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Windows 10 Fall Update Uninstalls Desktop Software Without Informing Users (ghacks.net)
ourlovecanlastforeve sends this report from Martin Brinkmann of gHacks: Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system may uninstall programs — desktop programs that is — from the computer after installation of the big Fall update that the company released earlier this month. I noticed the issue on one PC that I upgraded to Windows 10 Version 1511 but not on other machines. The affected PC had Speccy, a hardware information program, installed and Windows 10 notified me after the upgrade that the software had been removed from the system because of incompatibilities. There was no indication beforehand that something like this would happen, and what made this rather puzzling was the fact that a newly downloaded copy of Speccy would install and run fine on the upgraded system.
An IT Director I know had this happen with ESET antivirus as well, on multiple computers. He says fixes have been rolled out for both TH2 and the antivirus software to prevent this from happening. Other reports mention CPU-Z, AMD's Catalyst Control Center, and CPUID as software that's being automatically uninstalled.
The problem is that it's not the IT managers that decides what to use these days, it's top level management.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Windows 10 is an unfolding disaster in slow motion. I make a living writing code that is used mostly on Windows and I had a bad feeling since the first Technical Preview. Decided to hold off the upgrade until the end of the free upgrade period hoping that the problems will be hammered out and the control will be (at least for most part) returned to the user. But instead it started bad and goes downhill from there.
As far as I can tell, Windows 10 is the Microsoft play to become Google or Facebook on your desktop. In effect, you choose to run their code and in exchange they spy on you and sell all the info they get to the highest bidder. Microsoft clearly saw that investors are seeing bigger gains from non-manufacturing companies that just spy on uses and sell the info, and they've decided that as the OS itself they can do it better than anybody else.
Once you choose to run an OS that owns you, vacuums-up your every keystroke, mouse action, and utterance within microphone range and that routinely phones-home and auto-installs/auto-removes software, the auto-disabling of various applications is just another bullet-point on the features list. You are now the submissive; Microsoft is your dominant. If you wanted to complain, you should have done so before clicking on the "Accept" button of the EULA. Microsoft does not place a "safe word" in that EULA does it? Enjoy the ride to the software version of the Folsom St parade!
Maybe. Unless MS gets to reason and windows 11 gets the next windows for coroporations. I am 100% sure that 8 and 10 will be skipped in the upgrade cycle of big corporations. Most skipped vista, and 8 and 10 have a very short period between.
So when the chances are that MS will produce something which works as well for word, excel and PPT and windows XP and Windows 7 did.
If you look at the list of affected programs it is obvious why they are being removed. They all install low level drivers. The hardware monitoring/inventory programs use drivers to query devices directly (normal apps can't read the EEPROM on my memory DIMMs, for example) and the anti-virus software uses them to hook in to the OS at a deep level. Those drivers might break when the kernel is updated, so they uninstall those apps.
It's not a bug, it's a feature to ensure that upgrades on machines with tricky anti-virus and nasty DRM/copy protection drivers don't result in an unbootable system. Overzealous perhaps, but it's obvious what the intent is.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Same has been said by many a people about Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Truth is at the end of the day when MS have a small or any screwup the open-source crowd are so divided among themselves that they can never seize the opportunity.
The last Windows I used was Windows 2000. They crossed the line with me with forced registration and remote disabling "features".
Why anyone would use a OS that has this for anything mission-critical, is totally beyond me.
In my book Windows is a Toy, an elaborate gaming bios, and the only reason to use it is if you're into frontline hardcore PC gaming or need to use a professional application that only runs on Windows - such as Solid Works for engineers or something like that.
I've been riding Mac OS X since 2004 - for professional Flash development back then - and x86 Linux since 1999. Nowadays there is absolutely nothing aside of perhaps some neat Photoshop plugins that Linux and FOSS can't offer that I need for my professional work (Dev, Software Architect and Consultant). I expect that to improve even more with Gimp 3.0. I've got no incentive to replace my broken Mac Mini now - albeit HW & SW integration with Apple is still top-of-the-line.
However, I *do* still use a MS product: The last iteration of the XBox 360. The system mature to the marrow and has dirt cheap top gametitles out of the bargain bin. Just added Diablo 3 to my collection for 20 euros last saturday. Neat.
Conculsion:
I hope Windows, the abysmally shitty Outlook Groupware, Exchange, MS Office and all those ancient crappy MS monsters die in a fire and/or gets squished by Google and Chrome OS like a bug. They would deserve it.
Google has users by a leash too, but at least I get all their stuff and services for free and have an interest in keeping them running and synced across devices no matter what.
Which is why I recommend Chrome OS over Windows whenever a n00b asks me for advice.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's not really a low end desktop, not even today. Most desktops are still being sold with 4Gb of RAM, and when it comes to tablets, the situation is even worse.
My tests are on a Thinkpad X100e which originally came with Windows 7 and ran it fine, with 4Gb, and a HP Stream 8 which originally came with Windows 8.1. Both have, independently, had large numbers of BSoDs since the Fall Update. Responsiveness on both is pretty bad, though has improved with the FU, but still, more often than not, trying to bring up the Start menu takes more than 10 seconds (and sometimes more than a minute) on the X100e, and is a frequent occurrence on the tablet. The notifications bar usually takes so long to come up on both I usually give up on it.
(Want to see smooth and responsive? Try Windows 8.1 on a tablet. Made me never want to use an Android tablet again.)
For obvious reasons, I've not accepted by employer's offer to switch to Windows 10, nor have I upgraded my main PC. This is terrible. Yeah, I get people saying "Well, on my low end bargain basement $10,000 desktop, an 12GHz 16 core Intel i9 with 32Gb of RAM (I mean, who uses anything less these days, right?!" (I kid, but not by much...) "it works fine!" but when you have two devices in front of you that really suck thanks to the Windows 10 update, you tend to believe your own eyes.
Honestly, I still think Microsoft should have released Windows 8.11 (8.1 with a start menu) and then spent a year polishing Windows 10 until it was ready. It shows potential, but in its current form it's garbage.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
My wife's Windows 7 laptop (purchased 4 years ago, never auto-updated) is presently offering to upgrade itself to Windows 10.
Even if you don't "upgrade 7 to 10," they'll be "patching" 7 until it has got all the worst aspects of 10 in it. Just like they made "XP" so secure that it no longer runs on many of the platforms it was originally sold on.
It used to be that dual-booting Windows and Linux wasn't much hassle, so I kept Windows around for the odd time I wanted to play a game. But when I upgraded to Windows 10 it wiped out the Linux bootloader. So I grumbled a bit and figured that's par for the course, formatted the hard drive, installed Windows 10 first and Linux second. And that was fine for about a week until I decided I wanted to play a Windows game... after shutting Windows down, my boot loader is toast. Again. I can't even get to the little GRUB repair prompt this time.
It's just not worth it for me anymore, especially now that Steam is on Linux. Plus, I figure it will be good to get out before Microsoft's "subscription-based" model kicks in for Windows 10.
Farewell Windows. You were an awesome gaming platform for 15 years.
I've been following the project for a few years and yes, the progress is slow. They do have a team of passionate developers but they're few and not everyone has the will of learning enough of the Windows internals to develop a clone of it.
I'd like them to suceed but they need many more people.
That being said, it does go forward. For example, you can now start Steam and I've been able to make a couple of simple indie games work.