[ SECOND EDIT ] Just a day later, as if someone at Microsoft had read my article and thought to themselves “you think that’s crap? Check this out!” ( see bottom of article ).
[ FIRST EDIT ] Since writing this only a few hours ago, a few other things came to my attention, which I’ve added at the end
I’m writing this out of sheer frustration with an operating system that is actually a devolution, not an evolution in software design and programming. Windows 10 is still, after more than 3 years — on top of its rushed and hasty ‘development’, if you can call it that at all — an operating system barely worthy of the title “beta-release”, and is without question, a backward step in several respects from Windows 7 ( ie: it is a downgrade, not an upgrade ).
Let’s have a look just just a handful of the things, that after nearly 4 years of release, are still either design flaws that have been overlooked by some really crappy designers, or are more so bugs than design flaws ( perhaps a combination of both ), which anyone with any understanding of software design or computer code, would know better than to do in the first place.
Windows Explorer:
Let’s begin with something minor but significant, being the basic notion of user feedback — ie: telling the user what is going on, with some kind of audiovisual feedback, cue, or message — specifically in this case, I’m referring to the way Windows 7 used to highlight in the main viewing pane, the fact that you’d selected a drive, when in the left hand navigation tree, you had selected “My Computer” ( now renamed “This PC” in Windows 10 ).
This is called feedback in the user interface, and it is an extremely simple, fundamental, and essential aspect of good user interface design, which Microsoft had correctly coded in Windows 7, and for some bizarre reason, has removed from Windows 10, for zero advantage, and numerous disadvantages.
This is, put simply, inexcusably crap design, and the kind of thing you’d expect from a rookie startup, with no fucking clue what they were doing, not a multibillion dollar corporation with decades of experience, and an established product, which they only had to modify and improve.
New User Interface Redundancies:
Again we have another mistake, which is utterly inexcusable, being the way that Microsoft has created a new user interface that is used in order to access various system settings, and yet kept the old user interface too … this is a really extremely bad idea, and no one in their right mind whom understands computer code, would ever make this decision for technical reasons. It is without question a sign of extreme incompetence, for which there exists no valid excuse.
- IF you are going to change the user interface;
- THEN you do it, or not, you never half do it;
- AND you never leave the old UI simultaneously in place;
— why, I hear you ask? Well, for those of you who don’t know, in a nutshell, it is because you are creating unnecessary headaches both for yourself AND your users, AND IF your new UI is not ready to be trusted in a production release, THEN YOU DON’T FUCKING RELEASE IT … it’s that fucking simple.
Forced Windows Updates:
This one is perhaps the worst, for many reasons, some of which I’ll discuss right now, but another of which relates to the next problem, so I’ll explain it when we get there.
- People have limited bandwidth, and it is inherently disrespectful of your customers to enforce upgrades of software, especially when you clearly are using incompetent design principles, and coding / testing methods, none of which can be trusted, and the proof of which is in the numerous examples of such updates causing immense problems for your users, up to and including bricking ( wrecking ) their machines … this wouldn’t be excusable for a rookie startup, and it’s less excusable for a company like Microsoft — your update policy, is rude, flawed, and wrong;
- The option of delayed updates and update scheduling ( time slots ) is not a sufficient compromise, you should abandon the policy entirely … if I wanted an Apple computer, I’d have gotten one, and you have taken this concept far beyond where Apple took it, because at least they weren’t so stupid as to take it this far;
- Again, there’s nowhere near enough user feedback to tell me when your annoyingly intrusive forced updates are going to happen, NOR INDEED do you even provide adequate feedback as to WHEN they are happening! I experience all sorts of fucking annoying as fuck problems as a consequence of this, which you give me little or no control over, and it is only when I remember “oh yeah, I’ll bet Windows 10 is doing a stupid fucking update right now, which it didn’t tell me about, and that’s why this problem is happening” << sure enough, every single fucking time without exception, I have been right about this;
— which leads me to the next point …
Disk Defragmenter Stuck BECAUSE OF FUCKING UPDATES:
Your fucking software is like the incompetent leadership in the private and public sector — ie: the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing — and again, this is a really fucking rookie design flaw, but which, as I said at the outset, really constitutes a bug, not just a flaw.
When Windows 10 starts it’s idiotic policy of automatic enforced updates, not only does it not give the user any significant feedback ( if any at all ), BUT IT DOESN’T EVEN TALK TO ITSELF !!
Case in point, the drive defragmenter has no idea that Windows is doing an update, and so it finds itself incapable of finishing the drive consolidation process; but it doesn’t show an error, it doesn’t give a message to the user, it doesn’t automatically pause, or any other useful response to the situation, it just keeps trying, like a total dumb fuck, to do something it cannot adequately do … and so with no idea what is going on, you as the user are sitting there seeing it fail to move beyond 0%, but from all you can tell, there’s no error, no hung state, nothing actually wrong.
This problem isn’t even revealed by looking at the processes in the task manager, you can see lots of drive activity, but that’s exactly what you’d expect when the defragmenter is running.
