Creators Update gives Windows 10 a bit of an Edge, but some old annoyances remain Windows 10 was launched on July 29, 2015, just over 18 months ago, consigning the Windows 8 experiment to history and introducing the idea of "Windows as a service" – or in other words an operating system that (with a few exceptions) updates itself whether you like it or not. Now here comes the Creators Update, or version 1703 …
Not sure what the raison d'etre for this is. I'm looking at files on my local machine and it's showing me ads? The likelihood is that I would never, ever buy any product/service marketed in this way.
Of course, being slightly technical, a hosts file update or a firewall rule would be swiftly put in place.
I'm looking at files on my local machine and it's showing me ads?
And given how often Explorer just hangs waiting for something random that you aren't even remotely interested in, what are the odds that this won't make Explorer even more intolerable?
If anything ever needed a complete rewrite from scratch it would be File Explorer. It it still part of the entire desktop GUI, BTW?
"Hang on! Ads in Explorer?"
I was wondering about that myself as well. And it seems Microsoft even tries to add insult to injury because how do you combine that with this one: "Privacy and Windows 10 is a hot topic."?
Doesn't one, by definition, rule out the other here?
Anyway, thanks El Reg for a really nice insight article. I still don't like the very flat and dull looking interface, especially not when compared to my trusty rich looking Windows 7. I still don't understand why people would go along with that.
I mean... We've had years worth of development with graphic cards (GPU) and accelerators and all that. And what do you get with Windows 10? A flat, dull, colorless interface which sometimes makes me think back about Windows 2.0.
Even Windows 3.1 / 3.11 was better looking (in comparison), they really worked hard on some of the icons and some were honestly small pieces of art. This became especially true when the real fans started to release icon libraries of their own.
But now? I still have zero motivation to upgrade, and it's not because I'm unwilling to try something new but because the whole thing looks so horribly unappealing to me.
"... unning a basic Linux would probably suffice."
If you are going to the trouble of running Linux, basic or not, why would you cripple it by linking it to a Win-10 box? Just replace Windows. Then you don't need the "... old retired computer ..." as an intermediary.
God no, please do not make this the default.
I have rescued many systems over the years because the 'user' does not know how to empty the Wastebasket/deleted files folder. One was a scan of a passport that had been deleted a year before. Some scumbag nicked it during a burgulary. They wanted to know the Passport number. I found the .jpg waiting to be properly removed. If this was in place then that would have gone bye-bye a long time before that.
I know why MS wants this but please don't make it the default OOTB. I expect they will.
I'm so glad that I no longer have to use this POS on a daily basis. I'd have been tearing what little hair I have left out long ago.
Reminds me of an old boss who would delete every email that hit his inbox, other than what he was working on right now. If he needed an email after that he'd just trawl through the bin.
Odd behaviour for an IT manager, and he was particularly annoyed when I empted the bin whilst fixing some other email problem on his computer. After that when I had paperwork for him to sign, I'd walk up to him and throw it in the bin. Oh how we laughed!*
(* actually laughing may vary)
I had a particularly daft "office manager" who stored emails that she didn't want in the deleted items in her mail client. These got deleted after a while (server based, therefore a deleted items purge was occasionally needed to make space). She only finally understood the stupidity of this when I went to went to her desk, took her paperwork in her in-tray and put it in her bin and asked her if she expected to see it there tomorrow after the cleaners had been in the evening. Sometimes physical demonstrations work well.
"Wastebasket"
Have you been loitering on UK installs of MacOS up to 8.6? Everyone else (and 9.0.4 and beyond) got 'Trash', and Win95 gave us Recycle Bin. Oh and OS/2 had 'Shredder'.
As for auto-purging... System 6 and below did that every time an application was opened or was restarted. I think things stayed if Multifinder was running, can't easily check.
I think 'Wastebacket' was the bst out of all of them though, but then System 6 was the first GUI that I used.
The word "wastebasket" is unknown in written English before the British-English version of the Macintosh system. It was coined by someone in Apple's Engineering department because the proper translation, "wastepaper basket", was too long to fit on the icon label.
"Bin", the direct translation of "Trash[can]", may have been ruled out because of the word's meaning as an abbreviation of "binary", or maybe it just looked too short on-screen.
Translating this wasn't exactly Apple's finest hour, and there's a certain fascination with wickerwork running through these. German used "Papierkorb", which, while at least being a real German word, was one that didn't universally mean "trashcan" - I have heard more than one German use the word to refer to an in-tray (literally it means a "basket for papers"). The French translation, "corbeille", gave up on the concept of paper altogether, and so simply meant a basket of any kind, including one you'd use for fruit or flowers.
However, I'm deliberately using the past-tense for all these, because over the three decades, the repeated use of these translations in computer interfaces has retroactively given them the originally-intended meaning. "Wrong" words become "right" words once they're understood by enough people...
I usually rename 'Wastebasket' or 'Trash' or whatever, using a Navy term.
Back in the 3.1 era I had a shareware application called 'Toilet' that would flush, with (poorly done) animation and sound effects. when items were in it, the water was green [and of course the lid was up]. otherwise it was blue. And the lid would slam shut during the flush process, just because.
I've been 'cleaning up' a bunch of windows 10 pro machines for deployment this week, and cam across a handy power shell script that removes a whole bunch of, stuff.
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/blob/master/scripts/remove-default-apps.ps1
True to windows nature, doesn't work every time, sometimes needs to be run a couple of times, sometimes needs a re-boot, but it does (seem) to work.
True to windows nature, doesn't work every time, sometimes needs to be run a couple of times, sometimes needs a re-boot, but it does (seem) to work.
This is due to the incompetent way the Windows store application works. If an update for an application is queued in the windows store (this is, of course, an invisible queue and cannot be purged) then regardless of whether or not you uninstall an application in the mean time the application will be reinstalled later. This gets dafter because of the useless speed of the process (probably due to not wanting to grind a PC to a crawl on startup, therefore understandable in intention) an update to an update can also be added to this update/installation queue. What should happen is that when uninstalling an application all pending update to the application are purged from the installation queue, but this seems to be beyond Microsoft.
Of course, every time a new user accesses a Windows 10 system all the crappy default windows store applications are installed for them - these buggers are on a per user, per machine installation profile. Which gets added to arbitrarily by Microsoft.
"Option to install apps from Store only"
And next version, it will be "Option to be able to install non-store apps."
Next will be:
a) Option to allow Win32 API applications to work [followed by complete blockage, "signed" UWP-only from "the store" only]
b) Option to allow compiling from source on your own computer [followed by "disallow this renegade behavior"]
c) Option to keep your existing version without paying a subscription, followed by (you guessed it) monthly rental of the PRIVILEGE of using Win-10-nic on YOUR computer.
d) Option to allow ANY! OTHER! OPERATING! SYSTEM! on ANY! hardware upon which Windows could _POSSIBLY_ run. Then (you guessed it) the Micro-shaft Monopoly
time to abandon Micro-shaft, for "a proper operating system" without "allow you" nor "prevent you" in it.
(see icon for what I'm recommending, k-thx)
Ironically the only version of Windows 10 I would go anywhere near (LTSB), is the one that normal Plebs on the street can't get.... Microsoft don't want you running the version of Windows 10 that only has the good stuff, and none of the bad stuff.
The problem with LTSB is that:
- it requires KMS server (this can be arranged for;)
- technically, one is breaking law just by distributing it outside corporate environment (so what;)
- just like every other Windows version it's a rolling set of features. Tomorrow's LTSB may suck as bad as Anniversary edition. No fix here.
At this point the version to have may the Chinese copy. Would this be grey or red import?
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