Windows 10 is great. The majority of people who moan that they have issues with Windows, still use Windows…???

I suspect the majority (or at least significant minority) that moan about windoze have been using a Mac for the last 10 years (and are smug about it) and think W10 is like 95 but with more telemetry (conveniently forgetting that OSX also more than likely has telemetry 😉 ).

I’ve only had one BSOD / Kernel Panic in the last decade that I can recall. That was OSX. I use Linux for everything at home, and in that time have used XP and 7 at work and also Solaris, VMS, SLES,…  I call that pretty damn reliable tbh.

Win2000 was dire, as was 95. Memory related BSODs galore on that, on a machine that never triggered a Linux panic. Clearly OS related not hardware.

There are addons you can run that do a decent job of deactivating or limiting the ET home phone telemetry on W10. Although I fix the problem by forgetting to boot Win10 for 6 months at a time.

The moaners about Windows don’t seem to care that it’s the MS and IBM business model that had led us to the point where anyone can buy a computer for £100. This is pretty egalitarian, it brings computing and internet access to the masses. If everything were run by Apple we’d still be spending six month’s spare cash on a single computer to be shared by households if we’re lucky, and they’d be sitting on top of an even bigger pile of money.

I fix the problem by forgetting to boot Win10 for 6 months at a time.

The only time my Win 10 system gets rebooted is after a software update. I can’t recall the last time it completely crashed.

To be fair this wasn’t really a rant or moan about Windows and I’m quite a fan of if it, especially Windows 10, but there are aspects of it that do still make me facepalm.

Microsoft has been guilty of some lazy programming in the past; I’ve used Outlook (so not exactly a Windows issue) since the ’97 version, when it worked it worked well but periodically it simply wouldn’t run. If you dug deep enough it turned out that there was corruption in the .pst file (which only Outlook used so shouldn’t really be getting corrupted anyway) and Outlook therefore crashed (or simply quit). You had to run an obscure program tucked in the Office folder to repair the file and get things going again; a error message or auto-repair would have been nice.

I’ve had similar issues in Windows 7-10 where OneDrive, Skype, Windows Update, Windows Store (and various apps) and other sub-systems have simply stopped working; if you notice this there’s usually a fix on the internet that involves downloading a Microsoft utility or .cab file to sort out the problems.

The Troubleshooter is great and attempts to bring monitoring and repair into Windows itself (although on the Windows Update front you still have to download a separate utility to disable individual updates that break things) as well as attempting to resolve issues rather that just give up with ‘whoops something went wrong’ type messages. I was just amused that the Troubleshooting Wizard itself ironically broke with an unexpected error rather than reporting that it couldn’t fix the issue or suggesting other options.

As it turned out the error was a dodgy Wan Miniport driver (showing an exclamation mark in Device Manager & Devices and Printers); once uninstalled everything was fine.

There variety of refresh/repair/Windows Restore options in W10 are great and it’s fantastic not to have to do complete re-installs when Windows breaks completely, oh and the (much rarer) Windows 10 BSOD now have a nice emoji face on them!

I suspect the majority (or at least significant minority) that moan about windoze have been using a Mac for the last 10 years

Yeah, that’s pretty self-evident both from the comments made here and on similar threads in the past. Loads of folk saying things akin to “I haven’t used Windows in 10 years but it’s shit.” Plenty of people use other systems and love them and that’s great, but ragging on something based on an opinion you formed in the 90s is kinda daft.

Memory related BSODs galore on that, on a machine that never triggered a Linux panic. Clearly OS related not hardware.

How is a memory-related BSoD not hardware-related?

Older versions of Windows were indeed more prone to blue-screening. There’s a number of reasons for this, not least of which was because device drivers had lower-level access to the hardware in the early years. NT drivers ran in ring 0, which led to hilarious situations like being able to crash the entire system by ejecting a floppy disk at the wrong moment. But that was in the 90s.

Vista was much maligned, and with good reason. The UX was… less than stellar. But architecturally it was the best thing MS had produced in years. It underpins everything we have today.

As a random example, look at historical system requirements. Windows 3.1 needed 2MB of RAM. Windows 9X required 8MB (W95) to 32MB (Me) – approximately a tenfold increase in, what, three years? XP wanted at least 128MB of RAM, another broadly tenfold increase. A few years later we had Vista which required 1GB-2GB, so we’ve gone from 2MB in 1992 to 2GB in 2006 – a jump by a factor of x1000 in 14 years. But this is where it gets interesting (if you’re a monumental nerd like me anyway). Just look at the specs for Windows 10. It’s the same as Vista. Windows’ memory requirement broadly hasn’t changed in well over a decade. I find that incredible. If post-Vista OS development had followed previous trends we’d be seeing systems needing a Terabyte of RAM by now.

(And for the benefit of fellow nerds, yes, I know that’s a gross oversimplification.)

