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Ask Slashdot: Share Your Experiences With Windows 10
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: The Start button is broken on one of my Windows 10 machines. Left click is dead. Fairly well known problem, but none of the solutions from non-Microsoft web pages has fixed it... My little meta-problem of the day is being locked out of Microsoft's so-called support. The email part (on outlook.live.com) works as usual, but every attempt to access the support part returns "Something went wrong and we can't sign you in right now. Please try again later." It's a black hole page with no links or options or suggestions. Once you get there, you are dead to Microsoft. Whenever I try to go to Microsoft support, that's all I've seen for several weeks now. ..
In general, Windows 10 seems to be a good thing -- but I don't really know how much it is abusing my personal information and privacy. The abusive relationship with Microsoft support is clearly the same, bad as it ever was.
The original submission has more thoughts on the market for consumer operating systems, and asks for suggestions about these two previously-known issues -- a start button that ignores left clicks, and an ongoing lock-out from Microsoft support. But there's obviously much more to talk about -- so share your thoughts in the comments. Have you had any interesting recent experiences with Windows 10?
In general, Windows 10 seems to be a good thing -- but I don't really know how much it is abusing my personal information and privacy. The abusive relationship with Microsoft support is clearly the same, bad as it ever was.
The original submission has more thoughts on the market for consumer operating systems, and asks for suggestions about these two previously-known issues -- a start button that ignores left clicks, and an ongoing lock-out from Microsoft support. But there's obviously much more to talk about -- so share your thoughts in the comments. Have you had any interesting recent experiences with Windows 10?
Twice now I've had updates kill minor programs such as the built in photo editor. But a couple of weeks later, another update brings it back to life. Perhaps this is an artifact of the faster release cycle. Fortunately this computer isn't use for any actual work. I can understand why my employer is still just barely finished rolling out 7 to all company laptops.
I keep a Windows laptop around, to both keep up to date with how recent updates are coming along, as well as to play old games.
Windows is approaching the point where it might be workable for day to day use.
For work purposes, I don't need much, A bunch of terminal windows, a ssh client that can handle private keys stored on a Yubikey, and a web browser.
While the terminal emulation of the Bash prompt in the Ubuntu subsystem is still very poor, I could probably manage most of what I need for work from a windows box.
For my most common hobby, I need a few more things. Good NFS performance, a working automounter, an Xserver that supports hardware accelleration, and for the OS to not intercept any function keys for its own use.
The NFS performance of Windows 10 is decent, but alas if you install autofs into the Linux subsystem, it is unable to mount files. The few attempts I've made at mounting a NFS server from inside of the Linux subsystem have all failed. It appears that all mounts need to be done from Windows itself.
There are decent Xserver options for windows, but they (along with most other programs) suffer from Windows intercepting any press of F1 and using it to pop up a useless help screen, rather than passing it to the underlying application.
As far as I can tell, any program that doesn't make the right system call to indicate that it intends to use F1, will never see those keypresses as windows will intercept them.
If the automounter was working, and if there was a way to disable Window's interception of F1, I might actually be able to use it for hobby use as well.
Until then, I mainly use it for old games, and keep any productive work on Linux, BSD, and OSX.
The update has the bad habit of reverting settings that you specifically configured, and persisting settings that should be reverted. For example, if you use other virtualization solutions, you probably turned Hyper-V off since there's conflicts. The update turns it back on for some reason without telling you which can really mess you up. Next, Fast Startup is re-enabled even if you disabled it because it's broken (which it is for me). Lastly, Cortana is designed to be enabled all the time with this update, and the UI switch to disable it is gone. The problem is it should turn itself back on, otherwise it is difficult to determine how to do it without the UI. Sure, keep the registry setting so users who want to risk going into unsupported territory can keep turning her off, but the update really should switch things back to supported territory...
I say...not bad at all!
This keeps happening, big update comes out and all of the defaults reset to Microsoft products. It's been a constant problem since I've installed Windows 10 and at this point I'm willing to call this a feature rather than a bug. No I do not want to use your PDF viewer, Media player or Edge browser, stop forcing it on me Microsoft.
To fix the dead start button if you did no bork your PC more with the fixes proposed on the net, all you need to do is take the MediaCreationTool and Upgrade (even if it's the same version it will go ahead and install). This will repair all broken links to the UI from Windows Store and the famous Start button.
