For the better part of a year, now, Microsoft has been been pushing Windows 10... hard. Really, really hard. Way too hard. So hard have Microsoft been pushing Windows 10, that it's actually difficult to find words to truly express just how hard Microsoft has been pushing their new flagship product on consumers who really weren't sure they wanted it... and on consumers who were quite sure they really didn't want it (although some, like the EFF, have tried).
Throughout Microsoft's year of shoving Windows 10 down our throats, the tech press has largely behaved as enablers of this bad behaviour. Even those that criticized their GWX campaign were lauding the OS itself. Windows 10, we were told, really was a great product... we just needed to see past Microsoft's bullshit and try it for ourselves. The only shame was the Microsoft were turning people away that might be willing to try Windows 10 for themselves.
I've long suspected that this was, in fact, bullshit, and as the Anniversary Update's problems have continued to grow, I've been waiting for the cracks to start forming in this base of support. Those cracks have been pretty slow to start, though, with a largely complicit tech press still apparently enabling Microsoft's bad behaviour, reporting on show-stopping problems as if they were relatively minor issues, the sort of thing that any reasonable person would expect to see with an update to their PC's operating system... an update that they can't decline, or even postpone for very long, because of Microsoft's bullshit, but whatever.
Well, today, that finally changed. Today, one of those very same tech writers finally said what millions of consumers have been thinking for some time now.
Today, one of them finally admitted that Microsoft's broken mess of an operating system really isn't a good product. At all.
From Patrick Pilcher at NetGuide NZ:
In the past, I’ve been called a Microsoft fan boy, hell I was even one of the MCs when Microsoft launched Vista in NZ. My home has long been a dominated by Microsoft gear, and I’ve been using Windows 10 since it first became available.
There were many reasons for my early move to Windows 10. It was free; Microsoft had installed a near impossible to remove “upgrade to Windows 10” nagware app on my PC too.
In the end I got curious and installed it.
While Windows 10 was great to use in its early days, long term, I’ve found myself becoming increasingly frustrated.
More recently I've experienced endless problems with Windows 10. Tasks that were a doddle under Windows 7 are a complicated and unintuitive mess with Windows 10.
Windows 10 looks pretty. It has lots of fancy stuff and with regular maintenance runs pretty quick. Eye candy aside, Windows 10 has sadly proven to be horrible to use.
I thought that after the disaster that was Windows 8 and the kiss and make up exercise of Windows 8.1, Microsoft would've applied some serious spit and polish onto Windows 10.
It doesn’t feel that way. Windows 10 ran smoothly for a few months, but problems soon crept in and Windows 10 OS now feels like a bug riddled mess designed by committee, held together with duct tape.Pilcher goes on to list problems that should never have been problems with a finished product, let alone with the flagship product of a company as big as Microsoft, with so much riding on its success. Even the simplest things simply don't work reliably, like plugging in a USB drive. In Windows 7 plug in a thum drive, and it's accessible automatically, in seconds. In Windows 10, plugging in a USB drive requiring the use of a Storage Management utility. Printers mostly don't work, either, an issue which affects a wide range of brands and models, including recent models -- it's not just a lack of Win10-compatible drivers for older machines.
Even simple things like turning on the PC and logging on are more complicated than they need to be for home users... in an OS labelled as Windows 10 Home. Why?
And, yes, it keeps getting worse:
Instead of being remembered as Microsoft’s first real move away from Windows 95’s aesthetics, Vista is remembered by many for its bloated system requirements and sluggish performance. Reports have surfaced of similar performance issues emerging with Windows 10.
These revolve around how it makes use of virtual memory. It turns out that like most operating systems without a decent amount of RAM, Windows 10 performs like a dog with a tranquilliser habit. It is fixable. Get more RAM. Even though Microsoft says Windows 10 will run in 2GB of RAM, it’ll run terribly in anything less than 8GB.
Assuming your PC has a decent amount of RAM, tweaking how Windows 10 manages virtual storage also makes a big difference. Fire up settings and in the Control Panel search bar type 'Performance.' Then choose 'Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows'. Find and click the Advanced tab and Change in the Virtual memory section.
