Windows 10: Customers petition to demand changes to Windows 10 update practices

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I had an old Acer Revo 3700 1.8ghz CPU 2GB of ram, that I upgraded from 7 to 10
My first problem is that it took nearly 12 hours to install, I had to retry 3 times.
Next the operating speed was so poor, it seemed 1/2 the speed of Windows 7
I lost the touchscreen capabilities and had to get the old Windows Touch Pack for it
For the 1 or 2 features Windows 10 has, it removes a slew of older features we use.

I ended up uninstalling it and reverted back to Windows 7 (which went very smoothly)

Personally, I am not impressed with Windows 10, I can't recommend Windows 10 and though it may be fine for some, it definitely is not my cup of tea.

So, as I referred to some can like an ugly mutt, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

And those Apple bugs you talk about, the difference is, is that Apple actually corrects them and almost immediately. The last major bug, only effected about 10,000 people, but yet they immediately got a fix to them. So, I can't even compare Microsoft to Apple, when it comes to correcting defects.

 

And as I was saying there are all variations of experience levels from total newbie to computer engineer and surprisingly the ones that will find their way here come from all categories! That's how you end up with a mixed bunch on a forum like this! *Biggrin

I've been installing OSs since Dos and 10 threw in a stumbling block back on July 29th simply when having two storage drives plugged in and the initial upgrade attempts kept failing. Where did I turn? The Tutorial section by someone who had already encountered this situation and included the advisory in the guides for both clean install and upgrade type installs.

The check box option is already there to pick and choose which updates(Optional) will be downloaded and installed.. You simply uncheck any of the "Important" updates you don't want to go on usually when a particular update will end up causing some type of problem. That's how the WU works until 10 became an Optional pre-checked.

When mentioning touchscreen support 10 should automatically be seeing more support natively when in the Tablet mode! then 7 ever saw. I know someone who ended up hating the lack of full support in 7 and ended up reverting back to strictly keyboard and mouse input.

While ME was labeled a big flop for which I still don't know why never having run that oldie there XP was to see years of "Lack of Support" for the over 1,000 fixes finally seen in SP3! XP here was nothing but a usual unfixed headache looking for any excuse to crash! Don't remember how many times I saw a clean install go on. Vista while less responsive and a larger OS to begin brought in improvements in stability as well as crash control carried on and improved on with 7.

10 is the new dual platform OS explaining why many things are different. You once again have a larger OS to deal with explaining the hour long installation time for the average first seen with 8 as well as further development on the WinMin kernel so it's takes less ram per process otherwise 10 would be much slower like 20minutes to arrive at the desktop! When compared next to 7 here the 7 desktop arrives sooner but remains loading things in the background before you can even begin while the 10 desktop takes a bit longer but less background loading once up. Once the desktop does arrive you can get started sooner in 10.

As far as features things like the sidebar and Windows Mail brought in with Vista are gone with WM having replaced Outlook Express XP saw. 7 Still saw the option for both however about when MS brought in Windows Live Mail becoming Live Essentials in time for 8 and then dropping Window Live Messenger entirely in favor of the much better Skype that is readily available for 10 with the "Get Skype" option.

As far as any major bugs MS had just released a major security fix back in June for all versions(Vista and newer) when a new vulnerability was discovered. Often there isn't any big news announcement when MS slips various fixes for thise or that out mixed in with the usual batch. Reading the details on each update can be a help at times except where MS was being a little slippery with the Get 10 app.

 

At this point using Windows Phone seeing how Microsoft is seemingly trying to avert pulling another Windows Longhorn, I may possibly before loading 10 on my main telephone. I've been burned more times than I can remember on my tester phone and my old 920 trying to install 10 it's frustrating.

Also, Capitan is quite meh. I honestly believe apple took some UI/UX ideas Microsoft sent to the Recycle Bin but they were all like, "No wait! We'll take 'em!" Window snap is tedious at best, clicking a little tiny green button and THEN snapping the window just defeats the purpose for me. There's a very Windows 10-esque window select preview once you do snap it. Why apple decided to make two snapped windows into a virtual desktop is beyond me. Microsoft didn't get away with that in 8 and 8.1 and yet apple is using the EXACT same concept.

I'd like to see details come back to updates. Microsoft's recent stance of no changelog or no info seems sketchy.

 

Or at least do a drive image with your favorite backup utility, upgrade it to 10 to get the "digital entitlement" registered for your PC, then go back to your previous version using the Windows option (which often fails, which is why you have the backup). I presume this going-back won't cancel the digital entitlement. I sure hope not.

