WINDOWS 10 By Richard Hay This past July, Microsoft’s flagship operating system, Windows 10, reached its fifth anniversary. Over the past half-decade,
[See the full post at: The inevitable OS: Windows 10 at five years]
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There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
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The inevitable OS: Windows 10 at five years
- This topic has 26 replies, 18 voices, and was last updated 2 years, 10 months ago.
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My solution to Win10 forced updates is the third-party WuMgr by David Xanatos:
Within the WuMgr program, I set the options to:
- Block Access to WU Servers
- Disable Automatic Update
- Disable Update Facilitators
- Hide WU Settings Page
- Disable Store Auto Update
Using WuMgr with these options on my Win10 systems I have never once had an update downloaded or installed without first selecting it myself. Once a month (when Woody drops the Defcon level to at least 3 or 4) I’ll use WuMgr to manually go and check for updates. Anything in the list of available updates that I don’t want I simply hide. The ones that I choose to accept (usually based on Susan’s Master Patch List) I go ahead and select to download and install. Once my monthly updating is complete, I make sure that WuMgr is set back to disable all updating until the following month.
The only real disadvantage to this method is that you need to remember to manually check for updates each month. Although for me that’s not an issue; since that’s exactly how I handled updates previously on my Win7 and Win8.1 systems.
One other factor to consider is that WuMgr is a third-party program, which may make some people uncomfortable. (I know that I felt that way initially.) But after using it on multiple systems over the past year, I’ve found it to be stable and reliable — at least more so than the current Windows Update from MS with their ever-changing user interface and options settings that come and go from one release to another.
1 user thanked author for this post.
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I like Windows 10, except for the way that updates are handled.
I also like Windows 10, but updates are not an issue for me; I have driver updates blocked via Group Policy, and other than that I stay fully updated, currently running OS Build 19041.572.
I’ll be upgrading to 20H2 as soon as it is released via the MCT.
Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!We were all once "Average Users". We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems, we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.1 user thanked author for this post.
There are some things about Win10 I like. I much prefer the high contrast white on black UI (I’m an old geezer, my eyesight’s not what it once was), and… it runs all the programs I want it to run (something that couldn’t be said for Win7)
But, it’s not content, as Win7 was, to just sit there quietly and run the programs I want it to run. It’s like some hyperactive kid always whining for your attention, and fiddling with things when your back is turned
I stick with it, because at the moment it’s the only OS that runs all the programs I want to run on a daily basis, but, if that situation ever changes, then I’ll be giving serious thought to ditching it
2 users thanked author for this post.
Over the past half-decade, Microsoft has put a lot of work into Win10
If only it were good work… It surely is several times more complicated now – yet – somehow doesn’t do much of anything more than its predecessors did, even on decent computer hardware. Sigh. And what it DOES do now does with several additional doses of mediocrity and bloat. I have selected/moved/closed the wrong window at least several times this past week. Aero Glass would have avoided that.
Oh, and just late last week I looked over a dual Xeon Win 10 test system (dedicated to automated product testing) that was recording timeouts during basic operations, such as cold-starting the product. I took a look at the setup and, long story short, eliminated upwards of 45 running processes from that system that are useless given its purpose. I could have gone even further but testing is now proceeding smoothly and rapidly.
-Noel
3 users thanked author for this post.
A lot of people have posted grievances with Windows 10 taxing their hardware more than a corrupt medieval tax collector. Allow me to share my own…
I currently use a Mac as my daily driver now, after having been driven off Windows with the sheer lunacy that has plagued the OS for five years now with no sign of stopping. My old Windows laptop still sees use as a gaming rig, and to occasionally run the Windows program that doesn’t work well in a virtual machine. It has 12 GB of DDR3 RAM and an Intel Core i5… not the best, but also not the worst either. What’s really sluggish about it is its 1 TB HDD, which is the bottleneck of the system. It’s slow. Only an SSD upgrade would save it, but as the laptop is no longer my daily driver and my Mac has an SSD already, I don’t see the need to upgrade it.
