It walks, it talks, it falls over a bit. Windows 10 is three years old Sunday is a big day in Vulture Central. No, not the football. Sunday is three years to the day when Microsoft’s apology for the Windows 8 generation was released to computer makers. Windows 10 would hit end users two weeks later, charged with undoing the Metro carnage. The background In 2015 Microsoft was still reeling from …
I tried to upgrade my mail server at home a couple of months ago as part of a general 'refresh'. Unfortunately the upgrade process kept falling over at phase two. I tried to read through the log files but there was too much crap in there to make much of it. It looked like at one point it was failing to talk to its SSD but since by that point it had copied Windows 10 on, moved everything around and was supposedly just tidying up that seemed unlikely.
Anyway while trying to investigate this I discovered that after several years (lol) of it being unable to pull down any updates the update fixer actually worked and it found 600MB of Windows 7 updates. So I applied them and after it rebooted I decided I'd had enough.
I will try and upgrade it to Win 10 again eventually but I need to build my strength up first :-/
Agreed. I use Windows 10 at work, and it is acceptable... but only because I'm using the unavailable-to-normal-people LTSB version. I still prefer Windows 7 even over this. It looks better, it's more responsive and less tacky.
@Pro
What are the genuine limitations of LTSB?
Microsith say that all sorts of things don't and others are not supported. I have been thinking that it might be a useful thing to triy out at work as 10 has not "proved ideal".
LTSB, as far as I can tell - and I've been using it for quite a while - is just a stable build of Windows 10 that doesn't receive feature updates, only security ones - without any childish adornments whatsoever.
There is no "modern" (read:metro) interface. Calculator is the old one from Windows 7. There is no windows store. None of that, at all. There are no forced reboots for updates.
The newest currently is 2016 LTSB, which is based on 1607. The next one is coming in autumn, as far as I understand it, and it'll be called 2019 LTSC.
Just in case you *do* want the windows store, I believe it can be installed with a line of powershell, but I haven't actually bothered to install it, because I've had no need to.
There is no "modern" (read:metro) interface.
What about "Settings"? That's in the UWP style, and with the control panel being removed bit by bit, it seems unavoidable. Must accommodate those mobile devices that don't exist, you know!
I have noticed recently that start menu searching for "update" gets you nothing, but searching for "windows update" finds the "are we up to date" control. They seem to be progressively hiding more stuff.
I know people who love onedrive but I hate it. Isn't it supposed to be a local cache? Why is it always so much slower than a normal file system for reading even when fully synced?
Linux services for windows? Who will that please? Someone with an irrational fear of vmplayer?
Win10 may be used for work, but at home I fire it up every few months to run windows update and the odd game of defense grid awakening which was sadly never ported.
P. Lee says..."I have noticed recently that start menu searching for "update" gets you nothing, but searching for "windows update" finds the "are we up to date" control. They seem to be progressively hiding more stuff."
I just typed "up... " into the search menu and "check for updates" popped up before I could get to the third letter.
Don't know what build of Win 10 you are using or what you might have changed to handicap its functionality but what you describe is not the way it behaves.
And there is not and never has been a "are we up to date" control. Not a clue what you are talking about.
" ... and it is acceptable... "
Lol. To some people almost anything is " acceptable"
To me some things I can work with as "acceptable"/ Things like ink pens, toilet paper, dish soap.
But an OS? One that is 3 years old and still is only acceptable?
Acceptable? Really?
Exactly. Whilst you might be able to fool aload of numpties by a big number change, Windows 10 is still little more than Windows 8.2
Windows 10, even the latest version is still horrendous in day to day use. It's still the half Metro half WinForms hell,and it broken in so many way, where Win7 just worked (my pet hate is how I need to close all my programs and log out, just because I re-docked my laptop and the numbers of screens or resolution changes).
Pretending that Windows10 fixes Windows8 disaster is very very misleading. It fixes a small amount of the problems, but the vast majority are still there.
I installed a windows start button skin (In my case Classic Shell, but there are others) and voila - Windows 7 look and feel over whatever Windows innards you have. There are some issues with 10, principally the controlling of updates and telemetry. Anyone complaining about the interface when it's so easy to fix shouldn't be calling themselves an IT Pro.
