Windows 10

[maflynn]

t's still Windows. At the core you still have the system registry and DLL file system which adds overhead and complexity. Both of which are a pain to navigate, especially if you're not very tech savvy.

I support both workstations and servers at work, and I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to open up the registry to do any sort of work in 2017. I get that its part of the OS, but needing to go into the registry imo, is a rarity and as such its not something that needs to be held against MS.

As for dlls, the days of dll hell are long gone. Both are non-issues, no matter how you slice it.

Btw, the times I went into the registry was to change a file path for a report output for a specific application. I did this to make life a little easier in putting the report in a specific location, it was not needed at all to make it work. In fact, I would cite the application's inability for letting me set that path, so even though I have had to go into the registry the need was minor.

 

[06tb06]

I support both workstations and servers at work, and I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to open up the registry to do any sort of work in 2017. I get that its part of the OS, but needing to go into the registry imo, is a rarity and as such its not something that needs to be held against MS.

I blame MS completely. Neither Linux or macOS (Unix) use a registry or dll file system and both are far more reliable and stable. Like I said, Windows 10 may be more refined but earlier versions were a pain in this regard.

 

[maflynn]

I blame MS completely. Neither Linux or macOS (

No, but you're forgetting that Linux was created in 1991 but windows was created many years before hand (1985) and I think you need to look at the design with what MS was looking to do back in 1985, especially since they were developing a brand new os from the ground up. We can see 33 years later that the registry wasn't the best design choice, but back then it was revolutionary. I still remember when they were releasing windows and talking up the advantages of the registry and dlls.

Its easy to be critical of something without considering the big picture, i.e., hindsight is 20-20

As for macOS, remember the predessor of OS X had some very significant issues with extensions and so Apple's first graphical OS wasn't all unicorns and rainbows. In creating a brand new OS, Apple didn't write a new OS from the ground up, like windows, but rather took Next's OS NeXTSTEP (which was derived from Unix). They did that 14 years after the release of Windows and also knowing the weaknesses of System 7/macOS 8/Mac OS 9, which did not have pre-emptive multitasking, or protected memory - they developed a solid and advanced OS.

 

[elf69]

Windows 10 is okay, though I have a large number of gripes with it over 8.1:

- No easy way to boot into Safe Mode unless you can access the OS normally. Real stupid decision as you normally need Safe Mode when it won’t boot.

- Unable to easy skip Windows updates that keep failing, resulting in a 2 hour install attempt then subsequent rollback. In 7 & 8, when this happens you go through wuapp and disable which ones are causing the issue. Win 10 removed the ability to easily disable an update from installing and made Win update a Metro app, yet kept all the legacy service bull that you need to restart when there are issues.

I agree here.
In windows 10 home editions updates cannot be disabled, only enterprise editions.

We fix computers and fact you cannot enter safe mode unless you boot to windows and tell it you want safe mode is dumb!
Also in order to read HDD in another machine without having the stupid image file getting in way you have to shut down 10 while holding shift key so it does not create the stupid image file to which it boots from on next boot.

Windows 10 is what made me move to Mac OSX.
I hate 10, 7 was good but 10 put me off windows for life!

neither side is perfect but we all have a choice in which way we go.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Also in order to read HDD in another machine without having the stupid image file getting in way you have to shut down 10 while holding shift key so it does not create the stupid image file to which it boots from on next boot.

Arrrghhh what, you can hold Shift key on shutdown to get rid of the stupid image file!?! Man do I feel stupid, each time we were going into Parted Magic and then sudo deleting the hibernation file so the disk wouldn't be read only.

Though I guess on a large number of occasions the system wouldn't boot into the OS anyway so we would have had to do that. Other occasions would be for changing the password with the ol' CMD/Magnify switcheroo, but I guess one or two Terminal commands wouldn't add that much time to it as we'd need to go into Parted Magic anyway to do that.

Still, you learn something new every day.

 

[elf69]

Glad I could help someone

quote from winareo.com:

"The ways to shutdown Windows 10 are similar to the restart options mentioned above.
You can use the Start menu. This does a hybrid shutdown. If you hold down Shift and then press Shut down, then it will do a full shutdown"

But like you said 90% of time bloody thing not booting so no good.
This works from logon screen too not just within windows.

We use it when machines come in for data recovery.

our data recovery machine cannot scan drive if it has not been shut down with shift held down.
If we cannot boot machine to do this it adds extra complexity to get around.

