Creators Update gives Windows 10 a bit of an Edge, but some old annoyances remain Windows 10 was launched on July 29, 2015, just over 18 months ago, consigning the Windows 8 experiment to history and introducing the idea of "Windows as a service" – or in other words an operating system that (with a few exceptions) updates itself whether you like it or not. Now here comes the Creators Update, or version 1703 …
Not sure what the raison d'etre for this is. I'm looking at files on my local machine and it's showing me ads? The likelihood is that I would never, ever buy any product/service marketed in this way.
Of course, being slightly technical, a hosts file update or a firewall rule would be swiftly put in place.
I'm looking at files on my local machine and it's showing me ads?
And given how often Explorer just hangs waiting for something random that you aren't even remotely interested in, what are the odds that this won't make Explorer even more intolerable?
If anything ever needed a complete rewrite from scratch it would be File Explorer. It it still part of the entire desktop GUI, BTW?
"Hang on! Ads in Explorer?"
I was wondering about that myself as well. And it seems Microsoft even tries to add insult to injury because how do you combine that with this one: "Privacy and Windows 10 is a hot topic."?
Doesn't one, by definition, rule out the other here?
Anyway, thanks El Reg for a really nice insight article. I still don't like the very flat and dull looking interface, especially not when compared to my trusty rich looking Windows 7. I still don't understand why people would go along with that.
I mean... We've had years worth of development with graphic cards (GPU) and accelerators and all that. And what do you get with Windows 10? A flat, dull, colorless interface which sometimes makes me think back about Windows 2.0.
Even Windows 3.1 / 3.11 was better looking (in comparison), they really worked hard on some of the icons and some were honestly small pieces of art. This became especially true when the real fans started to release icon libraries of their own.
But now? I still have zero motivation to upgrade, and it's not because I'm unwilling to try something new but because the whole thing looks so horribly unappealing to me.
"... unning a basic Linux would probably suffice."
If you are going to the trouble of running Linux, basic or not, why would you cripple it by linking it to a Win-10 box? Just replace Windows. Then you don't need the "... old retired computer ..." as an intermediary.
God no, please do not make this the default.
I have rescued many systems over the years because the 'user' does not know how to empty the Wastebasket/deleted files folder. One was a scan of a passport that had been deleted a year before. Some scumbag nicked it during a burgulary. They wanted to know the Passport number. I found the .jpg waiting to be properly removed. If this was in place then that would have gone bye-bye a long time before that.
I know why MS wants this but please don't make it the default OOTB. I expect they will.
I'm so glad that I no longer have to use this POS on a daily basis. I'd have been tearing what little hair I have left out long ago.
Reminds me of an old boss who would delete every email that hit his inbox, other than what he was working on right now. If he needed an email after that he'd just trawl through the bin.
Odd behaviour for an IT manager, and he was particularly annoyed when I empted the bin whilst fixing some other email problem on his computer. After that when I had paperwork for him to sign, I'd walk up to him and throw it in the bin. Oh how we laughed!*
(* actually laughing may vary)
I had a particularly daft "office manager" who stored emails that she didn't want in the deleted items in her mail client. These got deleted after a while (server based, therefore a deleted items purge was occasionally needed to make space). She only finally understood the stupidity of this when I went to went to her desk, took her paperwork in her in-tray and put it in her bin and asked her if she expected to see it there tomorrow after the cleaners had been in the evening. Sometimes physical demonstrations work well.
"Wastebasket"
Have you been loitering on UK installs of MacOS up to 8.6? Everyone else (and 9.0.4 and beyond) got 'Trash', and Win95 gave us Recycle Bin. Oh and OS/2 had 'Shredder'.
As for auto-purging... System 6 and below did that every time an application was opened or was restarted. I think things stayed if Multifinder was running, can't easily check.
I think 'Wastebacket' was the bst out of all of them though, but then System 6 was the first GUI that I used.