Deselect 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives', and click on the hard drive on which you’ve installed Windows 10 (it’ll probably be drive C: in most cases), and choose Custom Size. Change “Initial Size” and Maximum Size to “values recommended by Windows”. Click OK then re-start your computer. It’s a fair bit of mucking about that simply shouldn’t have had to happen in the first place. Not good.Remember how Windows 10's smaller footprint and faster performance were supposed to be its main selling points? I remember reading that bit of hype in article after article. Well, apparently, its footprint isn't actually smaller, and its performance actually kinda sucks unless your machine has a lots of resources available to run the thing... just like every other new OS that Microsoft have ever released.
Never believe the hype, people. The hype is always a lie.
BTW, have I mentioned lately just how glad I am, to have avoided this cluster fuck of a product? How I suspected that Microsoft was just pushing Windows 10 way too hard, and how that could only mean that the product couldn't sell itself, on its merits? More and more, I feel like I really dodged a bullet, here.
Don't worry, though.. it gets worse! Because of course it does... mainly because of those compulsory updates:
A while back my PC downloaded an update and then rebooted to finalise the update. Then it rebooted again, and again and again. It wouldn’t stop rebooting.
The update – from Microsoft had screwed my PC. One safe restart and a reset later I had Windows 10 back. Ms-Office and anything else I happened to value on that PC was gone for good. Surely an update from Microsoft shouldn’t do this to my PC? I googled “boot loop windows 10” to find thousands of other Windows 10 users also afflicted. This just isn’t good enough.Oh, and about that safe mode:
If you find your PC is totally borked, and won’t boot You may need to create a Safe Mode boot option. Again this isn’t intuitive.
On your powered up PC, press Win+X. Hit Command Prompt (Admin), then type bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Windows 10 Safe Mode" and press Enter. In the Start menu, type msconfig. Click on “System Configuration” in the search results, and click the “Boot” tab. Highlight the Windows 10 Safe Mode option and tick the Safe boot box, selecting Minimal under Boot options. Choose “Make all boot settings permanent” and click OK.
This really isn’t something a newbie should to have deal with. Wouldn’t it have made a considerable amount of sense from a usability perspective to have a more conspicuous safe mode option given its central role in reviving sick PCs?And then, there's the privacy... or, rather, the total lack of privacy:
The elephant in the room with Windows 10 however is its shocking behaviour when it comes to privacy. It turns out that a pile of data about you and anyone else using your PC gets regularly uploaded to Microsoft. Things such as your location, any text you recently typed in, any commands you spoke to Cortana, any touch input, webpages you’ve visited, plus a bunch of other usage data including a list of which programmes recently used on that PC are all sent.
This data gets synched with Microsoft's servers. Even though Microsoft probably has one of the more secure enterprise IT environments around (to understand the importance of this, take a look at the recent spate of recent data breaches that has seen a large amounts personal and financial info stolen), there’s also a bunch of silly stuff too.
[...]
Then there’s Microsoft's policy on disclosing or sharing the information they’ve hoovered up. This is from the Windows 10 privacy policy agreement (That’s the bazillion page 4-point legalese most of us blithely ignore, clicking “accept” when we install software such as Windows 10)
"We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services."
Anyone who’d followed the FBI vs Apple situation is probably hearing alarm bells ringing very loudly by now. These privacy issues are so concerning that even the Electronic Frontier Foundation has written a damning report on them.Hello, EFF report! It's good to see you again.
None of these issues (and, yes, there's more, and you should really give Pilcher's article a read and some clicks) is actually news. All of this had been reported prior to now, by various sources around the web. But none of those reports actually added all of these issues together and reached the obvious conclusion: that there are enough issues with Windows 10 to make it a bad product. It may have the potential to be a really great OS, but it isn't one now, and home users should not have switched to it, if only because switching back is a pain in the ass to do... something which Microsoft has done deliberately, of course. And the recent Anniversary Update has made it worse, not better,
You could argue beggars can’t be choosers. You could also argue that Windows 10 was free, but the point is that even if all these issues were fixed, Windows 10 is plagued with some horrible design decisions, buggy updates and all told is really bit of a disaster. it still has an unforgivable amount of rough edges that really do need to be fixed and yet appear forgotten.
BTW, the one issue that didn't rate a mention in Pilcher's article? Webcams. It seems that Windows 10's other issues are all much more important than the webcam thing. Go figure.
Windows 10 is reportedly slow to take off among business users, and I'm not surprised. Every potential business user is also a Home user, after all, and this unforgivably buggy and unfinished mess is what they've been experiencing for the better part of a year, now. Why would they want to spend good money to adopt this bad product into their business-critical systems at work, too?