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DevilSlayerDante
Before getting a new laptop for my parents, I had very little experience using Windows 10. I despise the tablet style "settings" and flat GUI design. But now, I realize that Windows 10 is far worse than I ever imagined.
Out of the box, the first-boot setup wizard never prompted to set a time zone, something that has been standard in Windows Setup as long as I can remember. Then, when prompted to [optionally] connect to a wi-fi access point, I typed in the password, and when I clicked the "Connect" button, the focus instantly switched back to the password textbox, no error messages, no attempt to actually connect to the network, just selected all the masked characters in the password field. Luckily, connecting to wifi worked fine once I got to the desktop, but this experience gets much worse.
The next step was to get all the computers on the LAN so I could easily transfer files from the old Win7 laptop to the new Win10 laptop, and all the other machines in the household are on Windows 7 with a homegroup configured, so I started there. Problem is, Win10 wouldn't let me join the existing homegroup, it couldn't see it, it just gave me the option to create a new homegroup. So I did some research online, found several videos and forums suggesting I set some network-related services' startup modes from 'manual' to 'automatic'. This boggled me since these same services on Windows 7 are in automatic startup mode by default, but sure enough, I now had the option to join the existing homegroup. One catch though, when I entered the homegroup password, I got an indeterminate progress indicator for about 60 seconds before receiving an error message stating the homegroup had disappeared and Windows could no longer connect to it. "OK, I'll try the old fashioned way" I thought. I opened File Explorer and clicked on the Network tree in the treeview on the left, all my DLNA media servers and streaming players appeared, but no network nodes aside from the Win10 laptop I was working on. "Fine," I thought, "I'll get the latest Windows 10 updates and see if that fixes these network issues." After several hours of waiting for updates to download, fail, re-download, and succeed, I discovered that the homegroup option was missing entirely now. Go figure, instead of fixing the homegroup feature in Windows 10 that worked flawlessly on Windows 7 about 95% of the time, they just removed it altogether. And the old laptop was showing up in the network devices now, but Win10 said it didn't have permission to access that resource, even though I can access the same resource from any other machine in the house, get a username/password prompt, and view all shared folders just fine. Then I noticed that all the Win7 machines can see each other fine, but none of them see the Win10 laptop.
Besides the atrocious network functionality, I'm appalled at the complete lack of intuitive placement of settings and features. No one wants the Cortana search bar on the taskbar, so I right-clicked the search bar expecting to find an option or sub-menu to hide or disable the search bar there or in the taskbar settings window, but nope, I had to Google that, too, just to find out I was right-clicking on the wrong part of the taskbar. I used the App Store to install Avast Antivirus, but it wasn't clear that I was only installing a downloader, the "Avast Download Center". I could've just gone to Avast's website and downloaded the antivirus package I wanted myself, without first installing an app that I was only going to use once, but I digress. Once I got the antivirus I wanted installed, I went looking for the uninstaller for the "Avast Download Center", but it doesn't exist, not in the start menu, not in the appwiz control panel, not even in the Microsoft App Store like the Google Play Store does. If it weren't for internet search engines, I might never have found the "uninstall" option in the right-click context menu. Moreover, several pre-installed apps wanted to update from the app store, I didn't want most of them, but the few I did want, frequently stopped downloading halfway, or when nearly finished, which is absurd when my parents have a 6mbps DSL internet connection, and the Office Desktop apps is a 600MB download. I really just want to install Windows 7 on this thing, but I doubt I can get all functional drivers for the hardware.
I've been primarily a Windows user since Windows 3.1, and I liked the radically new look of Win95. Beyond that, I got annoyed when a new Windows version came out and they just moved settings and features to different locations, but I got used to the changes, plus the professional polish and hardware reliability greatly improved with each subsequent release, except for Windows ME. But Windows 10 is despicable, settings are tossed all over the place with no logical sense behind it, technology and features that have been perfected in previous editions of Windows are now unusable, there are "quirks" that hinder fluid transitions between applications that never existed before...I could write a book about every broken thing in Windows 10.
Why has professionalism declined so drastically in the last decade? Quality production in nearly every industry has taken a massive blow in the last decade, nothing is made to quality standards anymore. And you, Microsoft, your products have become so shabby, so pathetically underdeveloped, and deployment so poorly executed, I can't even warrant using a pirated copy. I'll pay for another copy of Windows 7 before accepting a free copy of Windows 10. This is utter garbage, you should be ashamed, you deserve to lose everything, I've never been so irate over a piece of software.