Ever since upgrading to v1909, I’ve noticed that Windows 10 happily attempts to defragment the drive when the laptop is idle, which… okay… but I explicitly disabled automatic disk defragmentation in settings, so I have no idea why Windows 10 thinks it’s okay to ignore my preferences. My poor hard drive, being forced to thrash around at 100% usage, all for Microsoft’s own strange desire to eradicate fragmentation as if it were the plague. Please, Microsoft, I’d like to get some years out of my hard drive, please leave my hard drive alone!
Also, I have no idea why, but the Office Click-to-Run client goes absolutely hocus pocus on that laptop. Often, after plugging the laptop into the wall, it starts up and then hogs all of the CPU, running it at 100%, doing nothing at all—even if there are no Office apps running! Ending the process simply causes it to restart, like a zombie coming up from the grave. Thankfully, going into Services, stopping the Click-to-Run service, and then disabling it brings some sanity… only for it to automatically re-enable itself the next time I restart my computer and plug it in. So annoying! And since Office apps don’t work unless the service is running, I have to let that beast run my CPU at 100% whenever I just want to use Word. Microsoft Word is using 100% of my CPU. Ugh. Please. Microsoft. Why? Lay off my computer.
2 users thanked author for this post.
from this page:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro
and this one as well:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-enterprise-and-educationStart Date – 07/29/2015
Retirement Date – 10/14/20251 user thanked author for this post.
Over the past half-decade, Microsoft has put a lot of work into Win10
If only it were good work… It surely is several times more complicated now – yet – somehow doesn’t do much of anything more than its predecessors did, even on decent computer hardware. Sigh. And what it DOES do now does with several additional doses of mediocrity and bloat. I have selected/moved/closed the wrong window at least several times this past week. Aero Glass would have avoided that.
Oh, and just late last week I looked over a dual Xeon Win 10 test system (dedicated to automated product testing) that was recording timeouts during basic operations, such as cold-starting the product. I took a look at the setup and, long story short, eliminated upwards of 45 running processes from that system that are useless given its purpose. I could have gone even further but testing is now proceeding smoothly and rapidly.
-Noel
Agreed.
But, good for whom? Microsoft? Advertisers?? Data Miners???
Heaven forbid it would good be for the end user.
The fact there is a ‘new’ version every six months simply says that Microsoft really has no idea what a good OS is. Try this, tweak that, add something, remove other things. Firm adherence to the Microsoft motto; “If it ain’t broke, fix it ’til it is.”
Get rid of the forced updates, telemetry, and the excess, unneeded, useless ‘Services’, the Windows Store (or what ever it is called), allow disabling or deletion of unwanted ‘features’, allow full user customization…
9 users thanked author for this post.
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Your last para.: “Get rid of forced updates”, etc.: Congrats on your fairly succinct, to-the-point, description of the typical Linux OS. It’s a long story, but I_cannot_wait_until the day I start the morning by booting my Linux Mint 20, and stay in it all day, and all week. Your last para. did, indeed, sum up most of my beefs with Win 10 Pro. Oh, how I missed Win 7 Pro! Linux: It_just_works!
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Indeed! As a computer enthusiast, not just one who sees them as tools (they are that, but not only that), I can definitely say that nothing has put the fun back into computing like my move to Linux. I had that level of enthusiasm with MS-DOS back in the day… not so much with Windows 3.0 and 3.1, but it came back in with Windows 95, then XP, and then 7, though in decreasing amounts with each new release. I moved to 8.1 for practicality (mainly the additional three years of support, though it turns out that I didn’t need them), and even though I was able to make it into a pretty good facsimile of Windows 7 with aftermarket modifications, it wasn’t something I was particularly enthusiastic about. Win 10, of course… it’s the Windows version that’s got what it takes to make a Windows man leave his home.
The original article did say that MacOS and Linux were alternatives, which is true, and that most people would just keep using Windows anyway (even if they didn’t particularly like it), which is sadly also true. That’s where he apparently comes to the conclusion that Windows 10 is the inevitable OS… but it’s actually eminently evitable for a lot more people than who will actually leave Windows behind. Many of them think it’s inevitable, though, and so they never seriously consider trying something else. Perception becomes reality for many.
Some people absolutely must use Windows-only programs, and alternatives like VMs or WINE won’t work (yet?), so for them perhaps Windows 10 is truly inevitable. Still, a lot of people who choose to tolerate Windows 10 rather than to leave it would find Mac or Linux quite hospitable if they were willing to commit to leaving Windows behind. That’s their choice, though, and it is theirs to make. But if it is, truly, a choice, I would say that Windows 10 is not inevitable for them.