This fix has not been posted anywhere but is well known among PC techs. I don't know why, it's not like it's a state secret.
I recently built a new home machine and bit the bullet and used 10. My user base (the family) are just that - users. They don't care what they are running as long as it's running and safe. That said, running on a gen 4 i5 processor with 8 GB of RAM and an SSD (which is probably the true magic) it runs amazingly well. I shut off everything (Cortana etc) during the install - was easy to do. I'm sure I missed some things, but I'll get back to those at some point. Getting back to my subject line, my main work computer runs OS X; been using Apple products for 8 years now and used to be a major fan, but am getting sick of the OS. The walled garden was fine several iterations of ago of OS X - it provided a nice stable work environment (still is stable), had easy access to Unix-like functionality when needed (love my grep), and the laptop hardware could not be beat - still using a 6 year old Macbook pro and it's still a great piece of gear. That said the walls of the garden started to collapse a few years ago, and the patches they've been putting up are ugly and poorly functioning. Things like iTunes (which is forbidden on the home Windows machines) and the Photos app are insanely painful to use and seem to go out of their way to keep you from your own media. The Windows 10 hook - as one example, it was trivial to set up a decent file structure that is accessible in many ways to the owner of those files, and it organized in a way that makes sense. It may be that I grew up in a DOS world and that impacted my thinking - most likely reason. That said 10 provides a solid user experience, similar to what I used to like about OS X. It was pretty easy to configure to look like a classic Win interface, I've had no complaints from my user community (the fam). Why not Linux? I don't have the time to play Linux admin for the house, and no one else is inclined to do so. My nerd cred runs deep (optical communications systems development), but the computer is a tool, not a task for me and this is doubly true with my Win 10 users.
It's not better than 8.1 with Classic Start Menu.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The consistency thing is a problem with Windows generally -- you can see it on Server 2012r2 where you need to use Server Manager to perform certain tasks, but many others are still handled by MMCs that haven't changed much if any since 2003 Server. Many don't even appear to use updated display APIs and look weird when subject to display scaling.
And where they have new features that require Server Manager, the Server Manager GUI can only partially configure them, the more specific configuration details require PowerShell commands, with all of their obscure, multi-syllable options. So the GUI isn't feature complete.
Compounding this is that some new features, like Storage Spaces, are really just disk management features. So Server Manager can do some of those, too, but you end up asking yourself -- how much effort did it take to create an entirely new GUI management system that only partially implements old management tool features, which you still need to do a lot of tasks? Wouldn't it have been simpler to simply add new features to the existing GUI tools?
Personally, I'm fairly cynical -- I think that so much management effort is put into scheming, trying to create lock-in scenarios and creating an illusion of newness that there's little human capital left for *engineering* the product. So you end up with something that may have some worthwhile enhancements from a core technology perspective, but it has so many cosmetic changes that the entire thing feels designed by committees whose leadership doesn't communicate. It's like if you work for a group under Windows, you think of something and submit it to a committee to get included in the next release, but the person who decides what to include is more focused on market share and looks, so there's just no coordination.
I'm a retired computer guy, and I support a couple of large communities of retired folks, basically old people with computers. Naturally most got upgraded to Windows 10, whether by choice or by MS trickery. I have developed a standard protocol after which Windows 10 operates much like an improved Windows 7, and it works very well, and is less confusing for my customers (and me :)).
* Local Account - Ensure a local account, preferably with no password, boot straight to desktop
* Install and configure Chrome (or Firefox) - Add ad-blocking, turn on and populate bookmark bar, make friendly for user (I use "Disconnect" and "Ublock Origin")
* Install Classic Shell - Friendlier Start Button
* Install Spybot Anti-Beacon - Turns off a lot of Windows telemetry (fancy word for spying on the consumer's dime)
* Hide Cortana and unpin Store from the Task Bar
* Install old Windows 7 style Games - Available from 3rd party sources, Spider Solitaire anyone?
* Turn off as much of Quick Access as possible, and unpin what's there, and change the Options to default to "This PC" instead - QA is not controllable by the user, try to remove a dead link, I couldn't. Using "This PC" is dead reliable.