At this point, I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve left my perfectly working Windows computer at the end of my work day, only to return to a completely broken computer that won’t boot the next morning.
I find this to either be a lie or self inflicted. I manage a small fleet of a few hundred windows systems and all updates have been fine for years.
In the windows admin user groups there are more than a few that are deploying updates within 24hrs of release to thousands of servers and workstations and have not reported issues.
Lastly I think that tech bloggers say things like this to get clicks, so they can get ad revenue. Then they also tell you how to disable updates so they can get more clicks and ad revenue.
It’s disingenuous and probably harmful to be telling people to disable updates that lead them to be exposed to vulnerabilities.
The primary issues that I faced with Windows (Win10 nearly a decade ago) are
very slow updates
constant 100% disk usage after boot
high background process usage
[Rare] messing with my dual partition setup
The final error which caused me to format my PC -> After logging in, the desktop froze, no icons showing up, no task manager.
If I had never used Linux, these wouldn’t even seem like problem; just normal Windows shenanigans. But after using Linux, I can never go back. I don’t know how much worse/better Win11 is now but can’t be bothered to try.
My biggest issue with Windows (at least on my desktop) is with my GPU driver for my Intel Arc A770 LE. Windows Update will not stop automatically “updating” my driver to a driver that was made about a year and a half ago. It’s too old that Intel Arc Control doesn’t even work with it. It doesn’t matter how I install the latest driver from Intel, I can DDU the old one, install the driver and wipe all custom configurations or just install it normally. Nothing works, upon the next reboot, it automatically says “there’s an update” and installs regardless if I want it or not. The driver installation also has a 50/50 chance of blue screening my whole system when installing, both the installation from Windows update, and from Intel. The Window driver “updates” for my driver have also just happened randomly with no notice, they’ve occurred during hour long Blender renders, crashing it and wasting hours of my time redoing work. (This is all on Windows 10). It is frustrating to deal with
Meanwhile, my Linux install on the same computer just runs mesa and I’ve had no issues at all with my GPU. (Or any issues with drivers really, it all just works).
Although it didn’t “kill” my computer. Whenever I still used Windows, it would spontaneously install this outdated driver which would either blue screen or crash whatever I was in the middle of doing such as working in Blender, playing a game, etc.
It’s kind of disingenuous of you to proudly say, “I don’t use the same version of Windows that this person likely does and I don’t have the same issues that this person does so they must be full of shit”.
There are vast differences between Windows home and Windows pro and Windows Enterprise editions as far as how easy it is to control and block off the annoyance ware that Microsoft builds into it.
If you use deployment software to roll out your images after standardizing them and have a set image that you can deploy to a thousand computers as easily as one then it’s very simple to sign in with a local domain account and disable the windows things through a group policy and just start rocking and rolling whereas your average Windows home user is not going to even have access to GPO and we’ll have to tediously for each and every single computer every single time they reset it redo all of the things to disable all of Microsoft’s crap activation.
They are not entirely different but definitely distinct versions of Windows and dismissing the home and non-enterprise users that their experience is inferior to your experience on the Enterprise side is what I’m saying is disingenuous
It’s kind of a wide disparity for something that’s so locked down, though. It’s not as though one person is saying they get occasional issues and the other is they often have issues… it’s one person basically saying their own personal computer is nigh unusable and the other providing an example of a large number of examples of that being extremely unlikely…
It’s far more likely this individual is fucking up their computer on a regular basis, or has a very high bar of usability that is broken any time there is even the slightest hiccup or inconvenience.
“I’ve never experienced what you describe, so it must be either imagined or your own fault.”
I’ve seen this nonsense over and over again in communities of all kinds, most often in tech forums (where there are always a few participants suffering from a big-fish-little-pond effect). It’s a very rude and foolish bit of human behavior.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
That’s the difference between the Home and Pro versions though. The things that generally break on the Home versions are all the things not generally enabled on a domain controlled Pro version. Thisbis more about Microsoft just being bad at small updates versus these giant roundup packages they like to ship.