Of course, those who like Windows 10 don’t find it inevitable either, as they choose to use it willingly. Those who have tried the alternatives and like them even less than Windows 10 also are making a choice, so it’s not really inevitable then either.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)4 users thanked author for this post.
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Yes, you nailed it. Enthusiasts!
Believe it or not, I felt that level of enthusiasm in the time when Vista matured… When Microsoft showed they could actually stabilize OS operation around the venerable NT core/kernel. It provided (on beefy gear) a computing experience where you just do stuff all day every day and not worry about the system – until you WANT to – was one of my “golden eras of computing”. I remember feeling when Win 7 came out that they were already moving some parts away from being “good for users”. What saved us back then was that each OS had a few years to become known to expert users, so we could learn how to tweak and augment it to be well-oiled – and those few years allowed Microsoft to tidy up the rough edges. Radically quickening the release cadence just broke all that, ceremoniously.
Fast forward to 2020… Because of requirements out of my control this year I had to move off my last remaining island of sanity – I had a top-end dual Xeon workstation from 2013 running Windows 8.1… Highly tuned, tweaked, and augmented with both top-end hardware (think SSD array, modern GPU, USB-3 ports, etc.). Perpetually licensed, stable without any failures for months of 24/7 usage, not even getting/needing any patches since 2017. Just about as good and stable a computing experience as one can get. Another “golden era” for me. I really liked that setup.
I didn’t tear it down, though – it’s still here. I built another one on refurbished hardware just as powerful – more powerful, actually, as several hardware parts are better, and I have even more monitors. It does run Win 10 stably, and I get my work done – but now with bloat and this incessant grind where Microsoft tries to add things to it that I don’t want and certainly didn’t seek.
Long story short, Win 10 on high-end hardware can be made acceptable, but it’s a little less stable, more irritating to use, is chatty beyond belief online, and all in all doesn’t feel like a trusted friend.
-Noel
5 users thanked author for this post.
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OK, I get the objections to the general intrusiveness to privacy and forced updates from Microsoft that are baked into Windows 10. Ugh!
But I must say that the hard work to develop a better OS has payed off, in at least one area!
I recently replaced my entire system motherboard, CPU, and RAM with a new generation of hardware. Then when first booting up from the hard drive that contained the Windows 10 build from my old hardware, I got a message that a few devices were being updated, and then it was back up and running again shortly after! Yay!
This is the first time that I did not have to do a clean install of Windows on new hardware!
Note: I did need to re-activate Windows 10, and every other application that requires that its activation be tied to the hardware. Small price to pay in comparison to re-installing everything again! 🙂
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
2 users thanked author for this post.
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I think your bad experiences with upgrades may have depended on your specific hardware, JohnW. I’ve had the experience going way back that I did not need to install Windows when changing hardware. In fact, thinking back on things, I only ever installed each major version of Windows once on a series of workstations numbering greater than the number of versions of Windows. And I just either moved drives or restored backups when I changed computer hardware.
I installed these operating systems exactly once and maintained them in good working order for years:
Windows XP x64 (bought with hardware)
Windows Vista x64 (installed in 2007)
Windows 7 x64 (installed in 2009)
Windows 8.1 x64 (installed in 2013)The hardware systems I had, noting that other than buying the first one with XP x64 preinstalled in 2005 I did NOT change operating systems at the same time as changing the hardware:
Dell Precision 470 (ran XP x64)
Dell Precision 470 with dual faster CPUs (XP x64 then Vista x64)
Dell Precision 490 (Vista X64 then Windows 7)
Dell Precision T5400 (Windows 7 then Windows 8.1)
Dell Precision T5500 (Windows 8.1)-Noel
1 user thanked author for this post.
I think your bad experiences with upgrades may have depended on your specific hardware, JohnW. I’ve had the experience going way back that I did not need to install Windows when changing hardware. In fact, thinking back on things, I only ever installed each major version of Windows once on a series of workstations numbering greater than the number of versions of Windows. And I just either moved drives or restored backups when I changed computer hardware.
That’s interesting. I’ll assume that your hardware leaps were incremental, so the OS didn’t require new hardware architecture support in most of your upgrades, or either you performed a sysprep?
