What’s Wrong with Windows Computers

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Or is it just a run of bad luck? I have been using PCs at work and home since 1994 and have been an avid fan of them and technology in general.

Enjoyed using XP, Vista and really liked Win 7. Then due to an accident I had to replace my Win 7 computer with a Win 8.1 laptop in November of 2014. The first one was an Acer that had so many issues out of the box that I returned it to Best Buy within the week. The replacement was a Dell laptop which had and still has chronic issues with the touchpad. Despite driver changes and a replaced touchpad tap to click still turns itself on constantly and only a restart will fix the problem. Win 8.1 in my experience was far worse than any version of Windows I had used previously. I have since upgraded that machine to Win 10 and glad I did as the OS is a much better experience but 10 didn’t fix the touchpad issue.

In December of last year we added a Microsoft Surface 3 running Win 10 and it was a disaster. MicroSD cards would not stay mounted, it frequently required forced shutdowns and finally it simply quit functioning and would not boot in any mode. In the course of trying to resolve the issues I experienced the least customer centric service I have experienced courtesy of Microsoft. So much so, that I will never own another piece of hardware from them if I can avoid it. Luckily since I bought it from Costco I was able to get my money back and move on.

We replaced the Surface with a Lenovo 700 Ideapad and we are very happy with the form factor, screen, keyboard and its operation. We have had it since March. It frequently has the problem of “plugged in, not charging” which Lenovo has no solution for other than sending it in to be repaired which I haven’t done. It seems that plugging it into a different outlet seems to fix the problem and it seems that despite that warning the battery charge level never drops. Also the screen seems to have an issue in that when on a solid black screen there is a cloudy white area in the lower middle part of the screen. Since the only time I see that black screen is on boot up we simply live with it. It also loses most of the icons on the taskbar for no apparent reason. The only fix for that is a restart of Windows Explorer.

We just end up keeping these computers and make the best of a poor situation and work around the issues or simply live with them.

So, I’m curious, is this normal now for computers?

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I believe most of these problems are the result of poor quality control forced upon the manufacturers by the necessity of cutting production costs.

Good QC takes intervention by trained people and these people cost money. With the automated assembly used now, most of the products will turn out OK and it is cheaper to replace the defective ones under warranty than test all of them.

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I believe most of these problems are the result of poor quality control forced upon the manufacturers by the necessity of cutting production costs.

Good QC takes intervention by trained people and these people cost money. With the automated assembly used now, most of the products will turn out OK and it is cheaper to replace the defective ones under warranty than test all of them.

That makes sense. I would say that makes the case for Apple. However, the only Apple product I own is an Ipad which is not without its problems. In fact the only devices we own that have been pretty trouble free are the two android phones we own.

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is it just a run of bad luck?…is this normal now for computers?

Bad luck, not normal. I’ve been using personal computers for nearly 40 years, and the reliability, stability, and ease-of-use of hardware and software has steadily improved. I’ve had 3 motherboards blow in that time, two of them were a month apart–so it goes like that at times. But as Nate said, most of the products will turn out OK.

I would say that makes the case for Apple

Apple’s gear is made by the same companies which make everyone else’s gear, so you shouldn’t expect it to be much worse or better. Afaics the extra money Apple make on their products goes into marketing, product appearance, and the bank, rather than other areas of the business.

If you have to use laptops and want the best probability of trouble-free good stuff, then you need to look at the premium brands above Lenovo or Apple. The Alienware desktop replacement I bought second-hand 3 years ago is still going strong–being second-hand, I got it for the same price as a new Apple, great value.

Other companies at the laptop high-end are Razer, Digital Storm, Aorus, Velocity Micro, BOXX Technologies, Maingear, Chillblast, Puget Systems, Schenker, Falcon Northwest, AVADirect, and Origin–while Panasonic specialize in rugged models. Generic companies which have premium models which might be good enough are your Lenovo, Dell, Acer, MSI, Apple, Toshiba and Asus. Unless you need some bleeding-edge performance, you will find best value 1 or 2 generations behind the latest of the premium brands.

I never used the touchpad, but there are alternatives like a joystick built into the keyboard or a trackball.

Laptops are constrained by size and mobility needs, so they’re never going to match a desktop at the same price. You’re stuck with relatively lower performance, reliability etc unless you go high-end.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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Lugh, appreciate the info. Most of the brands you mentioned I have never heard of, so, glad to learn something new.

Given our work environment touchpads are the best alternative or whatever is built into the laptop. The Lenovo TP works flawlessly. But, regarding the Dell touchpad problem plugging in a mouse works fine it just isn’t practical most of the time.

