Microsoft Windows gripes

Why do I still use this garbage. To be fair, it's slowly improved over the years, but still, I hate being stuck with this shit due to anti-monopoly inaction in the 90s.

Today's gripe: how every other update seems to change how shortcuts on the taskbar work. So I need to figure out how to put the music folder on there again every two months or so.

Hey, you want to change how the date looks in the bottom right? Go to the clock settings. No, not that clock settings. The other one that looks almost exactly the same but gives you better options.

Want to display the day of the week? Go ahead, but it'll disappear every Thursday. Gotta save space.

Windows now serves me ads popping up from the taskbar in the lower right, and I'm too lazy/beaten-into-submission to even try to figure out how to disable them

two weekends ago windows forcibly updated and forgot my mom's user profile. she called me in a panic, luckily it reappeared after 5 or 6 restarts.

then last friday my machine forcibly updated and it forgot my user profile until i restarted 5 or 6 times. this is after shutting down and downloading/installing updates for 2 hours at 1pm on a workday!!

first time I saw those ads I thought I got a virus

was obnoxious because I was playing online poker at the time and the ad covered the 'raise' button when I had a great hand, I tried to hide the ad but wound up clicking on it and getting another pop up and by the time it finally went away I had timed out, so those things wound up costing me about $25 or so, enough to buy several of the discount spatulas they were trying to sell me

that sucks!

is this windows 10? ... i am dreading having to upgrade to windows 10.

god dam. are y'all on Home edition? I had to use that a while ago and downgraded to Windows 7. Since installed some sort of fancy full featured Enterprise 10 that for the most part shuts the hell up. For when I'm not using Linux Mint.... which is so good for basic computer stuff finally that I've got my parents on it and they are doing fine. I think they boot Windows annually to do their taxes

also using https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

hopefully it can do something on Home edition too

I haven't seen any ads popping up from the taskbar, but if that happens to me I'm done

I already downloading a Mint ISO this week because I'm sick of auto-updates and other bullshit. Still have to use Win10 at work but I don't need it at home as well

*downloaded

same. surprised at this ad talk

the last 2 updates I've had wiped out all my wifi networks, the last one also took out all my device drivers so I get to work and have to wait for all the peripherals to reinstall, reboot because the monitor resolution was screwed up etc. it's shit

dang.

for the Linux curious who haven't installed a new operating system before, if you can follow the steps to make a bootable USB stick that lets you try out Mint, it doesn't get any tougher than that. But back your stuff up before going any further than that.

Still on Win7 here. I will stay on 7 until this machine dies. Then I'll try to install it on my next one and see if it 'takes'.

On my laptop, Windows 10 (it originally had 8 so I did the free upgrade ages ago) contributed heavily to the hard drive wearing out to the point where it would sit trying to do updates for two hours every time I switched it on. I replaced the drive with an SSD and installed Ubuntu only and it now works very well. Cold boot to login prompt is ~25 seconds, login to desktop another 7 seconds, on a six year old laptop with a dual core 1.8GHz Celeron CPU and 4GB of RAM.
Still on Windows 7 on my home desktop. I'm putting off upgrading to Windows 10 because a) I will need to buy a license, and b) I will need to replace my ten year old Tascam audio interface (it's my main music making computer) because it doesn't have Windows 10 drivers. I'm planning to buy an SSD to install in the computer and install Windows 10 onto that, so if there are any problems I can switch back to the Windows 7 partition on the original drive.
At work we're imminently going to be upgrading en masse from Windows 7 to 10. The Enterprise edition is way less annoying that Home, but we've still had to lock out a whole pile of things.
Also Windows still sucks at dealing with external USB storage drives - just let me eject the damn memory stick already!

fwiw it looks like these pop-up ads from the task bar are likely because you clicked Allow Notifications on some shitty website, rather than Microsoft starting to show pop-ups on Windows

I had never seen Microsoft ads in Windows... then just now I restarted the PC and got an ad for Microsoft Teams.

that's not an ad. that is Microsoft Teams running on your PC, it was added in a recent update. to get rid of it you need to uninstall it *and* the Teams Installer, otherwise it will just reinstall. it does seem to have gone away now I've uninstalled both of them

yikes! thanks for letting me know.

The constant updating when you live in Australia and have shitty internet speeds is a nightmare. Last update for some reason removed my wife's ability to use any Office programs from her account.

Minor innocuous gripe of entitlement: love how when I change the volume it pops up a lovely picture of whatever youtube video i last played, never mind that I'm actually listening to spotify.

my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?

You can install and use win10 without a license if you can live with a watermark on the bottom right of the display and not being able to modify the wallpaper

buy a 5$ license off ebay, works fine

I recently found out that the volume pop-up takes mouse input. I found out because I wanted to click something underneath it.

you can disable it?

my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?

― YOU CALL THIS JOURNALSIM? (dog latin), Monday, November 11, 2019 7:16 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes: be thankful for your procrastination.

We had a Halloween party weekend before last and I had a whole thing planned to play on my laptop but Microsoft decided that I ABSOLUTELY HAD to install Windows updates thirty minutes prior to the party (I have them scheduled to run overnight but my laptop had been closed) and, well, it took roughly the length of the party to complete so eff the entire way off, Microsoft.

Minor innocuous gripe of entitlement: love how when I change the volume it pops up a lovely picture of whatever youtube video i last played, never mind that I'm actually listening to spotify.

this bugs me too because my laptop has media pause/play buttons which I used to use to control my mp3 player, except now the thing which actually gets paused/played is whatever picture pops up when you press the volume controls, i.e. usually not what I'm actually listening to. so I press the button to pause my mp3 but it keeps going and at the same time unpauses some random youtube tab I've forgotten I've left open and the audio from that plays over the top

apparently you can change that by telling your browser not to respond to the media buttons, and I should do that in the hope that it will go back to how it was, but I'm also playing mp3s less and streaming Spotify web client/Mixcloud more, so maaaybe I should just not have hundreds of tabs open including youtubes I've opened to watch later and forgotten about, but still, I like to grumble

"my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?"