I went from 3rd gen Intel Core to a 9th gen Intel Core system without doing anything special, and Windows 10 barely blinked! I was holding my breath…
My previous hardware upgrade was from x86 to x64, so a clean install of Windows 7 was mandatory for that. Plus it was for Intel Pentium 4 to Intel Core 3rd gen.
The only thing left from the original XP build 15 years ago is the case. Everything else has been swapped out. 🙂
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
I remember when I went from XP to finally try Vista.
I had a procedure to customize XP that was 2-3 pages long, I think.
I spent 3 days learning Vista, horrified at how they took a simple, elegant (at least at the functional level) interface and created all kind of needlessly complex places to put stuff that was simple to find before in the control panel or directly from the start menu. Getting around Vista the first time was disconcerting. Big business printers weren’t working and a support person at HP told me to wait because Microsoft would fix it in a few months!
I saw the potential. I saw that Vista was amazingly powerful under, it was safer, it had many great ideas inside to integrate newer technologies. I got it. I also saw that on each startup, it lagged while doing a huge registry backup or something, that it had something like useless checks for video piracy that was probably using cpu cycles to verify if they should lower the video quality on the fly, I saw plenty of useless services. It was just not finished and messy. I tweaked it. Then it was great because the under the hood was great and it had been my favorite OS. Installed once. Ran until support was cut with now flaw and as fast as new. But it wasn’t the best in terms of how an OS should present itself. It was unnecessarily complex in its presentation. Microsoft has been bad for a long time at that. They dumb things down for people who don’t know computers, but these people would probably not even use those things and then the Pros wonder what they are talking about. They break things while trying to make them simpler without success. So Vista was a mess, but once you knew it and tamed it, you could get comfortable and productive in this mess that you knew and that stayed the same.
I liked Vista’s interface the best, with aero, the right use of colors and transparency and not the ineffective launcher of Windows 7. Why Microsoft didn’t keep it as an option in later release and made it difficult to bring back the quicklaunch bar (and keep hiding it from time to time on Win 8.1)? I would really like to have a Windows 10 that can have the now classic Vista aero interface.
They should have kept every setting in one place and stop with the multi-windows with left text shortcuts to other windows of setting like the horrible network places that appeared while they removed the shortcut to the network cards that was in the start menu. Remember how easy it was? Now WIN+R, ncpa.cpl is maybe the fastest. Settings should be a place you go to to check everything you can tweak as a user and once you went through it, you know you didn’t miss anything. Also, you need to be able to quickly get explanations on any feature you wonder what it does so you can make enlightened choices. It should also be easy to save settings and send them to someone less knowledgeable so they can apply them to their own machine.
And the bloat… They toned down services in 7. I noticed they had done what I had done on many services on Vista, not starting them by default. 7 was great but I had to run it on classic theme to know which window is active properly and even then, there is a bug that never got fixed that shows the wrong active window in Excel because I use a more classic way of seeing each open window in the task bar. Working with many Windows at the same time on huge monitors, I prefer to one-click each of them. Annoying. So I ran 7 until death on a very, very ugly classic theme desktop with an annoying bug, but I was still more productive that way than with a normal theme where active window is not clear (in Vista, the active window was “pushed” in the taskbar, it was very clear).
8.1 was, once tuned, pretty nice. That was the best under the hood when running classic shell on top. It is extremely stable. Never topped Vista’s interface of course.
My procedure was more than 50 pages so I built tools to automate lots of things. That was great if you thought “I will spend the time to do it well once and then I will be fine for a few years”. I was able to install heavily customized lean powerful machines much faster.
Then 10 happened and I wanted to like it, I drank the words of the great inspiring Satya Nadella promising a Windows that people would love, considering users feedback, etc. I dreamt of Spartan, that simple, elegant, lean browser that would respect standards and was the complete opposite of IE. Well, I was just dreaming and was in for a brutal awakening, much sooner that I thought.
