My Experience with Microsoft Windows 10

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My Experience with Microsoft Windows 10
By Hervé St-Louis
September 1, 2015 - 11:55

I installed Microsoft Windows 10 a month ago. This was the biggest error I have done with a computer upgrade. My experience has been bad. I get almost one blue screen of death crash per day. Worse, often, as today, I get three crashes within an hour. As I was trying to draw my Johnny Bullet comic strip over the weekend, the computer kept crashing and it would take five minutes to reboot. I wasted a lot of time because of the crashes and lost work because I forgot to save my work every minute. It is not conductive to productive and immersive work when you have to keep saving every time you draw a brushstroke.

Support at Microsoft is not responsive. The first few days, I tried to contact Microsoft’s support department after having been encouraged to seek their support by their Twitter accounts. I waited about two hours, after having been forwarded through different agents, and then waiting some more. I just gave up.

Windows 10 is not great. I don’t care what professional reviewers who receive pristine copies of the software on new computers tested extensively say. On a day-to-day basis, Windows 10 is pure annoyance. I dislike how Microsoft spies on me, even though I thought that I had disabled all of their spyware. I still get news prompts based on my profile on my screen saver coming from Bing, although I actively tried to disable (and thought that I had succeeded) all surveillance and data-mining features.

I’ve disabled automatic updates, yet they still update my computer. The worse feature is the hidden Administrator account that prevents me from making changes to my computer. Microsoft does not tell users about this hidden administrative account unless you search for it actively. Technically, I am the administrator of my computer. Yet, there are changes that I cannot perform because Microsoft does not want me too.

My DVD player has stopped working. I installed the Windows 10 DVD player provided by Toshiba for Toshiba laptops. The player still will not work and I cannot review two DVDs I was sent on my computer. I have to plug them on the player attached to the TV in the living room instead. Microsoft took away features it did not need to remove. Why?

Even if I remove Windows 10, my DVD player, according to reports, will continue to be unusable. All of this crap from Microsoft is so that they can sell me more tailored advertising. This is why this update was free. They want to build a massive critical mass of users to attract advertisers. Microsoft has completely forgot that its main goal is to make products that users can use as opposed to commodifying its users just like Google and Apple.

File update and image previews in Windows Explorer are slow. My browser, Firefox is slow and buggy since the update. Starting my regular apps is slow. I need my computer to work, not to play. But it seems that Microsoft wants to dumb down my computer to make it a toy on which I can watch YouTube videos and play games bought from its app store. If I wanted such a silly computer, I would have gotten myself a Mac…

I will not use the Microsoft app store. I don't want to be further commodified and have all of my purchase history tabulated in a cloud-based (and probably unsecured) database so that advertisers can sell me even more crap I don't need because I made the mistake of downloading one app at the Microsoft store.

Do not install this piece of trashware if you can. Skip it. It's worse than Windows 8. Do not buy into the free upgrade pitch. It is not a free update. You will become the product sold to advertisers. There are no free lunches when it comes to Microsoft, Google or Apple. You should not have to spend an hour of your life attempting to disable features meant to spy on you as opposed to help you improve your productivity.