In theory the upgrade period is over, but I have just - well, two days ago, not literally just now - but I have just upgraded a ThinkPad T520 from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. I popped along here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10/

And clicked "download tool now", and opted to download and install Windows 10 directly from the internet, rather than by making boot media. It worked, and two days later it still seems to be working. The laptop originally had Windows 7 Pro installed via Lenovo's recovery media and now has Windows 10 Pro.

I can't guarantee that at some point in the future Microsoft will deactivate it. At that point the alternatives are (a) continue using unlicensed Windows 10 (b) buy a copy of Windows 10 (c) revert back to Windows 7 (d) hackintosh the laptop into a Hackintosh (e) install Linux in roughly that order. Ordinarily (c) would be a bad option but, in theory, Windows 10 is supposed to have continual upgrades forevermore, or at least until Microsoft changes its mind.

buy a 5$ license off ebay, works fine
― corrs unplugged, Monday, 11 November 2019 13:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^ after running a pirated copy of windows since win95 I got fed up and dropped a fiver on a win10 activation key from ebay and it worked perfectly. no reason not to do it unless a fiver is really too much of an expenditure or if you have a moral objection to giving Microsoft money (fair).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g

Is that the guy who got fired for being a sex creep

Newest version of Windows Update changed the line spacing in menu text, making the space wider between entries. Irritates my father. Couldn't figure out for the life of me how to change it, as changing the font sizes and magnification didn't affect it. Anyone ever run into this?

maybe this? https://superuser.com/questions/975949/how-to-disable-wide-right-click-context-menus-in-windows-10

I'll give that a try, but my problem is more with the "Alt+F" type menus, not the right-click context menus.

Does Windows 10 use machine learning to determine how to open windows in the most awkward screen position and with the most useless dimensions?

Also the endless variety of places and appearances for the "new folder" icon / menu option keeps things so darn fresh!

New Folder 2

Shift-Control-N my dude

Window placement has always been shit in windows. No idea how anyone thought putting part of a window below the bottom of the screen was ever a good idea.

I hate how they make it hard to make desktop shortcuts now. Smartphone UI is just a huge pile of icons. You'd think windows would follow suit.

Thanks calstars, I can remember that.

I need more screens evidently but whenever I return to the desktop from the screensaver the windows I've carefully placed has moved around and shrunk. I guess there might be some setting to stop this but I can't imagine what purpose it serves.

Microsoft, why do i have to go into the registry to alter the fucking colour of the scroll bars! Madness.

i only just now discovered that if the cursor is in the tool bar area, that if I right click, I could open the task manager that way, as opposed to having to ctl + alt + del

Folders randomly being surrounded by black squares, printers refusing to remember default paper size (A4 not Letter, you motherfuckers), random shortcuts backing up to OneDrive without being asked and getting green ticks on them, Explorer crashing and needing to be killed and restarted because it takes 700 hours to dump something in the Recycling Bin

ctrl+shift+esc is task manager as well btw (xpost) (I happen to do that quite often without thinking and had to look at my hands how I do it: right thumb on the right ctrl, right ring finger on the right shift, left middle finger on esc)

I couldn't remember the password to my microsoft account or any security questions and also having a new phone threw a spanner in the 2fa works so for some reason I had to wait 30 days for them to do something about it. 30 days later I get an email sent to my gmail account saying I can reset all the security info related to the account. So I click the link, enter my gmail address as the microsoft account name, set up a new password, job done right? I try to sign in with the new password. 'This microsoft account doesn't exist'. Ok you twats. I try to create a new one with the same gmail account name. 'This account already exists'. Lol you fucking morons.

So there was a *different* 'create new account' link I had to click - after filling in some details there the page spins endlessly, great job again.

Newest Dev build of Windows 11 finally lets you un-combine taskbar icons. I was surprised by how annoying I found that.

I just bought a new laptop with Windows 11 on it and ^^^ this was the first thing I noticed and couldn't fucking believe they'd removed that. what the fuck is going on at Microsoft, how fucking dumb do you have to be to get a job designing their dogshit operating system? and it took them what 2 years to put it back in? why does everything just get worse

of course that build isn't on general release yet so I still have stupid combined taskbar icons for now.

kind of a niche gripe I guess but every time windows does a major update it disables and hides stereo mix audio input and it really winds me up.

I hate that it shows me my most frequently used programs as a helpful suggestion… like I don’t need to be reminded of this. If I want quick access I will put it in the taskbar… otherwise it’s screenspace best used for something else

I need Microsoft Authenticator to use work apps on my phone, except when I open Authenticator, it asks me to authenticate Authenticator first by using… Authenticator (i.e. itself), which is… impossible?

^^^ you’re not alone

yeah I've been stuck in that nightmarish loop, always authenticate using text messages!

tbh I've got to hand it to Windows after my earlier gripe. at least it's not Debian. just upgraded Debian from 11 to 12 and it's completely fucked my Postgresql database. think I've lost it all. nothing is working to get the data back. most of it I can get from backups but not all of it. what a fucking nightmare

Every time: click on the Windows button, carefully click on the tiny icon for Word or Excel or whatever Office thing I need, realise that it doesn't give a shit which one I clicked and will open up a new panel of bigger icons to click on.

Oh, you'd like an external drive to always have the same letter, the one you assigned to it multiple times, every time you plug it in? Well, fuck you.

I have an external drive which I turn off often. I haven't had that happen. But I found this site which may solve that issue: https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Cheers!