The word "wastebasket" is unknown in written English before the British-English version of the Macintosh system. It was coined by someone in Apple's Engineering department because the proper translation, "wastepaper basket", was too long to fit on the icon label.
"Bin", the direct translation of "Trash[can]", may have been ruled out because of the word's meaning as an abbreviation of "binary", or maybe it just looked too short on-screen.
Translating this wasn't exactly Apple's finest hour, and there's a certain fascination with wickerwork running through these. German used "Papierkorb", which, while at least being a real German word, was one that didn't universally mean "trashcan" - I have heard more than one German use the word to refer to an in-tray (literally it means a "basket for papers"). The French translation, "corbeille", gave up on the concept of paper altogether, and so simply meant a basket of any kind, including one you'd use for fruit or flowers.
However, I'm deliberately using the past-tense for all these, because over the three decades, the repeated use of these translations in computer interfaces has retroactively given them the originally-intended meaning. "Wrong" words become "right" words once they're understood by enough people...
I usually rename 'Wastebasket' or 'Trash' or whatever, using a Navy term.
Back in the 3.1 era I had a shareware application called 'Toilet' that would flush, with (poorly done) animation and sound effects. when items were in it, the water was green [and of course the lid was up]. otherwise it was blue. And the lid would slam shut during the flush process, just because.
I've been 'cleaning up' a bunch of windows 10 pro machines for deployment this week, and cam across a handy power shell script that removes a whole bunch of, stuff.
https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10/blob/master/scripts/remove-default-apps.ps1
True to windows nature, doesn't work every time, sometimes needs to be run a couple of times, sometimes needs a re-boot, but it does (seem) to work.
True to windows nature, doesn't work every time, sometimes needs to be run a couple of times, sometimes needs a re-boot, but it does (seem) to work.
This is due to the incompetent way the Windows store application works. If an update for an application is queued in the windows store (this is, of course, an invisible queue and cannot be purged) then regardless of whether or not you uninstall an application in the mean time the application will be reinstalled later. This gets dafter because of the useless speed of the process (probably due to not wanting to grind a PC to a crawl on startup, therefore understandable in intention) an update to an update can also be added to this update/installation queue. What should happen is that when uninstalling an application all pending update to the application are purged from the installation queue, but this seems to be beyond Microsoft.
Of course, every time a new user accesses a Windows 10 system all the crappy default windows store applications are installed for them - these buggers are on a per user, per machine installation profile. Which gets added to arbitrarily by Microsoft.
"Option to install apps from Store only"
And next version, it will be "Option to be able to install non-store apps."
Next will be:
a) Option to allow Win32 API applications to work [followed by complete blockage, "signed" UWP-only from "the store" only]
b) Option to allow compiling from source on your own computer [followed by "disallow this renegade behavior"]
c) Option to keep your existing version without paying a subscription, followed by (you guessed it) monthly rental of the PRIVILEGE of using Win-10-nic on YOUR computer.
d) Option to allow ANY! OTHER! OPERATING! SYSTEM! on ANY! hardware upon which Windows could _POSSIBLY_ run. Then (you guessed it) the Micro-shaft Monopoly
time to abandon Micro-shaft, for "a proper operating system" without "allow you" nor "prevent you" in it.
(see icon for what I'm recommending, k-thx)
Ironically the only version of Windows 10 I would go anywhere near (LTSB), is the one that normal Plebs on the street can't get.... Microsoft don't want you running the version of Windows 10 that only has the good stuff, and none of the bad stuff.
The problem with LTSB is that:
- it requires KMS server (this can be arranged for;)
- technically, one is breaking law just by distributing it outside corporate environment (so what;)
- just like every other Windows version it's a rolling set of features. Tomorrow's LTSB may suck as bad as Anniversary edition. No fix here.
At this point the version to have may the Chinese copy. Would this be grey or red import?