 

[Mousse]

It’s sort of like Win 95 was. Looked much better and more polished, ran nicer, but scratch the surface and it’s MS-DOS. Same with W10. It’s nicer but you still get the same damn issues as you did on 7 and 8, except in some instances it’s now even harder to troubleshoot.

Windows NT, 2000, XP and beyond has been based on VMS, not DOS. VMS is the OS that ran on DEC VAX machines; it's more secure than DOS, supports multi-user, multi-threading. The security is no were near as robust as UNIX, but it's light years ahead of DOS.

Anyhow, I hate Windows 10 UI; hate the frakking tiles. Since most modern computers are way over powered for personal need, I run Win7 and Linux in virtualization on a Win10 machine. I use the Win7 VM for connecting to the company's server, Linux for interweb. Win 10 serves as the host OS for my VM's.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Windows NT, 2000, XP and beyond has been based on VMS, not DOS. VMS is the OS that ran on DEC VAX machines; it's more secure than DOS, supports multi-user, multi-threading. The security is no were near as robust as UNIX, but it's light years ahead of DOS.

Anyhow, I hate Windows 10 UI; hate the frakking tiles. Since most modern computers are way over powered for personal need, I run Win7 and Linux in virtualization on a Win10 machine. I use the Win7 VM for connecting to the company's server, Linux for interweb. Win 10 serves as the host OS for my VM's.

Apologies, my original post wasn’t clear in retrospect. I meant 95 was DOS, not 10, and used 95 as an analogy for everything looks great on the front end but it’s the same old crap on the back end, just like Win 10.

Yeah... original post really wasn’t well written! Thank you for your courteous response though.

 

[Hanson Eigilson]

I blame MS completely. Neither Linux or macOS (Unix) use a registry or dll file system and both are far more reliable and stable. Like I said, Windows 10 may be more refined but earlier versions were a pain in this regard.

hmm yeah, but both of them seem to offer far less hardware support as well, and with the hardware macOs does support there is far less consumer access to it, like tell me how to underclock or lower the max clock on the dgpu on mbp2015 afaik not possible but absurdly easy on windows.

In my personal experience current macOs is not as stable as windows 10 is today, but everyones milage may vary.

 

[Falhófnir]

Sorry to say it, but 64-bit Windows 10 runs great on my 2006 24" iMac (the first 24" that they released), while with Apple it is only possible to run an OS that is 6 versions behind the current version, as they couldn't be bothered to write 64-bit graphics drivers for all of the older hardware that they cut off after Lion. So it falls to Microsoft to keep this great old hardware useful and up-to-date on browsers etc (and iTunes versions...)

Windows generally is better on older hardware as it’s optimised to a lower baseline than macOS -it’s really good that an intel mac that’s had it’s support dropped by Apple can usually be used a great deal longer if you put windows on it - fully supported and as secure as any windows machine can be.

 

[maflynn]

In my personal experience current macOs is not as stable as windows 10 is today, but everyones milage may vary.

I think what hurt macOS was moving from a 2 to 3 year upgrade cycle to an annual cycle. Its my unofficial, unscientific opinion by rolling out new versions every 12 months, the quality of that rollout decrease.

 

[Hanson Eigilson]

I think what hurt macOS was moving from a 2 to 3 year upgrade cycle to an annual cycle. Its my unofficial, unscientific opinion by rolling out new versions every 12 months, the quality of that rollout decrease.

Yeah it's so strange that they did that, I can not imagine working under that kind of pressure, but probably my manager would love it

Personally I think they kind of need a commitment to compatibility and process isolation, like in order to compile for newest version of IOS i need newest version of xCode (so now bugs might come from me, xCode linker, compiler or IOS)
but for newest version of xCode i need newest version of macOs and maybe newer version of swift, so now bugs might come from...everywhere lol. It's a strange way of doing things to me and I can not imagine having to do big applications, with heavy features with this kind of deep integration.

 

[lowendlinux]

I agree that the year upgrade cycle is silly when it's your only cycle. OSX needs a yearly and a LTS they don't need to RHEL at 10 years but 4 years seems appropriate.

 

[0388631]

I agree with @maflynn on the update cycle. I'm often left wondering what exactly is revolutionary whereas the previous cycle period left me in awe. And, similar to Apple, Microsoft now does 2 large updates for W10 each year. One in March and one in September. Each time, there's thousands of people with broken machines through the 'forced' update mechanism.

Honestly, I find Windows 10 a bit daunting to use.

I can count on one hand the number of times I needed to open up the registry to do any sort of work in 2017.