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Personally I refuse to accept such problems as normal. And I believe it is important to not quietly acquiesce; doing so literally normalizes poor quality for the manufacturers and retailers. Let them get away with it and many will sink into a morass of mediocrity and junk.

You cannot 100% stop it of course. I had a memorable experience back in the early 90’s (corporate IT support). An entire shipment of monitors were lemons. Great specs, good price, and the early experience of using them was very promising. Then one by one, the image quality on them went down the literal and metaphorical tube. We sent every one back, and most of them got fixed several times. Except the problems always returned.

And that’s just one story. There are lots more.

Even decent hardware though, eventually begins to fail. Once it’s out of warranty and beyond a certain age, you are usually better off trying to live with the problems. Assuming you can of course.

But brand new stuff? There’s no excuse.

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For the correct battery state to show, the battery may need recalibrating but if the machine is plugged into the AC then there shouldn’t be any discharge on the battery, although it’s reckoned that it does get used and is in a perpetual stage of being topped up.

There is a section in this article on that – http://batterycare.net/en/guide.html

As for the system tray icons disappearing, is there anything in Event Viewer recorded for when this occurs.

The icon cache can be rebuilt to see if that resolves the problem –

http://www.howtogeek.com/232779/how-to-rebuild-a-broken-icon-cache-in-windows-10/

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5645-icon-cache-rebuild-windows-10-a.html

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jcgc50, it’s possible you are just cursed. :o:

It’s true that electronics have become a disposable commodity, much like everything else has. It’s true that production volume now far outstrips the ability of QC to keep up. It’s true that the result of this is that the number of failures is going to increase. But in my experience, it doesn’t seem to show up as much as you might expect.

Electronics just seem to work and pretty much keep on working. They are more likely to suffer from technological extinction than product failure. Batteries are still a weak link and are likely the first thing to fail and can be expensive to replace.

As for Microsoft product support, I will admit to have had my share of problems with most software support and MS is no different. But from what I have seen of Surface support, it is better than what I would expect to get from most hardware vendors.

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gsmith. Perhaps I am cursed. I have started another thread with what appears to be the beginnings of a failure of the hard drive on my 1.5 year old Dell laptop.

My experience with Surface support was in a class by itself when it comes to a customer support failure. I won’t bore you with the details.

With the exception of my experiences with computers since November 2014, I would have agreed with your assessment regarding the state of computer reliability.

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It just seems like there’s a longevity issue with a lot of Windows machines. This could be based on my own experiences and be nothing more than anecdotal evidence, I honestly don’t know. But it just seems like there’s a degradation in performance that happens on a sharper curve than it should. Hardware issues, HDD issues.. things just seem to pop up and create problems so quickly. With all the technological advances we’ve made you’d think this would happen at a much slower rate.. but I guess if it did, we wouldn’t keep buying new machines as often. :/

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IMO, this is primarily a result of the never ending pressure on OEMs to produce the cheapest machine possible. Beginning with netbooks and continuing ever since you see cheaper components being used by all the OEMs. All of them chase the lowest possible component and assembly costs as they have conditioned the buying public to expect lower prices than can be charged and still make a reasonable profit.

--Joe

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IMO, this is primarily a result of the never ending pressure on OEMs to produce the cheapest machine possible. Beginning with netbooks and continuing ever since you see cheaper components being used by all the OEMs. All of them chase the lowest possible component and assembly costs as they have conditioned the buying public to expect lower prices than can be charged and still make a reasonable profit.

In theory the solution to that would be voting with our wallets, as the saying goes. However, that doesn’t seem to matter. Two of the computers I bought, in part, because the Dell and Lenovo got relatively good ratings, and yet, they have failed to meet expectations.

At this point, I continue to use PCs because there are programs that I can’t duplicate on a Mac. However, I would consider switching to a Mac and installing a Windows OS to use the few programs that I need. That said, my experience with my Ipad 3rd generations suggests that they may not be any more reliable. If that is the case I certainly don’t want to pay a premium price and end up with the same quality.

It almost seems that there is too great a focus on creating the next new thing and no focus on perfecting what has already been created.

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It almost seems that there is too great a focus on creating the next new thing and no focus on perfecting what has already been created.

Sounds like Windows 10!

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IMO, this is primarily a result of the never ending pressure on OEMs to produce the cheapest machine possible. Beginning with netbooks and continuing ever since you see cheaper components being used by all the OEMs. All of them chase the lowest possible component and assembly costs as they have conditioned the buying public to expect lower prices than can be charged and still make a reasonable profit.

I think you’re right on the money here. And this goes well beyond just computers, it’s how a lot of things are being built now. Things used to really be built to last.. now things are kind of just built to last until the next model is released. A shame but it’s how these companies maximize their profit margins.