"I installed a windows start button skin (In my case Classic Shell, but there are others"
Me too. It reduces how objectionable Win 10 is. But it hardly solves all the problems with Win 10, and it certainly doesn't make it as good as Win 7.
" Anyone complaining about the interface when it's so easy to fix shouldn't be calling themselves an IT Pro."
You have apparently failed to notice that the author of Classic Shell has given up the project, stating that Microsoft has made it so difficult for him to maintain compatibility that he's certain he would not have been able to do it much longer in any case. This speaks volumes about Microsoft's whole approach - happily sacrificing consistency in order to reduce configurability.
By the way, I have used Windows 10 with Classic Desktop - it's still horrible.
In addition to the problems still in Windows 10, each "feature upgrade" breaks too many things. One finance related piece of software has to be run as an administrator in 10, but worked fine in 7 (I never deployed Windows 8.x systems because just 2 weeks of testing revealed too many insurmountable problems with applications and training).
The 1803 release broke a local business' accounting package requiring a roll-back to rel. 1709. Fortunately only one of the five accounting computers was on 10, the others were on 7.
The new release every 6 months and only 18 month support is a pain in the ass to try to keep things running.
1511 was shit. 1604 was good enough for office machines. 1703 (?) broke loads of shit for us. 1709 works nicely. 1803 was a load of steaming crap as far as breaking stuff went.
LTSB is great buuuuuuut we needed 2 store apps and minecraft education so no go. Next LTSB looks like it wont play with MS office so that will nail a few coffins.
Linux is great for our web server, file server, mariadb server etc but no use for our 400 school desktops. Linux wont run over half of software we need to run so we are stuck with windows.
@Danny 14
1511 was shit. 1604 was good enough for office machines. 1703 (?) broke loads of shit for us. 1709 works nicely. 1803 was a load of steaming crap as far as breaking stuff went.Windows 10 was/is shit.
There, fixed.
Next LTSB looks like it wont play with MS office so that will nail a few coffins.
Try Office 2013. It was introduced before LTSB and therefore has no problems as far as I can see.
Linux wont run over half of software we need to run so we are stuck with windows.
Can Wine do it? How about a decrapified Windows PE?
For me, It's not simply that Windows 10' suffers from 'Fit and finish' issues. It's just B.A.D. (Broken as designed). MS seems to have the mindset that they own your PC (or at least control of it).
I use Windows 10 at work (because I have to) and Windows 7 on my multiple systems at home.
It seems to me that Windows 10 is worse in so many ways than Windows 7 as far as the basic premises.
Telemetry spying/tracking, frequent monolithic forced updates (which seem to often break things for me), an inferior 'flat' Metro UI, trying to force you to switch to only 'apps' (so you buy all your programs through the 'store'), etc. etc.
You are still watching TV with WMC? Does the program schedule service still work? I had engineered all the PCs and network to use WMC seamlessly until WMC failed to make the jump to Windows 10. I tried all the various hacks with little success. I even had problems with WMC under Windows 7. A key part of WMC was the use of HDHOMERUN. No other cable interface was even close to usable after Comcast turned on encryption. Every Windows 7 update I would have to refresh the HDHOMERUN drivers. Once HDHOMERUN acquired the capability to record cable content I made the jump to Windows 10. I did the free upgrade using a redundant drive on each of 2 laptops and 1 desktop. Then I put the Windows 7 drives back. I repeated the process for every Windows 10 update for about a year. Now I am running Windows 10 on 4 laptops and 2 desktops. I do a lot of experimenting with Windows 10 on one of the desktops with numerous self-inflicted problems. One laptop is an ASUS T100 tablet that came with Windows 8 so I have seen it all. TV with HDHOMERUN on Windows 10 is very nice. The content recording is far better because the files are generic format instead of the WMC proprietary. format.
Still using 7 on old machine with 4GB maxed-out-RAM and despite occasional problems with external drives it works well.
Also works well on netbook and the 7200rpm 750GB drive uses a lot less power than the old 250.
Interesting to note that I actually did try running 10 on both but it was just too slow.
Unless M$ are nice and reduce the price of 10 upgrade for older but compatible systems (maybe call it 10L) then people are just not going to move.
