The folly of Windows 10

Now that I’ve gone four days without a BSOD, it does appear Microsoft realized it had rolled out another lemon, and, nearly two months later, patched things. Goodness knows how many hours it has cost people worldwide—the forums have a lot of people reporting BSODs (maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I really don’t remember this many, ever). I posted this in a discussion entitled ‘Windows 10 is a nightmare!’, and the comments there make for sobering reading. A small number have had to purchase new computers; others report that the OS has made their computers unusable or that countless hours were spent trying to fix things. I can believe it. My addition:

I have to concur with the original poster: Windows 10 has been, hands-down, the most shockingly unreliable OS ever made, by anyone, anywhere.
   I have spent more time here for this OS than at any other time with Microsoft products—and Windows 10 has been terrible from day one.
   Most recently, I have had multiple BSODs per day since the fall Creators update was installed, and until Microsoft rolled out a patch at the end of January that finally fixed problems of its own making. If your computer is BSODing multiple times a day, with 800-plus events in the reliability monitor per week, then you can imagine how little work gets done. Things finally calmed down on February 2, when I received the cumulative update. You can see the thread for yourself here: I actually feel sorry for the MS tech who stepped in, because he’s solving problems a crap product with faults not of his own making. They won’t be bugs that are in his handbook. Looking at this part of the forum alone, BSOD comes up a lot in the subject lines, more than I ever remember. So it isn’t us, Microsoft, it’s you.
   Going right back to day one, I can’t believe how many threads I’m involved in. Windows 10 started up differently each day, as it would forget its own settings each day. Some days Cortana worked, other days it didn’t. Sometimes I had the UK keyboard (which I had never once installed), other days the US. In November 2015 I had to post a queryto ask how many hours it would take for a Windows 10 machine to shut down. That’s right, hours. At least that’s better than some of you who commented earlier who can’t get yours to start up.
   Initially, Cortana required fiddling with each day to get it to work. Notifications once went back in time—on a Saturday I began getting notifications from the previous Thursday. None from Friday though, they all vanished. Windows began forgetting my default browser and default PDF application, and no, you couldn’t fix either from the standard settings. The Anniversary update took 11 attempts to install on this PC—and one of them screwed things up so badly my PC was bricked and wound up at the shop, where I had to spend money to get it fixed urgently. (I joked at the time it was called Windows 10 because you needed more than 10 attempts to do anything.) It never installed on my laptop at all: by the time Creators spring came round, the one update that was compatible with my laptop, it had been through 40 unsuccessful update cycles.
   There’s still more that I can share, and you can probably find it via my profile. I would add more but on the original reply I actually hit a limit on these boxes. I guess Microsoft has a limit to how much bad news it can take from one user.
   Microsoft has actually changed its QC procedures for the worse—that is a matter of record—and you’d think after three years of abject failure they would switch back. We see the same hackneyed official responses here day in, day out. They need to spend more time getting things right before they ship their OSs, and spare their community people a lot of wasted hours with solutions that generally do not work. In my latest thread, I fixed it—yes, the tech helped a bit, but ultimately I had to listen to my gut and believe that MS had messed up. I was right, but wow, at a massive cost to my real job with days lost to being Microsoft’s unpaid technician.

   It is good, however, to come out the other side (knock on wood)—and despite the countless hours spent, I was once again right, and conventional wisdom was wrong. I’m not sure if that’s something to be that proud of. A healthy mistrust of big firms stands one in good stead nevertheless, and remember, every industry has thick people making stuff.


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2 thoughts on “The folly of Windows 10

  1. Everytime I download an update something goes haywire with my computer.

  2. The Microsoft Answers forums are full of disgruntled users, Karen. I’m not surprised you’ve had this experience. Microsoft has been releasing lemons lately. They changed their quality control procedures to have each department check their own work in the mid-2010s—one of the dumbest moves ever. Like the other firms I write about, just because they have the image of technological superiority doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes—and Microsoft has been making plenty thanks to their strange structure.

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