I can see the writing on the wall, as the end of extended support for 7 looms large, even if it is five years away. If going back does not cancel the digital entitlement, that will give MS five more years to get 10 in shape before I really have to give serious consideration to leaving 7. That's why I am here on this forum-- I want to be aware of the goings-on with 10, because 7 is not going to be supported forever. I want to like 10-- MS just needs to give me a reason.

Not me. I don't have a smart phone. I've never even seen one up close, and I don't plan to.

Just DX12. Nothing else that has changed in 10 strikes me as a great new feature. Native USB 3.0 is nice, but not a big deal; USB 3.0 works great with 7 with the appropriate drivers. I know the kernel is more efficient, so they say, but my PC is quick enough to where I don't even notice a difference. I have no use for Cortana or anything "app," but I do for Windows Media Player, which isn't there. I don't care about touch screen stuff, as I would not even be using it if I had a touch monitor now. I have no use for OneDrive or any "cloud" stuff.

10 may be better than 8 (which I never tried), but It's still a jarring mixture of what I would call native Windows stuff and the ugly Universal stuff... like Microsoft threw "app" versions of OS dialogs in just to prove the point that it was all one, big, happy family now. It's so... ugly, not to mention unnecessary.

So it is only bad if using the first OS to spy on people? That doesn't make any sense. If it was bad the first time, it's bad every other time too.

Really? There seem to be more than 12 people that signed the petition at change.org. Do you think all the people complaining about this are really pirates? I understand granny or grampa just letting MS change their computer at will, but I would have presumed anyone that was tech savvy at all would be approving or rejecting each (non-security) addon manually. To do otherwise would be to trust Microsoft to act in the user's interest rather than their own. The folly of that, if not already evident by now, was certainly illustrated with the unwanted downloads of Windows 10 and the telemetry and "GWX" nag updates.

If by "grandparents" you mean me, and by "8.1" you mean 7, and by "used to" you mean "finished tweaking to make it as much like Windows 2000 or Windows XP Classic as possible," then yes. I only migrated to 7 less than 2 years ago. It was on a holiday sale at Fry's and I wanted to migrate to 64-bit, so I bit the bullet and did it. Otherwise, I don't think I would have upgraded-- I'd still be on XP, security issues notwithstanding. My older laptop (too old to run something newer, as far as Windows goes) has been running fine with the ReadyPOS updates.

Only because Microsoft stops updating it. XP would still cut it just fine if they had kept updating it with only the necessary new features and security updates instead of putting new stuff in new Windows versions every few years. Even now, six years out of mainstream support, it still runs nearly everything Windows. Other than the security risk, which is not because of XP being inherently inferior, but because MS has simply stopped offering updates for it, XP is still a very usable OS even today.

You mean another OS that is so stable, usable, intuitive, and popular that people don't want to give it up, even for something new and shiny? Isn't that exactly what we need?

 

This is just hilarious, as if they will change it. I am all for the forced updates aside from the drivers. Most of the time its not a bad update its due to the person not restarting their machine in months or they need a chkdsk really bad.

 

That's Great, I hope you enjoy things like this latest update. If this one didn't get you yours will come sometime in the future.

I tried W-10 for a full 30 days then dumped it and reverted back to 8.1 where I at least have some control over updates and I will remain with 8.1 till the bitter end, 2023 is a long way off.

I totally agree with that part of your comment. I am having a great time witnessing this Threshold2 update debacle.*Roflmao2

Although I really do sympathize with those users who are not very computer literate, they have no idea what they are up against. *Sad

 

From what I have been observing here the thing MS should be pointing out is the update is actually an Upgrade Install to a newer build as far as going from the July 29th release of the 10240 RTM to Threshold 2 or for an Insider the 10586 with a slight change under the hood of not seeing the version number or OS build number only the product ID number which will aurtomatically vary with each upgrade or clean install if you use the Media Creation tool to download and save the particular edition to the drive for seeing it go on a later time.

The same product key used to activate the 10586 Insider Preview flavor just seen out last week cannot be used on the Threshold 2 which looks for a 10 key insttead of one from a previous version being a difference found there. On two separate machines I have 10 Home and Pro both activated on VMs. Those two are the 10586 builds while the Threshold hasn't activated on it's own or accepted the same key used on the 10586 Pro VM there. I couldn't a second Pro 10586 VM on the second machine to activate for the 7 Pro key there while the Home did from a 7 Home Premium key not in use. Edge seems to be slightly better while still lacking.