Yet after seven months of trying everything on the web to get WU on my Win 7 lappy to do more than spin using 51% of the processor to no effect, on Monday I got notification of 10 updates waiting (which naturally became 11 after a reboot). After a "rollup" upgrade was installed the service stopped eating cpu cycles so I stopped turning it off when I needed to do heavy lifting.
Funny that my Win 7 system starts working as it used to right after this Win 10 update was pushed out.
That "a huge and intimidating set of options in the Windows 10 Privacy settings" is not a problem. The options not exposed through any of user accessible interfaces are.
BTW, I can't think of any any o these options I'd leave at default setting. But the time it takes to tame the beast just turns me off from logging in to new systems. Far from perfect when ones job is to support this turd.
"Download options now include "Run" for executable files ..."
They need to have 'Run As Administrator'. That would give one heck of a Creators facility.
I shall look forward to getting this eventually. I know, from experience with the Anniversary Update, that I'll have to set aside about an hour or so for the update process and I'll never be sure if it's finished, what with all those restarts.
I've stopped/blocked LAN access because it started writing its crap onto my network drives. I thought that they were MY network drives but I was obviously wrong. Now, I use a FAT32 USB stick if I want to transfer anything into Windows on the rare occasions that I use it (Daz Studio 3D and Photoshop CS6).
If that is what it sounds like, I have wanted something like that since Win95.
I know you can add favourites to Regedit and export them to a .reg file and import them to other computers or when you rebuild etc but I only do that for 10-20 locations that I use a lot.
Now by the sound of it we can highlight a location on a web page, ctrl+c, win+r, regedit, ctrl+v.
Now how about bringing back Windows 7's "Aero" elegance with the glass windows as an option instead of the blocky, annoying, generic title bars, and adding choices for menus such as what you get with "Classic Shell", a freeware app that makes 10 so much more usable. Yes, the Metro-style menus are more usable on a mobile device or tablet, but how about options for the rest of your desktop and laptop users?
For us poor saps that need to deploy it to an Enterprise environment, how about a Microsoft-sanctioned utility that allows customizing settings for all users, instead of the generic sysprep options and behind the scenes reg hacks and trickery we have to do now?
Why do all OS and equipment purveyors (except arguably some Linux distros) try to tell their users what they want instead of just listening to them? When it comes to UIs, why does everyone have to reinvent the wheel every few years? Maybe this has some limited usefulness every time a new generation of users goes online, but for business, people like the option to use the menus and shortcuts they've been using for years, without having to spend time finding workarounds for the "improvements."
The art of turd polishing
Yes, that reminds me of a YouTube video someone referred to yesterday - it's EXACTLY like that.
Instead of addressing the real issue why people don't like Windows (and CERTAINLY won't become "fans"), they make it worse. Much worse. I honestly have no idea what these people are thinking, but they seem to be as connected to the real world as your average hardcore LSD user whilst under the influence.
Unbelievable.
Yep, just "Waste of bandwidth". I can't imagine running this crap at default settings. All the crApps updating all the time (and MS adding new sh!tware to the start menu at a whim) and then Windows updates pulling a GB at a time. And then MS hovering your data (to balance their data link usage;). All this why I wait for the page to load in my browser.
Does "Creators edition" disable the metered connection fix for all interface?
Not when it starts off maximised.
Try and resize a Win32 executable's maximised window. You need to restore it to normal size first before you can drag the sides/corners. I wouldn't even try to resize it before restoring it because that's the way it's worked since Windows 3.1 or before.
TIFKAM does not offer expected behaviour.
You could have been so good, if you hadn't let those bastards from the marketing division* try to turn your computer into a platic pal whose fun to be with, and your customers into a revenue stream.
*mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Are you sure it is the marketing division and not the people who are straight out of college with no real world experience and who have never talked to people outside their bubble? I am thinking it is the latter because there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom. A educated person follows what the book says, and the book says that mobile is the future. A wise person knows to listen to paying customers and not to piss off paying customers.
Well I was being a bit tongue in cheek, but as a serious answer.