How is a memory-related BSoD not hardware-related?

/me shrugs

BSOD code was something to do with memory, usually occurring during boot or within 1st minute or so of use.

Linux would run absolutely fine. And that was back in the days when you’d have to do regular kernel recompilation to make the thing work, else it’d panic.

If Linux power use works, and Windoze barely got past a boot, then clearly windoze was the issue, not hardware, nor thermal, etc. My money would be on one of the drivers provided by either M$ or the Mobo MFr.

But that was so long ago that it is irrelevant.  The OSX panic tbf is hardly relevant now either, and that was within the last decade.

Microsoft has been guilty of some lazy programming in the past; I’ve used Outlook (so not exactly a Windows issue) since the ’97 version

And that’s exactly my point. Sure they have, and so has pretty much every other software manufacturer on the planet. But that was 20 years ago.

.PST files have always been notoriously shit, they were a dirty hack in the first place to compensate for slow networks and limited server mailbox storage. It took until Office 2003 for them not to be limited to 2GB in size (and they often exploded messily if you exceeded that), and even then conversion from the 90s format was a manual process. They should have died out years ago, there’s no requirement and indeed no place for them in a modern environment.

If Linux power use works, and Windoze barely got past a boot, then clearly windoze was the issue, not hardware, nor thermal, etc. My money would be on one of the drivers provided by either M$ or the Mobo MFr.

Sure, but then that’s not a memory issue aside from the fact that data is held in memory (and where else would it be?) As you say it could well have been a (possibly third-party) driver issue or a bunch of other causes.

Windoze, wow, I’ve not heard that one before, I can barely contain my hysterics. Is that made by Micro$oft, the people who did Internet Exploder?

there are aspects of it that do still make me facepalm

Of course – I’ve had the same for all three OSes I’ve used recently. I do get the impression though that there’s about 3x more actual software in a Windows installation than on a Mac one, so perhaps 3x more to go wrong.

Memory related BSODs galore on that, on a machine that never triggered a Linux panic. Clearly OS related not hardware.

It can be to do with memory usage. IIRC Ubuntu just used memory for what it needed, whereas W10 thinks it’s pointless to have RAM sitting there idle so it fills it with cached stuff. If you have a lot of RAM and a fault in some of the higher addresses you could easily never touch that address with Linux but you could with Windows.

I’m using some legacy desktop software on this Mac currently, and it keeps freezing up which is to be expected. But when it freezes it takes the whole OS with it. I can’t figure out why this happens but it’s frigging annoying.

W10 might. W95/W2000 less so. I’d bet that Linux doing a kernel compilation was using way more RAM (possibly all of it, especially if it starts paging) than W95/W2k etc. does during boot.

All modern OS will use as much RAM as is available for buffers, cache etc. Linux does for sure, and has done so for decades (and hence Ubuntu will have done the same since Warty Warthog). RAM is there to be used, not to be available for use. That one I learned back in the late 90’s when buying more RAM because it said 80% used, only to find out after doubling the RAM that it said 80% used 😉

Vista was much maligned, and with good reason. The UX was… less than stellar. But architecturally it was the best thing MS had produced in years. It underpins everything we have today.

It was maligned as a whole load of drivers weren’t ready when it came out, which meant people updating and their printer or whatever not working. I don’t recall any complaints about the UX particularly. (And FWIW I had a Vista machine at home and it was used daily for 4-5 years, without any major issues).

Anyway I like Windows, I find MacOS irritating. But that’s clearly a personal opinion, rather than a scientific fact 🙂

People complained about Windows Me but I had it on a Dell laptop and it never crashed once so never understood what the fuss was about. I think I chose Win Me because the alternative cost quite a bit of money, can’t really remember now.

At home I’ve been on a Mac that I bought myself for my last “significant” birthday for the last ten years. At work I’ve used a mixture of Linux (for development) and Windows (for admin) over a twenty year period. All three basically work.

As for software taking the whole OS – this site takes down the browser and the OS on my iPad. Who do I blame for that?

Upside down die chips

mogrim

It was maligned as a whole load of drivers weren’t ready when it came out, which meant people updating and their printer or whatever not working. I don’t recall any complaints about the UX particularly. (And FWIW I had a Vista machine at home and it was used daily for 4-5 years, without any major issues).

Also when first released it had some very visible, but not particularly serious problems like file deletion and copying taking an age. Many problems like this were hotfixed early on, but Vista was already tarnished by that point.

It was maligned as a whole load of drivers weren’t ready when it came out, which meant people updating and their printer or whatever not working. I don’t recall any complaints about the UX particularly.

You don’t recall Vista being the Windows “Are You Sure?” Edition? UAC was a terrific idea, implemented terribly in Vista. It was almost universally hated and the intertubes were awash with guides explaining how to turn it off (which was really, really bad advice).

