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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Use irfannview. Lightning fast.

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