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Windows 7 and 8.1 Are Gaining More New Users Than Windows 10 (digitaltrends.com)
New submitter TroII writes: After Microsoft ended its year-long "free" Windows 10 offer, new installations have slowed predictably. But in an unexpected turn, October saw more new installs of both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 than of Windows 10. Compared to September's numbers, market share increased only 0.06% for Windows 10, while new installations of Windows 7 and 8.1 were an order of magnitude higher at 0.68%. According to tracking firm NetMarketShare, Windows 7 is still by far the most popular version of the OS, installed on more than twice as many computers as Microsoft's latest offering.
Disable that crap? In Windows 10 Home (that about 80% to 90% of people have) I would love to see how you do that, and auto-update of course, because that "resets"anything to "Microsoft Standard".
Disabling really all crap is only possible in the "enterprise" edition, that is not available for the normal user. Even Windows 10 Pro does not give you the same amount of control you had in Windows 7 or even Windows 8.1. So - no downgrade to Windows 10 for me!
Considering that Windows 10 was designed as a "one size fits all" solution that is intended to run on machine with limited power, it's not surprising that in this case the performance is an improvement.
I've run Windows10 and Windows7 on some machines I've upgraded for work. There was no user discernible difference in speed or performance. Maybe there was some minor benchmark difference but it certainly wasn't enough to matter. The boot up times are not meaningfully different, the interfaces didn't speed up, and none of the applications run any better. There might be some under the hood improvements but they certainly aren't obvious.
Also they did away with the flashy Windows 7 UI and replaced it with rectangles - another performance improvement that I don't mind. I like minimal, simple things.
Windows 10 is many things but "minimal" and "simple" are not among them. The rectangle thing isn't easier or simpler, particularly if you are talking about Windows 8... shudder.
How about when it informs me that it scheduled an update in an hour and I'm not at the computer, so I don't get to see the popup and I lose my open documents?
How about when I want to reboot because my Wacom driver has stopped working and I don't have 40 minutes to sit through an update install I wasn't aware of because I'm in the middle of actually trying to do some work?
How about when I've delayed the update install a couple of times and now Windows decided I don't get a choice when to reboot and just shuts off?
So now I have the update service disabled and I'm not getting any updates installed instead of installing them at a convenient time like I do on 7.