The driver issue was compounded by Vista being the first Windows version to popularise the 64-bit architecture on the desktop, fuelled in no small part by quarterwits telling people that if they had 4GB of RAM they had to move to x64 in order to “use all the memory.” x64 was available in XP but it was Not Good™.

this site takes down the browser and the OS on my iPad. Who do I blame for that?

Safari, probably.

You don’t recall Vista being the Windows “Are You Sure?” Edition? UAC was a terrific idea, implemented terribly in Vista.

A fair point, I’d forgotten that. Still don’t remember it being that bad on a day-to-day basis, though.

The moaners about Windows don’t seem to care that it’s the MS and IBM business model that had led us to the point where anyone can buy a computer for £100. This is pretty egalitarian, it brings computing and internet access to the masses. If everything were run by Apple we’d still be spending six month’s spare cash on a single computer to be shared by households if we’re lucky, and they’d be sitting on top of an even bigger pile of money

Not so sure about that. I remember IBM’s business plan being a few large mainframes that we would lease time on (ie pay forever) and they were so unconvinced that personal computing was the way forward that they licensed the OS to Microsoft (second choice, they went to Intergalactic (yes, really) Digital Research first) even though they had their own OS (AIX, nothing wrong with that) and contracted out the processor to Intel in spite of having their own processors and production facilities. It was the lack of a business model that allowed other companies to step in and undercut IBM as both Intel and MS would sell to anyone (IBM hadn’t bothered with an exclusivity clause as there was no future in desktop computing) and other processor vendors (NEC was one) began selling DOS compatible processors. IBM’s failure to see desktop processing as the future one of the worst business decisions ever if not the worst.It allows anyone to build a PC so the market isn’t controlled by any one company and competition has resulted in a very open market, not just for PCs but for self-builders. IBM don’t even make PCs any more

In 1984 I was quite hapy using Fortran remotely on a mainframe then someone delivered a desktop with some rather large and genuinely floppy disks including MS-DOS 2.12 and Wordstar 2000. It lasted a couple of weeks before the cleaner moved it (no I hadn’t parked the disc drive). Lesson learned it provided good service with HQ occasionally sending out new discs for us to try. I only recently threw out some of the old back-up floppy discs.

My next computer was bought in Interdiscount in Pau. It didn’t work when I plugged it in so I opened it up, removed some glue from a connector and away it went, I briefly saw my first Windows before the first of many blue screens. I had a love hate relationship with that one, it had SAVE! SAVE! SAVE! scrawled on it with marker pen to remind the soon to be Madame E to do exactly that before it crashed – again.

Windows 95 and a 56kb modem gave access to the world wide web and random guessing of urls got me US pizza delivery firms and the first pornography. I wasn’t impressed, it crashed more than the old one.

Windows 98 needed to be a bit more reliable as by this time my accountant wanted everything on discs, it was and I kept it for years. It could usually be fixed with a bit of help from those crazy people on user groups if you had access to another computer when it died.

Vista was shite, I hated it, the computer virus had come of age and it was a seive.

XP was inexplicably slow, the computer had all the right things to make it fast but it wasn’t, I put up with it for longer than I should. Madame move to Windows 7 which was obviously a huge improvement but I stuck with XP till a cup of coffee killed it.

Windows 8 (then 8.1) I liked. I liked the tiles that others didn’t, it booted quicker, it was reasonably stable, by 8.1 there were drivers for just about anything and everything, it’s till used as a backup.

W10 and SSD. Remember that comparison on Windows with a car about how you wouldn’t accept a car that took forever to turn on, required a pass word to get into, the car would randomly stop and require a restart… well this computer doesn’t take any longer to get into and start than my Renault Zoé, and the car has failed to boot first go more often than this computer (though strangely only ever when Madame uses it). Well done Microsoft, it took a while but W10 is fit for purpose.

Oh, I thought IBM licensed the design to other companies but they didn’t – it was reverse engineered and IBM weren’t able to stop it. Interesting.

I see I’ve mixed up Vista and XP, it was XP that was a sieve and Vista inexplicably slow.

Vista was fine for me to be honest. It did need a decent machine to run well though, reletivley speaking. It was never an OS for the £300 laptops of the day that shipped with it.
It needed 4gb ram and it needed a fast duel, preferably quad core processor.

7 was better in many ways as the UI harked back to XP, and 10 would’ve been even better if it wasn’t for all the ‘ET phone home’ crap you have to turn off, and re-inspect after every windows update as it can get mysteriously turned back on.

8 was garbage, I think we can all agree about that. It worked fine-ish but the user interface was a total car crash.

It doesn’t help that vista, 7 and 8 were, and still now 10 get peddled out on under specced budget machines. Celeron or atom CPU with 2gb ram, 5200rpm hard drive.. recipe for angry customers. Of course it will run like crap, but it technically still ‘works’.

It doesn’t run like crap though. It does pretty well.