Windows 10: Win10 magnifier does not match up to Win7 search facility

For 10 years I have been running my W7 desktop. It's been the best system I have ever run. Rock solid (I cant remember when I last had a BSOD several years ago), and a totally reliable host for all my apps. However the system has been slowing and pausing increasingly frequently in the last 6 months or so, and although Ive done various obvious things, I cant eradicate the problem, so I persuaded myself to buy a big desktop to run Win10. (Ryzen 12 cpus, 32GB, M.2 SSD etc).

The results show that Win10 does not appear to be a forward step for me. There is an almost impenetrable layer of screenfilling junkware that I will never need in just about every system feature. I get BSODs about 1 - 2 times a day, plus about 3 - 6 crashes of Firefox per day. The Win10 installation (Pro) was straight from Microsoft with no bloatware. At purchase, all the network discovery services had been turned off, so I had to sort all that out for the new box to even see my home LAN.

I have been appalled at the huge number of totally needless changes that MS have made to the good utilitarian stuff in Win7. E.g. File Explorer is a non-obvious mess with tabs all over the place.

What brings me to write is that I cannot yet find the facility that was one of Win7's great workflow enablers, the ability to press the Windows key and put in a search term that could be sought over ALL files and all emails, or even input more than one search term by enclosing several terms in parentheses, in order to find what you were looking for.

This HAS to have been the single greatest workflow enabler in the whole Win7 operating system, as it allows all data objects to be searched associatively, so you dont have to create deep multi-level fixed hierarchies of folders to separately store similar stuff together in order to find things. The search facility also removes much of the pressure to have an email folder hierarchy that mirrors that of the file system (Big +).

Anyway, that magic facility seems to have gone, and if thats really so then I am sore about it. If this type of search can be done in Win10 could I please learn how?

I should add that I have looked at the magnifier on Win10 and it does not measure up at all. Why it wants to search the web beats me, I have a browser for that and I then have my bookmarks and History to help me afterwards. I cannot make the magnifier look at my considerable collection of .pst file I use with MS Outlook. To me, its clumsy and useless.

Perhaps I should have chosen a system where all the devices had Win 7 drivers..

Thanks for any help given,

Jon

:)

 

Magnifier

Interesting, you have a lot more values in that key than I do. LensHeight was the first on in my list, but Invert was added when I turned on colour inversion. I don't have ZoomIncrement, the zoom level it opens with is the value in Magnification.

I had a look at the same key on a Win7 PC that hadn't used magnifier yet. It didn't exist, but when I used WinKey and + the key was created. It was the same as for Win10 except it was missing RunningState. Also, the magnifier in Win7 behaved exactly the same way as in Win10 - only one press needed, remembering my zoom level and so on.

I haven't found any setting in the Ease of Access Centre that adds any of your values. Do you have Classic Shell or similar installed (I don't) - that may have added the extra values.

 

Magnifier & Speech Recognition problems

Suggest you pick one of the ones I listed- or search for another- something that is really intuitive and easy...

Are you aware of these controls?

 

How do I add display magnifier to the Start Menu of Windows 10

Hi,



I suggest you to follow the steps below and check if it helps.

• Press Windows key.
• Search and click on Windows Easy of Access.
• Right click on magnifier.
• Select pin to Start.

Keep us posted on this issue so that we can assist you better.