No I think this is driven by people who have realised that now many people will let their data be borged and know they can get away with it, thats not neccesarrily young people.
In fact I'd say it's a calculation, yeah you can turn techs off and off we all fuck to Linux, but you should expect techs to be more data wary anyway so they are bit of a lost cause to monetise.
However the people who several months ago it just updated and don't know what to do with it, the people who go I'm being tracked who cares, stuff like that totally outweigh the few who leave; so in the long run (if say you are doing the calculations) no loss there.
A wise person might know how to listen to his customers and not piss them off, a cynical bastard with experience knows how much you can get away with first.
As I have commented before it's a case of boiling the frog, making things super useful is the way you get people to sign up to these things and as each new tech generation comes along more are doing so, until it swings back the other way (if it ever does), this is the way it goes. As people get more and more used to the fact that their private life to some degree is out there, and if you can combine it with things that are useful. Then it becomes more and more easy to go from an inch to a mile.
There's probably not many of us who are so locked down nothing is available.
The pedant in me needs to point out that a Tomato is in fact a 'false fruit' as the true fruits are the pips, also it is quite possible to use certain cultivars of tomatoes (specifically some very high sugar content 'cherry' types) in a fruit salad as they can add a very interesting and enjoyable balance to the other fruits (and false fruits.)
"Are you sure it is the marketing division and not the people who are straight out of college with no real world experience and who have never talked to people outside their bubble?"
Them, too. Some people call them "4-inchers" as in "they view the world through a 4 inch screen" via Faceb****, Tw*tter, and other 'social media'. Yeah, they are the ones that *FEEL* (no thinking involved, just emoting, widdle snowflakes can't think any more) that everyone using a computer is a MARKETABLE CONTENT CONSUMER and needs to be "guided" (read: herded) into doing things "the Microshaft way" because, superiority complex like a bunch of brown-shirts. OK maybe not like brown-shirts, but you get the idea...
yeah, blame THEM too. mega-thumbs-up for pointing it out.
This is the only time in my entire life that I have welcomed a windows update and that's because on my only used as a blu-ray player because it is cheaper than a 4k bluray player x-box one s I can now do bit stream audio.
Thanks Microsoft.
p.s. Windows 10 pc is still looks shit with less privacy than the town gossip after a couple of beers in the local.
But the bragging about Narrator auto-defaulting to edit fields is so laughably bad it makes me shake my head in disgust. Jaws from Freedom Scientific, NVDA, & all the other screen readers have been able to & done this for years, so what's taken MS so long to catch up?
Unfortunately it's too little & too late because Win10 still plays merry hell with screen readers. Jaws tells it's users NOT to use the built in Win10 mail client because it renders Jaws FUBAR; not to use the Edge browser but to use the copy of IE instead because Edge still can't decide if it wants to let Jaws work at all; & not to use a brace of other built in Win10 programs for being inherently NOT accessible.
The folks at Jaws work their asses off to try & figure out how to make their program work with Win10 so they can support their paying customers, to make our lives just a little bit easier in navigating our own computers, but it seems like MS is *actively hostile* to any attempts by third party accessibility vendors to make their OS useable.
Congratulations MS on improving your native screen reader to finally do stuff everyone else has done for a decade, but I've already decided to upgrade right the hell off the MS treadmill. I've got work to do & MS won't let me do it.
Jaws tells it's users NOT to use the built in Win10 mail client
I think that's good advice anyway.
I've spent years trying to get people to look at the headers of any suspicious mail; it gives real insight into who is telling which lies, and makes email security so much easier. And so Microsoft have shipped their default client with no way to see the headers[1].
I have to use Win10 at work. I've switched[2] to using Thunderbird for my mail, but it really isn't much cop. I'm actually thinking about running Squirrelmail in one of my Linux VMs...
Vic.
[1] Unless anyone here knows differently - I'm all ears.
[2] At least I tried. It turns out that Win10 still reads your emails even if you're not running the mail client. I've now deleted that account entirely - let's see if it's really gone...
