Windows 10...where's the beef?

[Lee DeRaud]

Am I the only one seriously underwhelmed by Win10?

I'm told there are a lot of improvements "under the hood", so to speak, but the UI is just plain ugly, looks like someone said, "Don't worry about how it looks, most people will be using it on a phone-sized screen." And the "Start menu" looks like they took everything people complained about on the Win8 start screen and made a menu out of it. I spent most of yesterday tweaking it, installing and tweaking 'Classic Shell', and testing various apps.

The kill-shot was when Quicken refused to open its data file because of a permissions issue. Turns out the entire 'documents' folder tree is read-only for normal mortals. Huh? Fixable, but something is definitely Not Right with the thinking (or lack of it) that led to that.

First thing this morning, I restored the whole partition back to Thursday night's backup...gotta love True Image. I might (have to) try again when I go through my next hardware upgrade, but for now I'll stick with Win7/64.

[Mark Taylor2]

Lee,

I'm a "former" IT person who still reads the IT news. Your experience pretty well sums up everyone elses views. BTW, if you decided to keep it, go here: https://fix10.isleaked.com/ and check the settings. Win 10 loves to phone home with any personal data it can. There's much speculation on whether Win10 will just end pitching ads at you. For anyone else thinking of upgrading, read that site, and when you start the install do NOT pick "Express Setup". Take the time to set the beast up with particular care about the privacy settings.

[Lee DeRaud]

Lee,

I'm a "former" IT person who still reads the IT news. Your experience pretty well sums up everyone elses views. BTW, if you decided to keep it, go here: https://fix10.isleaked.com/ and check the settings. Win 10 loves to phone home with any personal data it can. There's much speculation on whether Win10 will just end pitching ads at you. For anyone else thinking of upgrading, read that site, and when you start the install do NOT pick "Express Setup". Take the time to set the beast up with particular care about the privacy settings.

Happy to find my instincts/skills haven't degraded that much since I retired: I hadn't read that article, but it pretty much described the tweaks I made during the initial install.

Edge looked like an improvement over IE11 when I tried it on a couple of sites that IE had issues with. OTOH, it's enough different from IE that I'd just as soon use Chrome when I have problems, and possibly transition to it fulltime at some point.

My main beef is that they seem to have dumbed-down the whole thing yet again, turning what should be trivial customizations into major kabuki dances. It could just be that the "lore-base" hasn't accumulated yet: I seemed to keep finding "fixes" that didn't work because they depended on some now-missing feature of the beta version or some feature that the 'Home' edition didn't support.

[Bill George]

Wait until you find out about the numerous private information being sent to Microsoft issues. By default these are all turned ON allowing MS to collect whatever it needs, to enhance your user experience. Sure they can be turned off, but it takes going to more than one place in the software and selecting it to Off.

Windows looks to be abandoning the people who actually use their computers beyond updating FaceBook and watching another online video.

[Steve Morris]

That is always assuming it is actually "OFF" and not just a button on the screen to keep you out of the loop. MS, Google, Firefox and all smart phones don't have a great track record in allowing genuine privacy.
If you have the Home edition then updates cannot be switched off so keep checking they haven't reset your preferences

Think I'll give it al least until the October version is released.

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

................... And the "Start menu" looks like they took everything people complained about on the Win8 start screen and made a menu out of it.

Yep, this is a good read about the Start menu.
http://www.howtogeek.com/224805/the-...in-windows-10/

[Bill George]

Yes my wife reminded me, every time MS does an update it will more than likely put every thing back to on. Where do you think all those annoying Reserve your Copy of Windows 10 Today pop ups come from?

[Scott Shepherd]

Someone posted a link in the general jibber jabber side of the forum about it not long ago. It showed in depth all the privacy issues and it was probably the worst thing I've seen from any company regarding privacy. It said it WILL go through all your emails, and it will use that data how it wants to, more or less, and that if you turn the settings off, it would turn them back on automatically. It really, really, really did not want you to opt out of anything. Most all of the really bad privacy issues, it would turn back on automatically, whether you wanted to or not. One setting that allowed you to turn something off, said if you were a consumer, you basically couldn't use it with it off. Only platform that could turn it off were Enterprise editions, or something like that.

It was wickedly horrible and I guess I'll use Windows 7 for the next few years.

[Bill George]

So for "free" use of the OS you've sold your soul to the devil, so to speak. Scott I wonder how many people know this and worse yet how many of the general public really would care? Did any one ever see the movie Big Brother, was that the name?

[Scott Shepherd]

Bill, it was actually in this forum, posted by Rich Harmon. Here's a link to a large photo, click it and you'll see all the issues. It's enough to make you uninstall it.

https://i.imgur.com/iHge6RJ.jpg

[paul cottingham]

Best way to upgrade Windows is to nuke the partition and install Linux.

[Bill George]

Great, you find me Print Drivers for my laser, all my printers and a replacement for Simplify 3D and etc. Just had this discussion over on the other Forum I am on a lot. I for one am staying on Win 7 until they pry my.....

[Lee DeRaud]

Great, you find me Print Drivers for my laser, all my printers and a replacement for Simplify 3D and etc. Just had this discussion over on the other Forum I am on a lot. I for one am staying on Win 7 until they pry my.....

Yup.

Every couple of years I end up with a "spare" computer and install Linux as an experiment. It invariably turns into one of those "well, everybody needs a hobby..." deals: fun in a somewhat abstract way, but not particularly useful.

[glenn bradley]

Am I the only one seriously underwhelmed by Win10?

Before the long-haul of Windows XP, operating system upgrades were not really meant to be a marketing parade "chock full-o great new stuff". they were simply a natural evolution of the technology. Despite not being able to control their marketing department's enthusiasm I believe Microsoft is just returning to that more logical progression of things. Just one darn fool's opinion ;-)

Yup. Every couple of years I end up with a "spare" computer and install Linux as an experiment. It invariably turns into one of those "well, everybody needs a hobby..." deals: fun in a somewhat abstract way, but not particularly useful.

"UX" variants usefulness is often directly proportional to the enthusiasm of the person using it. Tthe joys of not having your OS come with 2300 fonts and 437 printer drivers you will never use is offset by sometimes not being able to find a good stable driver for what you need. I have a die-hard linux user/Windows bigot who has had flakey wireless service for years but, puts up with it on his laptop for the other advantages he gets from his non-mobile systems. To each their own ;-)

[Lee DeRaud]

Before the long-haul of Windows XP, operating system upgrades were not really meant to be a marketing parade "chock full-o great new stuff". they were simply a natural evolution of the technology. Despite not being able to control their marketing department's enthusiasm I believe Microsoft is just returning to that more logical progression of things. Just one darn fool's opinion ;-)

YMMV. I'm old enough to remember what a huge advance Win3.x was over anything previous. That said, I've been skipping every other major upgrade since then.

I'm pretty sure that, privacy concerns aside, Win10 works better than Win7/8 at some level. But visually, the GUI is a big step backwards: my first reaction was that I hadn't seen anything that cluny since the early days of SunWindows (a pre-Motif X implementation). And when you get right down to it, there's very little functional difference between Linux/Windows/Mac at the kernel level, so the GUI pretty much defines the OS experience.