Despite a few builds being RTM none are the finished 10 but much more like the RC builds seen with 7 years back! I suspect the actual finished 10 will be what comes out next summer when you have to pay for it since the free upgrade offer will be over then. MS has everybody jumping to upgrade into essentially evaluation/developer builds even when not in the Insider program! With 7 the change came a year later with SP1 included in the media being the big update there.

 

The problem with skipping updates is that each new update builds on the total body of preceding updates. Each new update will have been tested on the completely updated code. They simply can't test it on the code minus whatever updates you or Fred Blogs have decided to miss. That's why updates are now Cumulative; they will add the latest update and whatever previous updates are missing.

I realise that this is sad news for those who have made a living out of advising people on what updates to install and what to miss out on, but it's progress for most people. Most people don't understand the minutiae of update details, and, as I said at the top, skipping updates may make a future update fail.

Bob Frost

 

Yes, that is certainly true. Even so, we've managed to muddle through for 15 years or more like this; what has suddenly changed to make that paradigm unworkable? Allowing the owners of computers to decide what is done to their own machines is, in fact, the industry standard, is it not? I'm sorry if that makes it harder on Microsoft's QA team, but the bottom line is that these are our computers, not Microsoft's, and Microsoft has already shown they can't be trusted not to abuse the update process (once again referring to "GWX" and unwanted downloads of Windows 10).

To relieve their own burden of more difficult troubleshooting, all Microsoft would have to do for their own tech support team would be to let customers know that their Windows installation has to be fully updated in order for them to make use of Microsoft technical support (unless actually getting those updates is the problem). Their automated troubleshooters could easily require this as a first step.

Beyond that, it's not Microsoft's job to protect people from being what they consider to be stupid. Not installing the latest updates is, of course, far from being the only way to get a PC messed up; I would hazard a guess that people falling for social engineering scams to get them to willingly execute malware probably is the biggest. To take the impulse to reduce user choice in order to promote stability to its logical end would be to make Windows much like iOS, where you can only do a very limited, OS-vendor-approved number of things, in order to keep it "just working." I have no doubt that it is probably pretty hard to get an iOS device truly messed up without jailbreaking it, but if I wanted that level of babysitting to keep me safe, I certainly know where to find it. Of course, iOS is not a desktop OS, and I have not heard any reports that OSX suffer from the "walled garden" effect (I have no first-hand experience with it), but the comparison still stands.

The bottom line is that the kinds of people who would turn off auto updates (tech savvy people who want to have fine-grained control over their own computers) are not going to give up and let MS do as they wish. People know they can simply set the Windows Update service to Disabled, and the auto updates will not happen. That includes the updates they would almost certainly have approved-- the security updates. Is getting none of the updates better than getting just most of them? Or how about keeping people using previous versions that do still give them this choice; is that better than letting them migrate to 10 and continuing to be able to choose? Look how much difficulty MS has had getting people off of XP, and that's when there is another perceived "good" version available for people to migrate to (7, of course). How will it be trying to get people away from 7 and into 10 if there is no perceived "good" version anymore?

I've been screening updates since the first time they were available (the details of when that was escape me, but it was back in the 9x days), and I do end up approving nearly all of the "recommended" updates and a good number of the "optional" ones, and certainly all of the "critical" ones. It's just the telemetry, the "GWX" adware, the unwanted 4GB downloads and that sort of thing that I refuse. I never saw the Windows 10 adware, because I never allowed those updates to install. I scrutinize everything that gets installed on my system; I am a little surprised that there are techie type people who don't do this with updates.

Microsoft abused the users' trust when they used their updating system to send out adware, and I don't doubt they would do that again, especially given that Windows 10 has advertising baked in like no previous version (ironically, the one that comes the closest, as far as I remember, is the beloved Windows XP and its MSN stuff), which kind of shows what Microsoft is thinking. The Action Center greeted me with an offer to buy Microsoft Office right from day one when I tried 10, and the Threshold 2 patch brings advertising to the Start Menu, as I have read. Then there's OneDrive in the navigation pane and systray when I have not even set up a Microsoft account (why not add them if/when I actually sign up for OneDrive, unless they're meant to be constant reminders that it is available, like a billboard by a highway?), and the Xbox app that (as I understand) can't be uninstalled by normal means, even though I will never have an Xbox. Even the integration of mobile "apps" into an OS installed on a desktop (including the bits of the OS that are "universal" instead of regular/native Windows, like the personalization menu, the settings menu [which we've been told will eventually engulf the Control Panel], Groove music, etc.,) are efforts to get people accustomed to/invested in the "ecosystem" so they will later choose to buy Microsoft tablets and (eventually) phones.