I don't know if it works in the Win10 mail client, I only know that it works in Outlook 2010.
Alt+F+I+V will get you to the Internet section of the properties of the email, & cursoring down gives you the headers. It's a total pain in the ass, but it is possible. You may have to use the shortcut keys multiple times to convince Outlook that you really want to view the headers, but once you're there it's good.
HTH.
Ads in fucking file fucking explorer?!?!?!?!
I get ads in android apps from the play store. A lot of the better apps that have ads also have a "pro" version or a "donate" option to get rid of the ads. This is intuitive, ethical, and sane. Free software may have annoying ads, pay for the software and you get rid of the annoying ads. My choice to uninstall, tolerate the ads, or pay some money. But file explorer isn't really optional, it's a necessary component of the OS (however infrequently you use it).
So Microsoft make you pay for their (mostly shitty) software and then fling ads at you? Unless you pay extra? Let's call it what it is. It's fucking RANSOMWARE. The usability of your computer is compromised unless you fork over dosh.
Thank fuck I don't have to use this shiteware.
What's with comparing Edge's HTML performance (in fact, the performance of a future version of Edge) to Firefox 48, which it conveniently beats? The current version of Firefox is 52, which scores 474, beating the current and future versions of Edge. An inconvenient truth?
And as has been pointed out elsewhere, you change the size of the calculator app like any other window since god knows when. The new size will persist. Only a moron would be complaining about this "bug" this long after the OS launched.
just get rid of
1) the tifkam control panel apps. seems to be random as to which one you get
2) the "change default browser" annoyance. change it. get taken to tifkam page. change it. "are you sure, why not try edge"? just change the fucking thing already
3) add user. just add a fucking user. dont hide making a local account, having to seleect "i dont have this persons login details" , then ask me if i want to use a ms account, then finally get to a local account. just have dropdown if you must. and just give me the win 7 style user management page. not some crap about this user, other users, add a family friend, add a dog. alright, i could net user /add etc
4) if i do a search from the start menu, im not interested in internet results, waiting for 2 minutes whilst it tries to find device manager or whatever. (ok, so i know i can use devmgmt.msc instead...)
5) theres ads in explorer? ive not seen this actually, but it wouldnt surprise me.
i wonder what this update will break / uninstall. usually network cards in my experience, and security programs.
incidentally, ive had a 2 jobs this week on lenovo's with win 10 where a firmware update for some uefi component that i cant remember at the moment borks the external monitor output. just roll back the driver for it and it works. maybe this will help someone
seperate processes sounds great, however, it'll probably always be the Windows update service that causes the problem as usual
3) add user
Learned the hard way, if you let Win10 switch a local account to an MS one, there's no way back. It will let you try but apparently it's never worked. If you bound your licence to an MS account, create a new MS login if you ever need to re-activate Win10, don't let the activation troubleshooter bork your local login.
Windows, the best argument for nightly drive imaging ever.
Pfft. I'm on the Windows Insider Edition (now with extra snoopiness!), running as a VM on my Mint box. Used only as a machine to see how this is evolving and to run the occasional "ONLY on Windows" application (like Paint.Net, which I love). Otherwise it's fired up about once a month to pick up the latest updates. After a VM snapshot, of course. MS must be very disappointed in me if they look at my profile - I just don't DO much in Win 10.
That's what I'm planning to do as the only reason I have for using windows is that Jack and ALSA are total pains to get running properly and quite a number of VST's and VSTi's just don't play nicely under Linux. If I could get Focusrite Mix Control to see my USB ports and my Scarlett 18i8 under Wine I'd dump MS for good.
What really annoys me, apart from the add user bit you mention, is the "fast start". It's one of the stupidest dodgy workarounds that microsoft have done. To cater for the fact that starting up / shutting down is painful on older machines with spinning disks, fast start simply replaces "shut down" with "log off and hibernate" (or something very close to that). It also rather disingenuously turns off the display before it's actually finished, to make the user think it's shut down quickly.