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FWIW, I used to build my own computers (for myself and my business) because I could choose what components I wanted and it was invariably cheaper.

At some point in the past, I switched to Dell Business computers (PowerEdge server, Optiplex desktop and Latitude laptop). They tended to be more expensive, but they had long warranties and really were better made than almost anything else I could purchase.

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Here is another example of what I am getting at. With Windows 7 I had an OS that seldom needed to be restarted and almost never required a forced shutdown. With Win 8.1 forced shutdowns happened often as well as restarts. Win 10 improved but still requires restarts because something just stops working properly. An example is the taskbar. It will often just lose the notification area and half the icons or simply stop auto-hiding. Initially I was restarting the computer until I learned to use task manager to restart windows explorer. These are things that simply never happened with 7.

So, the problems I am talking about go well beyond hardware reliability.

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Seems like you need to reset your Win10 system.

--Joe

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Seems like you need to reset your Win10 system.

Thanks for the suggestion. While a reset isn’t as big a pain as a reinstall I would prefer to avoid it. Moreover, I have two Win 10 laptops. On the older Dell I upgraded from Win 8.1 to Win 10 and on the newer Lenovo it came pre-installed. They both exhibit this behavior so I have my doubts that a reset would resolve the problem.

In response to the possible argument that perhaps it is something I have installed I would say that the Lenovo is essentially as it was out of the box.

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Have you considered a repair install? That should keep all your programs and data. (I would probably make an image before trying anything drastic.)

Image or Clone often! Backup, backup, backup, backup......
- - - - -
Home Built: Windows 10 Home 64-bit, AMD Athlon II X3 435 CPU, 16GB RAM, ASUSTeK M4A89GTD-PRO/USB3 (AM3) motherboard, 512GB SanDisk SSD, 3 TB WD HDD, 1024MB ATI AMD RADEON HD 6450 video, ASUS VE278 (1920x1080) display, ATAPI iHAS224 Optical Drive, integrated Realtek HD Audio

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Have you considered a repair install? That should keep all your programs and data. (I would probably make an image before trying anything drastic.)

I am not sure what you mean by repair install. I don’t have any win 10 external media and I am familiar with a reset and system restore. Given that the problem is on two computers, as I indicated, I am not confident that a reset/restore is going to fix anything.

The temporary solution of windows explorer restart is quick and easy so just living with it.

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You might consider trying to disable or remove any File Explorer extensions. See How to list Explorer extensions and disable them.

--Joe

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You might consider trying to disable or remove any File Explorer extensions. See How to list Explorer extensions and disable them.

Tell me if I am doing this correctly. I downloaded and ran Autoruns. Clicked on the Explorer tab and looked at the list. Nothing was there that would be considered a virus or malware. I also use Bitdefender Antivirus and the premium version of Malwarebytes and have no issues there.

I have run SFC /scannow and nothing was amiss.

Thanks
Jim

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Use the other two utilities – ShellMenuView & ShellExView. You should disable the shell extensions. They may not be malware but could be corrupted or not totally compatible.

--Joe

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production volume now far outstrips the ability of QC to keep up. It’s true that the result of this is that the number of failures is going to increase.

Higher production volumes will mean fewer failures, not more–speaking of good companies, of course, like the main long-time PC makers.

QC has been degraded as a means of assuring quality for decades, certainly since the 80s in more advanced companies, since as you say, it can’t keep up. But it never could–that’s why cars used to have bits falling off on the road in the ‘good old days’.

There have been considerable advances in manufacturing management techniques since the days when QC was the best available quality method. PCs today are different class compared to those of the 80s, both hardware and software.

It just seems like there’s a longevity issue with a lot of Windows machines.

Quality is always linked to price. A $300 PC is going to die quicker than a $900 PC, on average. Since Apple don’t offer economy or reasonably priced products, their PCs will last longer than the average of other PCs–since the bulk of purchases are at the economy and reasonable end of the market. But I’d back the premium PC builders I listed in my earlier post to last longer than Apples, on average.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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I’ve been on computers since 1970 and personal computers since 1983, when I bought my first “IBM-compatible”, running MS-DOS3. I reluctantly left the DOS platform (at 5.0) after my checkbook management software of choice would no longer work unless I used Win95. I used all the current Win versions at work, but never chose to upgrade at home until necessary. I continued that trend through WinXP Pro, until Win8 was offered for $40. I jumped on it! Then Win8.1, then the free upgrade to Win10. I waited a few months for initial bugs to get fixed, then jumped on it! I’ve never been happier – Win10 is fast, stable, secure and does everything I need (email, browsing, finances). Having said all that, this post is to chastise those who nit-pic and complain all the time about everything under the sun. To me, a normal user after years as a power user, Win10 is the PERFECT OS!