Continue reading...
Out of the box, the first-boot setup wizard never prompted to set a time zone, something that has been standard in Windows Setup as long as I can remember. Then, when prompted to [optionally] connect to a wi-fi access point, I typed in the password, and when I clicked the "Connect" button, the focus instantly switched back to the password textbox, no error messages, no attempt to actually connect to the network, just selected all the masked characters in the password field. Luckily, connecting to wifi worked fine once I got to the desktop, but this experience gets much worse.
The next step was to get all the computers on the LAN so I could easily transfer files from the old Win7 laptop to the new Win10 laptop, and all the other machines in the household are on Windows 7 with a homegroup configured, so I started there. Problem is, Win10 wouldn't let me join the existing homegroup, it couldn't see it, it just gave me the option to create a new homegroup. So I did some research online, found several videos and forums suggesting I set some network-related services' startup modes from 'manual' to 'automatic'. This boggled me since these same services on Windows 7 are in automatic startup mode by default, but sure enough, I now had the option to join the existing homegroup. One catch though, when I entered the homegroup password, I got an indeterminate progress indicator for about 60 seconds before receiving an error message stating the homegroup had disappeared and Windows could no longer connect to it. "OK, I'll try the old fashioned way" I thought. I opened File Explorer and clicked on the Network tree in the treeview on the left, all my DLNA media servers and streaming players appeared, but no network nodes aside from the Win10 laptop I was working on. "Fine," I thought, "I'll get the latest Windows 10 updates and see if that fixes these network issues." After several hours of waiting for updates to download, fail, re-download, and succeed, I discovered that the homegroup option was missing entirely now. Go figure, instead of fixing the homegroup feature in Windows 10 that worked flawlessly on Windows 7 about 95% of the time, they just removed it altogether. And the old laptop was showing up in the network devices now, but Win10 said it didn't have permission to access that resource, even though I can access the same resource from any other machine in the house, get a username/password prompt, and view all shared folders just fine. Then I noticed that all the Win7 machines can see each other fine, but none of them see the Win10 laptop.
Besides the atrocious network functionality, I'm appalled at the complete lack of intuitive placement of settings and features. No one wants the Cortana search bar on the taskbar, so I right-clicked the search bar expecting to find an option or sub-menu to hide or disable the search bar there or in the taskbar settings window, but nope, I had to Google that, too, just to find out I was right-clicking on the wrong part of the taskbar. I used the App Store to install Avast Antivirus, but it wasn't clear that I was only installing a downloader, the "Avast Download Center". I could've just gone to Avast's website and downloaded the antivirus package I wanted myself, without first installing an app that I was only going to use once, but I digress. Once I got the antivirus I wanted installed, I went looking for the uninstaller for the "Avast Download Center", but it doesn't exist, not in the start menu, not in the appwiz control panel, not even in the Microsoft App Store like the Google Play Store does. If it weren't for internet search engines, I might never have found the "uninstall" option in the right-click context menu. Moreover, several pre-installed apps wanted to update from the app store, I didn't want most of them, but the few I did want, frequently stopped downloading halfway, or when nearly finished, which is absurd when my parents have a 6mbps DSL internet connection, and the Office Desktop apps is a 600MB download. I really just want to install Windows 7 on this thing, but I doubt I can get all functional drivers for the hardware.
I've been primarily a Windows user since Windows 3.1, and I liked the radically new look of Win95. Beyond that, I got annoyed when a new Windows version came out and they just moved settings and features to different locations, but I got used to the changes, plus the professional polish and hardware reliability greatly improved with each subsequent release, except for Windows ME. But Windows 10 is despicable, settings are tossed all over the place with no logical sense behind it, technology and features that have been perfected in previous editions of Windows are now unusable, there are "quirks" that hinder fluid transitions between applications that never existed before...I could write a book about every broken thing in Windows 10.
Why has professionalism declined so drastically in the last decade? Quality production in nearly every industry has taken a massive blow in the last decade, nothing is made to quality standards anymore. And you, Microsoft, your products have become so shabby, so pathetically underdeveloped, and deployment so poorly executed, I can't even warrant using a pirated copy. I'll pay for another copy of Windows 7 before accepting a free copy of Windows 10. This is utter garbage, you should be ashamed, you deserve to lose everything, I've never been so irate over a piece of software.
Continue reading...