10 bit me with very stupid bugs from the start. One bug that drove me here the first time was that 10 was completely freezing my computer every week because it was off the Internet. After discovering many nice knowledgeable folks here, I found out I had to disable a new way Microsoft added to synchronize the clock every week and the freezing was gone… then I got many other bugs here and there over the years, but also a lot of annoyances. I realized immediately how bad was the fake Start Menu that I never use. I thought, are they really thinking people will be happy with that horrible joke? Windows Search that I use more than a hundred times a day started by being bad, then really bad, then less bad with worse things, and then this most useful and maybe only truly really game changing feature from XP for me at a user level never got back to the cleaner form it had in Vista and 7. And in all those years, I guess nobody in the feedback hub said or was listened too that it should do like Google did in 1998 and show you a relevant file even if you misspell by one letter. I also was not happy that they added even more settings bloat so I had to take a lot more time to check settings that were doubled in old and new settings panels and all kind of new places like the Cortana gear. Also, never had so much issues with an OS. Never an OS made me loose so much productivity managing updates, checking settings, tweaking and being disappointed by the removal of useful features from the Pro version or the addition of mindless things that I had to disable.
I’m not stupid. Windows 10 is better than previous versions for some things under the hood and some not under the hood. I see things in new versions and I think oh that is a nice idea but I won’t use it, or that is a nice idea but it is not well implemented or that is a nice idea but it is only for Enterprise version. But the reality is it is also a lot worse on so many aspects and I see a lot of very bad ideas and very bad implementations. I’m not talking about frivoulous stuff (hey, I worked on the broken classic theme of Windows 7 for years, so I’m not going to make a big deal about esthetics when at least it works).
The thing is, I just don’t like Windows 10. For many valid reasons. When you play with it a bit more deep than the surface level, you find all kind of things that don’t work, undocumented settings that don’t have the right behavior, GPs that don’t work. I put up with it and I find it fragile. I would really like Microsoft to have a different vision than the stupid WaaS that is promoting absurdities like the more than 5 years in the making slow transition from the old control panel to the new one. What do I gain from that as a user, having a bit more changed each version? Please, Microsoft, give your customers a choice of running LTS so at least they avoid the pain of having this water drop torture that WaaS is.
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I liked Vista’s interface the best, with aero, the right use of colors and transparency and not the ineffective launcher of Windows 7. Why Microsoft didn’t keep it as an option in later release and made it difficult to bring back the quicklaunch bar (and keep hiding it from time to time on Win 8.1)?
Branding. It’s the same reason they got rid of the Classic start menu in Windows 7. Windows was not allowed to look dated, not even if you, the PC owner, wanted it to, lest someone look over your shoulder and think that Windows isn’t the height of coolness.
I realized immediately how bad was the fake Start Menu that I never use. I thought, are they really thinking people will be happy with that horrible joke?
No. They are not obviously not concerned about whether people are happy with anything in Windows 10. That’s the beauty of having an “inevitable” OS, as the thread title says.
I would really like Microsoft to have a different vision than the stupid WaaS that is promoting absurdities like the more than 5 years in the making slow transition from the old control panel to the new one.
That started in Windows 8, in 2012! It’s been eight years. It’s also a bad idea to go from the outstanding control panel to the mess that is Settings. Since I’ve moved to Linux, I’ve noticed that all the desktop environments I have seen have various takes on the control panel for their settings, not Settings. The whole point of that was for the eventual “one UI to rule them all” Windows that works on phones and PCs, only they gave up on phones years ago.
What do I gain from that as a user, having a bit more changed each version?
It’s not about what you gain. It’s about what Microsoft gains, which is a delivery system for whatever change they want without triggering a backlash. If they just pushed some monetization scheme or other such consumer-unfriendly thing out via Windows update as a standalone, there would be too much attention focused on the update and how MS was callously using Windows Updates to send out those unwanted, consumer-unfriendly things.
If, however, they keep a frequent release schedule and populate it with bunches of useless fluff to fill up each press release, it gives cover to the nasty bits they may want to sneak in there. The bad bits will only be a small part of the “what’s new” article, with the new baubles taking up the bulk of the text, and the general tone will generally be that users got a bunch of good things and just one bad thing, with no user backlash of which to speak. That’s not to say that no one will complain, only that the level of complaints will fall into the “satisfaction not necessary” zone rather than the “too hot, retreat!” zone.
Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/16GB & GTX1660ti, KDE Neon
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, KDE Neon (and Win 11 for maintenance)3 users thanked author for this post.
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