by Leren » Mon Feb 18, 2019 4:52 am
All right !!! I've been waiting for an opportunity like this for some time. Here are just some of the gripes I've had about the "wonderful" Windows 10.
1. First of all, I was a victim of the infamous Windows 10 Black Screen of Death. If you weren't a victim here is how it worked (or didn't). If you turned on your computer the screen would just go black. This happened intermittently, but when it did you just had to repeatedly turn on your computer until, miraculously, it came on. Just before I returned my new PC to the store as a dud, I googled black screen and found out the cause. Depending on what hardware was in your computer, W10 for some reason pushed over the display to a non existent external device, so your screen went black. And I bought my new PC after W10 had been released a year earlier !
2. The equally infamous desktop destruction update. I'll bet jobs were lost at Microsoft after that disaster. After an update my desktop turned up completely blank. I got in touch with the computer manufacturer, who said that my BIOS had been corrupted and guided me through the steps to at least get my PC running again. Unfortunately I had lost all added software, but at least my files were there, so I had to reload it all. Takes months to fully fix a problem like that. Subsequent W10 Updates came up with a box that said something like "Restoring Users Desktop Experience". For a few updates this worked very slowly, but seems to be working reasonably OK now. This feature was also added to Windows 7. As I said, I'm sure jobs were lost and Death Threats were made over that disaster.
3. The screen aspect ratio disaster. After one update, all my spreadsheets (including my Sudoku Solvers), all worked but the aspect ratio of the screens had changed, so I had to recast them all. A week later, another update came along and restored the original aspect ratios, so I had to recast them a second time. Again, job losses and death threats would likely have been the case.
4. The best feature of Windows 7 was the button on the RHS of the taskbar that would minimise all applications running and get you to the desktop in one click. Gone in W10 ! Well, not quite, but they have reduced the size of the button to a 1 mm wide strip at the right hand edge of the taskbar. It's still there, if you know where to look. If you don't you will probably never find it.
5. The desktop calendar function just would not work, for several months, and mysteriously started up again after several more updates.
6. At one stage it was impossible to use a date format of dd/mm/yyyy in Excel. W10 absolutely refused to allow it. Amazingly, after another update, it returned. Job losses and death threats perhaps ?
7. Office 16 (the latest version) and W10 have a peculiar display incompatibility. If you are not careful, it looks like Excel macros are not running. It's off-putting, but it's a display thing. if the file is saved at some stage the display somehow normalises.
8. The time for updates to complete was always worryingly long, with long periods of black screens. Every update was a potential disaster. More recently, updates are taking less time, so, finally, after about 4 years, the 15th version of Windows is finally settling down.
9. The mysterious application scroll bar. If you click on the Windows button you get a list of applications, but how do you get to the ones down the list? After about 6 months of frustration you accidentally hover over an invisible scroll bar and you can finally scroll down to the lower applications. No doubt this is documented in Micrsoft's million page W10 user manual somewhere.
In summary, W10 is without doubt the most aggressively pushed version ever, and they are clearly not doing any Beta testing. They are using ordinary users like us as the Beta testers in their unstoppable headlong push to make W10 look and feel more like a smartphone. If you are over, say 35, then you might as well not exist for the W10 "designers".
Well, that's about it for a first post. Not bad huh ? As I remember more faults that have occurred over the last 3 years I'll add to the list.
Leren
<edit>
1. Tip for Cortana victims. (a) Never say the word Cortana in the same room as the PC. (b) If you right click on the Cortana box on the Taskbar and unpin it, it seems to shut it up permanently.
2. Tip for auto-update victims. I think there is an option in Control Panel to disable auto updates, but of course they have made Control Panel harder to find for us dinosaurs.
3. Tip for line format puzzle users with 0's. Don't use it ! Ever ! If you paste one of these into an Excel cell and don't format it as text, the millionaire geniuses at Microsoft know they are smarter than you so they recognise your puzzle as an 80 digit integer. But Excel cells only keep 15 digits of accuracy, so what ends up in the cell is a 15 digit integer with some exponent notation thrown in ! 65 cell contents wiped out!
The very first thing I did for the Sudoku X project was to recast RUUD's evilly 0 formatted puzzles into . format. Problem solved. That's not a W10 gripe, just a general one about Excel, but hey, it still complies with MM's Griping rules !
Last edited by
Leren on Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:20 am, edited 10 times in total.
. It is the one that I encounter the most. Serg, who probably still runs the XP version of Windows has very few -if any- gripes 