Windows 10 seems like the "free" version of software that is advertising supported, only there is usually a paid version that removes the ads (and 10 is not free... it's a free upgrade for some users, with limitations, of course). Can we have a paid upgrade version (which would also be the non-upgrade, full price version) that does away with all of that stuff I mentioned (including all of the hideous Universal bits of the OS on devices that are not convertible to a tablet)? That would make Windows 10 very much more appealing. The ad-supported 10 could then be a lower-cost boxed option (like the starter editions) with the ability to upgrade from within itself. (I say that tongue-in-cheek; I don't expect them to do that, though it would be welcome.)

Perhaps the aftermarket will take care of this, so it will end up being a paid version that doesn't have that stuff... it's just that someone else will get the money. There'd be a huge market for it. A lot of people don't like the "jack of all trades" aspect of 10 (and 8); we'd much rather have an OS that is the "master of one," which would be the one we are using Windows on now.

 

Well the one thing you can count on from now will be expecting a full upgrade install for each new public release by way of the updates rather then simply buying newer media with the SP1, SP2, ? included on the disk which will be no more as MS does away with all optical media in favor of write protected flash drives which will leave many stranded as well if they are running a Vista laptop there won't be upgrade by update option or 10 app! And if the laptop just happens to lack the option for the boot device menu like HP models for example you will still need to burn a dvd! A good number of laptops and compacts lack optical or have the optical but lack the F key like F4, F11, F12 to bring up the list of drives to pick USB HHD from the menu to boot live from a usb key!

 

At least they know that a different approach will be needed for next upgrade. Can't wait. You can actually repair all this without a clean install.

 

You can now download the MS made "4 in 1" iso and save time on multiple machines! Instead of seeing the 32bit and 64bit MC tool on separate links you now only see the MediaCreationTool.exe not _x64 or _x86 in the file name. I have the combo iso downloading now which will replace the two Tech Bench downloads since there won't be any need to extract the two iso files into the 32bit and 64bit folders on the flash drives made into the 4 in 1s here.

In a minute the actual size on drive will be.... 96% and closing... 98% and almost ....progress as far as verifying download begins... creating media or actually saving download as iso file to folder directed to with change of file name from "Windows.iso" to "W1-Home-Pro-32-64-Combination.iso" which is how that will be saved to the drive and distinguishable from the rest of the downloads which now have to be dumped! One flash drive does all! *Biggrin

45% and climbing on Creating 10 media as we speak...78% and still climbing... 945% and ... done! It weighs in at 5.48gb in size which will be going onto a 16gb USB 3.0 as well as a 2.0 as well as even an 8gb that slide onto a key chain I bought for Recovery Drives however. No matter! *Smile

 

You only need to boot from the usb device if you are doing a clean install. That will only affect a minute proportion of Windows users. The downloaded upgrade will run from your existing Windows to do an upgrade of your current installation. I've done this on all the Insider releases and the final releases, and this release, on four different computers without any problems - one laptop, three desktops. As far as I am concerned, the days of clean installs are past thank goodness!

Bob frost

 

I have to agree that clean installs while nice are not as necessary as they were in the past. The update process is a lot better and it's been working just fine for me.

Jeff

 

Well let's see that works out nicely for both desktops and not for VMs or a certain laptop that lacks any boot device menu you bring up by pressing a particular F key like F4, F11, F12 at post time where you then select the drive or device like cd rom or USB HDD option and can then boot live from optical or usb media. Many a laptop only see the optical drive set first in the boot order and no option to even get into the bios setup leaving you stuck with the need for optical and why MS had to make sure that option was included in the MC tool! They may want to dump optical as far as retail but can't stop supporting that form!

On VM you won't have any issues upgrading while a few apps will likely get knocked out and no they are not updates but upgrades you now see downloaded by way of the Windows updates but are still full upgrade installs which some have been running into problems with "As Typical of Upgrade Type Installs" can be! This is why most want only clean installs to begin with to get past any buggyness from upgrading. Your 1 out of 3 or 4 upgrades may come out running 100% while others will be seeing bugs come up a later time. And some are immediate disaster zones! *Eek*Eek*Eek "yikes!!! what a mess!" *Doh