Summary:
Lift your fucking game Microsoft, because Windows 10 is a lesser operating system versus Windows 7 ( despite all the things you’ve done to sabotage Win 7 ), and seriously, anyone running a for profit company would be well advised to consider alternatives like Linux, because I really don’t see the Win 10 OS as being worthy of release, and definitely not worthy of being paid for, as it is quite frankly garbage, and neither an evolution in code, nor of design.
[ EDIT ] Additional:
A few extra things came to my attention since I wrote this:
Defrag Still Fails After Stopping Win Update
Having shut down the Windows Updates, the aforementioned drive defragmenter problem persisted, such that I was eventually forced to stop it ( yet again ), and reboot the machine. My guess is that a further bit of feedback Windows 10 is not communicating to itself, is that partially completed updates require a reboot, and for some reason this prevents the defragmenter from doing its job, and had I not stopped it, the stupid thing would have sat there perpetually rewriting something in an endless loop.
Clearly something is very wrong indeed, and it’s something that should never happen in a commercial release, yet here it is, nearly 4 years after the initial release.
Defrag Issue Caused RAID Issue
After a reboot ( with the drive still not properly defragmented ), the RAID array had to go through a full verification and repair process, which took a very long time indeed … nothing was wrong with anything until Windows fucked it up, and these drives are not very old, and very high quality hybrid devices.
So Windows has done more harm than good, when being asked to perform a basic drive maintenance function that has been a part of the Windows ecosystem for many generations, dating back to Windows 95 or before.
Microsoft OneDrive ‘Security’ Notification Won’t Dismiss
Every time I reboot the machine, the Windows ‘security’ warning comes up, telling me that Microsoft OneDrive is not set up for file recovery.
- Firstly, while it mentions ‘ransomware attacks’, this is nothing more than a scare tactic to make you use their product. Not having OneDrive set up, IS NOT a security issue.
- Secondly, sharing my private files on your server IS a security issue when the US government’s spy agencies want access to all our data, and I do not for one second believe you’re going to stop them getting access.
- Thirdly, if I get hit by a ransomware attack that shuts down my machine, OneDrive isn’t going to fucking help, and I have way bigger problems in that case than not being able to access my files.
- Fourthly, if I click ‘dismiss’, which you offer me as an option, the notification should dismiss ( as advertised ), which it doesn’t, and I should NEVER see that notification again UNLESS I CHOOSE to ‘reset notifications’ ( or some similar function ). No exceptions, this is how it should work.
— seriously Microsoft, WTF?
Additional ( second edit ):
I thought I’d put this article to bed, but no …
Desktop power button in start menu, causes built in display to completely disappear until reboot — and printer issues.
I don’t know how it’s even possible for code to be this badly written, because the outcome should have been an impossible consequence of the event.
Following Microsoft’s recent screw up of Windows 7 updates ( KB4480870 and KB4480960 ), which were bricking people’s machines and wrecking networking, particularly remote access, they released update(s) that fixed the problem, and having done so, I plugged my printer back into the older machine ( Win 7 ) that acts as a print server.
Side note on printer driver issues:
While we are on the subject, Microsoft and Brother released printer drivers, and device recognition software, so poorly designed that it took me MONTHS to figure out why my perfectly functional printer had lost its manual duplexing function, which I was finally able to restore, no thanks to either company.
… back to the topic at hand …
So after having fixed the networking, a few days later it’s not seeing the other machine again, which I decided to solve ( and did so successfully with a simple reboot ). Microsoft has never had particularly good networking functionality, and it has been a major headache since the days of Win 98 at least ( about which time I can remember some really shite situations that cost me many weeks trying to fix problems that should never have existed ).
But I also thought to reboot the Windows 10 machine in case the problem was coming from that end, because ultimately, when you’ve wasted tons of time dealing with these problems caused by crap design and code, and crap policies on 3rd party software ( which wasn’t an issue in this case, it was all just Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot ) … you don’t really care anymore what the problem was, so long as the solution works.
When I went to click the reboot option in the start menu, all of a sudden the laptop display disappeared completely, and had I not had an external monitor plugged in, it’s possible I’d have just been staring at a blank screen only at that point. Fortunately I did have an external monitor plugged in, and despite the fact I’d gone nowhere near any function that should switch off the built in display, nor set the display to an external monitor, that’s what happened.
This situation, with properly written code, should be impossible, as the start menu has nothing to do with such an event or outcome, and neither do the power off / reboot / sleep options within it.
I’m seriously gobsmacked this is an in production commercial operating system, with such a long history of predecessors, and nearly 4 years of its own history post initial development.
Windows 10 has been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and what stuns me is how many people are willing to write articles contradicting this demonstrably true and irrefutable fact. This is a garbage operating system that has been forced on people, and you cannot quote the numbers of ‘usage’ as being synonymous with ‘popularity’, when its usage is directly tied to Microsoft and Intel’s collusion to stop writing CPU microcode for Windows 7 — WHICH IS THE ONLY REASON YOU CAN’T INSTALL WIN 7 ON NEW HARDWARE.