Starting up is then a bit faster because all it has to do is basically an un-hibernate from a memory image hibernate file.
But the whole thing is flawed. Windows, as we know, is incapable of staying up for more than a few days without slowing down or having "problems". So the user shuts the computer down every night, except it doesn't really shut down fully. The problems start after a few days with problems like internet access being sporadic, the computer being slow or some such thing. I tell users to restart their PCs, and they say "but I have" and I say "no you haven't, it says it has been up for 30 days" and they say "no but I shut it down every night". So I ask the user to restart properly NOW, not a shutdown, but a restart. And the users think they know what I mean, and shut down, then turn it on again. And the problems don't go away. Until they actually RESTART the bloody thing.
The worst things about this arrangement are that a) the fast start option seems to keep being set back on every few updates as if the users' wishes really don't count and b) on modern machines with SSDs, you can't tell the difference between a 'fast' start and a normal 'not fast' startup anyway. It's just so damn pointless!
When will people realise that windows is a turd that has only a light veneer on it to make it slightly glint in the sun?
@anthonyhegedus
yes. fast start is a giant pain in the arse. ive only recently figured out something that has been bugging me for ages. if you shut down a win 10 pc (with, as i now know, fast start enabled), and then bung the disk in a caddy to move data to it from another machine, and then bung the disk back in the machine, it goes ape shit, runs check disk. then the data you moved dissapears, (actually it turns up in lost files) but it reports the available space to be what it would be if the data is actually there. the first few times i tried this with win 10 (i do a lot of this because i run a repair shop, copy data to data server, rebuild , copy data back) i couldnt figure it out, so i started doing it the other way (copy data from win 10 machine to caddy, but i dont like doing this, id prefer to have their data on my data server rather than having to have lots of external drives hanging around).
its fast start that causes this. turn it off and it behaves itself.
im with you on the turn it off front. dont hibernate, sleep, any of that shit. on or off. all the machines i build these days have 850 pro ssd's in them, and as you rightly say, its 15 seconds to windows from cold, so fast start is not useful there. whoda thought restart to turn off, instead of turn off?
Microsoft probably lost many IE supporters when w10 came out because they used Edge as the default browser and didn't even tell novices that IE still existed. Some then flipped over to Chrome [the web browser version of Macs] and probably won't head back.
When I mentioned to some that IE was there - just hidden in the menus - I'd get "whaaaaat?" But most of them will stick with their current browser.
AFAIK, everything that's keeping me from using Windows 10 would be stopped if I can prevent Windows from phoning home.
I've read that Windows 10 will ignore any firewall software that would prevent it from phoning home.
But does anyone know if using an external firewall is known to work? I.e., is there a reasonable set of rules that an external firewall can use to suppress:
- Unwanted update pushes.
- Unwanted snooping by Microsoft.
- Unplanned system updates.
Nothing about the crap settings menu whereby you have to jump though a series of clicks to get to the old style setting pages, such as adaptor settings where you can actually do stuff. You cannot go direct from the wifi connection icon on the task bar. You cannot see IP/gateway from there. Similarly actual graphic settings are hidden behind a tree of useless GUI guff.
If you care about privacy then you don't use Windows because by using Windows you have no expectation of privacy and this is common knowledge considering the past behavior of this corporation. That being said Edge would be better if they restored the delete usage data that they aped off of Firefox.
My private laptop, which came with Windows 10, now claims, in Settings->Privacy, at the top of the page, in red:
Some settings are managed by your organisation.
What organisation would that be? And what settings?
W10 has been preparing to install the Creator's update. I had to turn off some spying, and for Windows to NOT spy on my browsing it seems I have to allow cookies and history, as MS says:
To opt out of personalised ads in this browser, your browser history must allow first-party and third-party cookies and you must have your browsing experience set to NOT delete browsing history on exit.
This seems bizarre.
W10 is still preparing, so we'll see how bizarre things end up being.
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