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Having said all that, this post is to chastise those who nit-pic and complain all the time about everything under the sun. To me, a normal user after years as a power user, Win10 is the PERFECT OS!

Gosh, lucky you!!!! :o:
If I were you, I wouldn’t be so fast to judge other peoples problems and while you’re at it, maybe give some helpful advice to people that need help ( just a suggestion ).

Don't take yourself so seriously, no one else does
All W10 Pro at 22H2,(2 Desktops, 1 Laptop).

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Anyone who never has problems with their computer or software is very likely a minimal-user of both.

They are the lucky ones alright!

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I’ve been a subscriber to Consumer Reports magazine for at least 20 years and during most of that time they have been tracking personal computer failure rates. They survey a large portion of their 7 million subscribers every year, or every other year, and the results have been rather consistent over the years. Apple has always been the most reliable with a failure rate around 7% – 10%. Windows computers have a failure rate ranging from 16% – 23%. For this year, the most reliable computers are the Apple MacBook Air and Apple Macbook Pro, with failure rates of 7% and 9%. The most unreliable computers are the HP Envy and Lenovo Y Series, with failure rates of 20% and 23%. During the first year of use, a Windows computer is three times more likely to fail than an Apple computer.

As Lugh mentioned, this contrast between Apple and Windows probably has a lot to do with price and quality strategies. Apple goes for quality and then charges a higher price, while the mass market Windows manufacturers go for lower prices and then lower the quality.

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I’ve been a subscriber to Consumer Reports magazine for at least 20 years and during most of that time they have been tracking personal computer failure rates. They survey a large portion of their 7 million subscribers every year, or every other year, and the results have been rather consistent over the years.

Notwithstanding any impartiality concerns, is this not a very small sample size?

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Notwithstanding any impartiality concerns, is this not a very small sample size?

Consumer Reports magazine has been impartial since it began in 1936. That’s actually one of its core character traits. I used to work in the consumer research industry. Assuming a research survey is properly constructed, for a simple national survey to have statistically significant results, only 2,000 responses are required. I don’t know how many responses they get for their personal computer surveys, but given the number of responses I’ve seen for other surveys they did and how common personal computer ownership has become, my guess would be they get at least 100,000 responses, so more than enough to be accurate.

For those seeking a desktop computer, I would suggest you avoid the mass market brands and look at the brands made in the USA, some of which Lugh mentioned. I had a post about this last year: http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//170615-Recommend-new-computer-for-Win10-What-s-out-there?p=1018593#post1018593

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…For those seeking a desktop computer, I would suggest you avoid the mass market brands…

Better to get a local computer technician to custom-build a desktop system to suit you.

The “mass market brands” models available off-the-shelf in retail stores or even online too often are seriously out-of-date at time-of-delivery. Why?, because it simply takes some months for an OEM to set up a new model computer then ship to overseas wholesalears/retailars.

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For those seeking a desktop computer, I would suggest you avoid the mass market brands and look at the brands made in the USA, some of which Lugh mentioned.

Depends on budget and needs. Eg I would never go that route, as cost is an issue for me. Apple and better are all over-priced for the value you get.

The “mass market brands” models available off-the-shelf in retail stores or even online too often are seriously out-of-date at time-of-delivery.

Only if money is no object, then of course your and Cloud’s approach is fine. When money does count, then you want the out-of-date stuff–the latest components come at a hefty premium, close to double the price of the previous generation and with maybe only half the reliability in the first year.

Another point is that hardware goes obsolete so quickly, with the rate of advancement which still exists, so it’s often bad value paying for a computer to last. $500 every 3 years is better than $1,000 every 6 years imo.

Middle ground are business machines which are already as fast and powerful as needed for the job. Then reliability and warranty for dozens/thousands of machines are key factors, which is where the large brand names come in.

Self-build or local custom-build are probably the best value long-term for enthusiasts like WS readers. You can get a case and PSU intended to last 10 years, a graphics card aimed at 2 years, and a motherboard for 4 years. So you’re not buying a new PC so much as regularly upgrading and recycling parts of it.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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Thanks for the figs Cloud. I’m a bit surprised that Apple’s failure rate is nearly half of the general PC rate.

Apple goes for quality and then charges a higher price, while the mass market Windows manufacturers go for lower prices and then lower the quality.

On top of that, there’s Apple’s ‘walled garden’. They control most of their hardware, and there’s far less software for OSX. Those two should mean far fewer failures.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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