.

That's unusual. You have better specs than I do, and I certainly don't experience any latency on Windows 10 at all -- definitely not any in the seconds range. Anecdotally at my workplace, I haven't heard any complaints either. There might be something that is idiosyncratic to your setup.

I spent $10k on a computer in 2008 to get rid of latencies. Now computers are so much faster and some latencies just get greater? It's Windows that is broken. I don't see the same thing happening often on my Mac or iOS.

I think the points you're making are accurate and fair, however I also think these issues are solvable only because of the strategic direction Satya has led, specifically referring to the evolution of MSFTs business models.

I cannot disagree more. Yes, Windows 7 is more polished in some ways, for example the control panel vs the thing they have created now.

But the rest, I don't have any of the problems you describe. And I run Windows 10 on a ThinkPad P50, which is 5 years old.

Also, the start menu is reasonable, although I prefer the simplicity of XP.

Microsoft ≠ Windows

There is Azure, Office 365, Xbox, Bing, servers any many others properties that are money makers.

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