I don't do IT myself, but as a power user, I've maybe used the registry about 30 times since 2000.

 

[decafjava]

Honestly, the last straw that broke the camel's back for me with Windows was the fact MS spread out and hid a lot of the privacy and data sharing options in different places. I finally pulled the trigger one year ago and got a Ma after years of using iPhones. I also am very used to Windows 7 so have found getting used to Windows 8 and 10 in my current workplace a bit of a challenge - I have the tile interface turned off in favour of the classic start on Win 8.1 on my main work laptop for example. Even installed the "bliss" wallpaper.

 

[oldhifi]

Also loaded my MS Project 2003 and Office 2007 with no problems

 

[Mousse]

I also am very used to Windows 7 so have found getting used to Windows 8 and 10 in my current workplace a bit of a challenge

Understatement of the decade. MS decided to screw up a perfectly usable WIMP UI in Win7 with the gawd awful Tiles UI of Win8. Win10 did little to rectify the mistake. How would you feel if overnight, GM, Toyota and VW all decided to drop the steering wheel in favor of buttons for steering? Hey, kids should be able to pick up driving instantly from all the Gran Turismo they play, right?
That is why OS X is vastly more usable. The mantra of consistent UI was ingrained into the Apple culture with the 128K Mac.

 

[elf69]

if you don't like 8 or 10 interface install "classic shell" it resells windows 8 or 10 to look like XP/vista/7

it is still not perfect but we have done this for many older customers who could not adjust to the change.

 

[maflynn]

I don't do IT myself, but as a power user, I've maybe used the registry about 30 times since 2000.

They have the registry locked off for standard users, and I've not seen much issues related to the registry in supporting the desktops, i.e., lack of editing the registry has not caused problems.

 

[0388631]

They have the registry locked off for standard users, and I've not seen much issues related to the registry in supporting the desktops, i.e., lack of editing the registry has not caused problems.

I can't recall what we use to deploy feature limiting to lock our employees' computers down. Though it's similar to that; can't touch the registry, can't wander deep into the C drive, etc. From the time we started out until now, the software our industry uses has gone ahead in light years. We're no longer bound to hardware restrictions when it comes to the majority of software we must use. A blessing when you think about other industries that are still hardware bound. I think the only upgrade we have done on employee units was installing SSDs as boot drives and migrating the early HDD to a secondary bay. It's been pretty headache free for the most part.

I'm not sure how long these will last, but being energy compliant and low intensity use, they should last a long time until they're too outdated. Either new units, thin clients like Wyse, or possibly Apple (though at their snail's pace, this seems unlikely.)


Edit: The move to boot SSDs was a night and day difference. I think if PCI-E SSDs become the norm in the next 4-5 years, it'll provide even more speed and longevity to hardware.

 

[oldhifi]

I purchased Windows 10 and Office 2016 from this web site:

Prime OS Tech

works fine..

 

[Kingcr]

I blame MS completely. Neither Linux or macOS (Unix) use a registry or dll file system and both are far more reliable and stable. Like I said, Windows 10 may be more refined but earlier versions were a pain in this regard.

Not entirely true.

With respect to the point on dll’s, both macOS and Linux have equivalents (.dylib and .so). Yes they are handled slightly differently, but this is hardly something unique to Windows.

Then, as to the registry, on Linux dconf and the older gconf are functionally similar if you’re using Gnome. Not nearly as complex as the Windows registry but still a central database of component and application settings. Of course, I much prefer macOS’ plists in this respect.

The point is that every OS has its own set of architectural strengths and weaknesses, with a lot of conceptual overlap in between. I wouldn’t really blame any one set of architects for decisions that got technology to where it is now.

 

[Mousse]

Win10 introduced a browser that's WORSE than IE, Edge. It's fast and pretty good in most respect, but...a yuge BUT (Sir Mix-a-lot big BUTT). But it automatically restores the previous session in the event of a crash or force ending. So what? Big deal. It is when you get this...

Everytime you restart Edge...it's baaaackk.
No way to turn off automatic recovery without editing the registry. The Boss had this BSOD happen no less than 4x yesterday. And once this morning. I had to clear the recovery cache to get Edge working again. It's ridiculous.
I switch her over to Chrome and IE (banking website requires it). BTW, Edge doesn't play nice with the banking site, so two birds.

 

[maflynn]

WORSE than IE, Edge.

Yep, I avoid that browser like the plague. Its awful.

 

[elf69]

also unlike IE it cannot be reset that I can see.

at least with IE there is option to reset via internet options.
Edges is worst browser EVER!