Oh the LTSB saga. We had Mickeysoft in last year to help us get our head round how we're going to go about a W10 deployment. Considering we have a very polished and reliable (although admittedly quirky) W7 deployment regime in place, LTSB looked to be the immediate answer to the very un-corporate standard version. Plus in typical Sysadmin style everybody immediately donned the tinfoil hat approach to the constant "diagnostic" data leakage.
Originally M.Soft came in like henchmen. "NO YOU CANNOT USE LTSB. IT'S FOR CASH MACHINES AND LIFE SUPPORT ONLY". It felt like we were under the cosh, one "but we're not interested in your damn store" away from being waterboarded.
I'm assuming they got ejected from a lot of offices as this year they deployed another soldier but this time as a "free training session". The LTSB interrogation turned into an agony aunt. Instead of being pistol whipped, it was "please, I beg you, as a friend and ally, please do not use LTSB as you'll miss out on all this great stuff".
And so the W10 Disney Magic Kingdom Tile edition will soon be deployed.
And so the W10 Disney Magic Kingdom Tile edition will soon be deployed.
As far as I know, you get the licenses for both Enterprise and Enterprise LTSB together and you get to pick. Why the hell does your boss even care to listen to M$'s droids?
If you have a Windows 7 computer, you can upgrade (though that's really a misnomer) to Windows 10 for free. A properly activated Windows 7 to 8.1 machine will activate Windows 10 without a problem. Download the ISO and create bootable media with it and install from that. I believe that if you have enogh disk space, you can always go back; just keep the Windows 10 Activation Key because you can use it for a clean install if necessary.
Fundamentally, I would never do this to a physical machine but I have upgraded Windows 7 Pro VMs just to give it a go. It offers no compelling advantage in speed, usability or aesthetics; just a pain in the ass for care and feeding.
> Not while there are features that disappear with the upgrade. I'm not the only person who
> uses Media Centre as a television
Well, yes. While I seem to be in the minority here, and quite like Win10 for desktop/tablet use, the machine I built 10 years ago which sits under the TV and runs all my home entertainment with Windows Media Center will be staying on Win7 for obvious reasons.
Put the menu system back the way it was, stop pushing your solutions in my face, and let me turn off the Phone Home feature and we'll talk.
Also put the file explorer back to XP's style and stop burying the context of new windows.
"I would also be thrilled to have actual window borders back."
Just fornicating *NUKE* the entire "the Metro" interface changes that happened between 7 and "Ape", including the 2D FLATSO, "the Metro" in general, UWP, pastel blue on blinding white backgrounds, oversized non-intuitive shapes pretending to be buttons, and, as you mentioned, "practically BORDERLESS" windows that are hard to grab the edge of for re-sizing.
I used to have 3-pixel border widths configured in XP. i think you can still set that in 7. Of course, it all disappears in 10, because, MICRO-SHAFT knows BEST on how YOUR computer should look.
/me points out that APPEARANCE CONFIGURATION should _REALLY_ be an "accessibility" issue, because old eyes can't see those HORRIBLE 'the Metro" colors very well, at least NOT without eyestrain...
icon, because Win-10-nic is a *BIG* *FAT* *FAIL* and deserves to *DIE* a *HORRIBLE* *DEATH*.
Micro-shaft needs to DO WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT, and *STOP* trying to HERD us like CATTLE.
JohnFen writes:
I would also be thrilled to have actual window borders back.
That's just a theme, at least as far as the "desktop UI" bits go. Even though MS puts more restrictions on these than kernel drivers (themes have to be signed by Microsoft, a service they refuse to offer at all to third parties, while the far more dangerous kernel drivers only have to be signed by some recognized CA), it's quite possible to do. I haven't found any MS theme to be acceptable as-is since Classic, personally.
Where's the Phone Home feature hidden? I's a bit of code somewhere - a binary? So who knows where it is? One of the last updates of Win 10 on my gaming rig pushed most of my older games into unplayable state so I'm full well ready to start digging since I'm going to copy the games and saved data to an external then wipe and reinstall anyhow. If I can find that fucker and make it so it doesn't work, I'll suss it out on the reinstall and get it gone and do all updates manually. It's not like I do anything with the gaming rig other than play games with it..
Personally, I cannot believe how unstable Windows 10 is, today. I'm not a rabid anti-Windows-10 hater. I use Windows 10 professionally and at home and I have been developing on Windows-based platforms since 2000 and I feel that Windows 10, in 2018, is about as unstable an operating system as I have seen in a very long time.
To put a number on it, my workstation up-time is measured in hours! Even on the hated Windows 8, I could go for over a week without restarting, without a BSOD and without a total failure of Windows Explorer or some other vital piece of the shell. And that's on a developer desktop that gets all kinds of abuse thrown at it.
It's like being on Windows '98 SE all over again. Multiple restarts a day -- and most of them involuntary and unannounced.
I don't like the Slurp. I don't like the Store. I don't like Metro or Modern or whatever but even if you write all of that off as the status-quo and just accept it, Windows 10 is still failing to perform its basic function: providing a stable operating system, i.e. a thing that runs applications.
Every time I debate this with colleagues, we come to the same conclusion: Microsoft don't care about Windows anymore. They'd be quite happy if you were connecting to Office 365 and running stuff in Azure from Mac OS or Linux. Cloud matters; desktop does not.
Same here, my Windows 10 devices simply work... My main use laptop is measured in weeks/months of uptime, not hours or days.
I assume, like a lot of Windows problem users, there are inherent issues that most likely lie with the hardware.
I can only go by experience, personal devices work flawlessly, and a network running 300+ Windows 10 devices that cause me no problems at all as a Network Manager
I'd have to second the idea that something is seriously wrong.. The app store packaging structure seems more sound that the old windows installations, but of course there is a cost. Winsxs. All those identically named dlls that once we the bane of your existence are all lovingly and separately registered in winsxs each with a truncated guid, like signature. File corruptions can be identified and fixed automagicly with sfc, but god help you if somehow the sxs registrations go awol, or you think you can simply copy a file in to replace a corrupt one.
The OS is strong. (The failure rate of updates, given how they do the feature updates, is way lower than I would have expected ) I'd guess you've got some corruption in your sxs manifests. Wipe and reinstall i'm afraid.
Stop error codes are still viable and the crash logs are better than ever.
Unabashed linux fan. Windows is stuffed, but not in the way you describe. Its surprisingly durable.
Personally, I cannot believe how unstable Windows 10 is, today. I'm not a rabid anti-Windows-10 hater. I use Windows 10 professionally and at home and I have been developing on Windows-based platforms since 2000 and I feel that Windows 10, in 2018, is about as unstable an operating system as I have seen in a very long time.
You must be doing something very odd then, or running on dodgy hardware. I'm not a huge fan of Win 10 myself but it seems at least as stable as previous versions. My laptop at home is only rebooted if an update requires it (so perhaps three times a year) being left in sleep the rest of the time when I'm done with it. The PC I use when working from home has always been fine but to be fair I don't use it much.
My PC at work is left on all week and only powered down over the weekend. I'm a software developer (albeit a high level one) so my work machine gets a lot of stress. At the moment it's typically running three or four Visual Studio instances, two of which in debug mode spawn web sites and services with the third spawning an application and another web site. The machine is also hosting a Linux Postgres server and an Elastic search server.
It's been many, many years since I'd describe any Windows version as unstable. So called BSODs are a rarity and have been since Windows XP SP1. If you can give us more information perhaps we can help sort out what sounds like an annoying problem.
"You must be doing something very odd then, or running on dodgy hardware. "
I can't speak for the OP, but the Surface Pro I'm familiar with blue-screens several times a week. Utter rubbish hardware, but what do you expect from a no-name vendor at back-of-lorry prices, eh?
I would say one of three things:
Bad CPU cache, bad RAM or bad HDD.
I had problems once with 10 that later turned out to be a very slightly flaky RAM stick, had to do some extensive tests but eventually one of them showed up a rowhammer related problem.
I also determined that many machines which do not update are damaged in some way: never under-estimate the power of a fan clean/repaste of CPU.
A good tip is to load CPUID or a similar tool, if with moderate use the temperature spikes then take machine apart and clean it properly.
I did this on mine and found that the thermal paste had turned to grey powder so it obviously wasn't working. Newer ones use a cheaper compound that is optimized for a lower core temperature and degrades rapidly the hotter it gets.
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