The interesting thing for me is that I own two different surface pro 7 tablets. I have one for work and one for home (now that work doesn’t require me to bring my own device anymore). The work surface has windows 10 pro on it. My home one doesn’t, The difference is very interesting. The IT team have disabled a lot of stuff on my work surface that I don’t even have access to on my home unit. I don’t often have bugs from updates breaking things at work. I do at home though which is enough for me to perhaps upgrade the windows key on my home unit someday. If I don’t install linux first which is a possibility.
#1 is by and far the cause I see when people ask me ‘why did thing break?!’
There’s a lot of ‘Well, I edited the registry and then deleted these two files and installed this 3rd party software so that it looks like it did in Windows XP!’ floating in my circles, which almost entirely correlates to the people who are mad that their install is, yet again, broken/not working as expected/having weird problems.
Of course, people are doing this because Microsoft can’t stop shitting up Windows in a way that annoys people, and thus leading them to do things that maybe aren’t the best idea.
So, in summary: it’s a land of contrasts, but stop adding bullshit nobody wants Microsoft.
The year 2000 was peak human technology. It’s been downhill in every way since, until generative AI - which is f’in amazing. But let’s be real, the future belongs to the bots.
Can confirm. N64 existed before year 2000…but not WWF No Mercy, which came out in 2001. Lets call it 2002 was peak. Pretty sure GTA Vice City was out by then.
Honestly, I’d get on-board with just about anytime 2000 to 2010. The enshittification of the internet and social-media-driven comment culture didn’t start in earnest until smart phones took off.
That is what people want out of Windows, it dove off a cliff from there. I’d still be using Linux, but it’d be a harder choice if the alternative was XP instead of Data Harvesting Simulator 11 begging me to subscribe to me own hardware.
It’s not harmful to tell average people who run windows to disable updates, because you can’t disable the updates as a single-license scrub.
(Theres usually some hacky bullshit to delay or block updates, but they break constantly and you have to keep finding new ones, because Microsoft thinks of their userbase as stupid babies who can’t be trusted with their own hardware).
Also, you live in your own personal slice of Windows control with your hundreds/thousands of systems being managed with group policies. I have no doubt that you don’t see issues, because your company chose a few models of laptop or desktop and know how they’ll react to the updates. You can turn off the annoying shit, and choose specific updates at specific times. Microsoft doesn’t want to piss off their corporate customers, especially the ones with massive spending contracts with Dell/HP/Lenovo.
Thing is, outside of you - and your groups of other corporate windows admins - the general user (with varied hardware/software configurations) don’t have the safety of catching issues on a few test machines and delaying a deploy to the fleet, or even the option to delay updates at all, and they’re screwed over constantly by random broken drivers, system setting that aren’t respected between updates, and bloat/backdoors that you can’t opt out of.
It is you who is being disingenuous, by suggesting that the windows update system has no flaws, because you operate in an extremely controlled environment with tons of safeguards and - ironically - way more autonomy.
My personal devices haven’t had the issues described either and I install a lot of different software and hardware. I’ve also supported a lot of friends and family. I didn’t want to bog down my comment with my own blog post.
My two cents, I could say the same as the author. My Windows work laptop most of the times cannot wake up from sleep (you know, opening the lid after it’s closed) so I have to force a restart. There’s a 50% or less chance that Bluetooth and WiFi won’t work at all (they won’t be displayed on Windows, like it’s not even a feature) after I turn the laptop on, so most of my pre-work morning is restarting the laptop until it’s working as intended. It’s the third laptop I got from them, they’re different models but they’re all HP, and they all had problems. The Macs and the same HP laptops running Linux have none of these issues.
There have been two distinct Windows updates in recent memory that have broken things.
The one that stopped network printers from working, and you had to change a specific GPO setting which was not available in Intune at the time, meaning I had to do it manually on each computer.
The one that removed all shortcuts to Office 365 apps from the desktop and start menu, necessitating a repair… manually on each affected machine.
So it does happen on occasion. It’s not as bad as in the XP days, but it still can be a little sketchy at times
I can kind of feel the author on this. I’m in charge of a lot of “special projects” at work that basically come down to, “figure out a way to replicate this extremely expensive technology or software using low cost or free alternatives”. It ends up being an unholy mix of programs and hardware that is held together with duct tape and super glue and any minor perturbation means something breaks.
I‘ve had several faulty Windows updates in recent years and my machine is pre-built. And going by the threads I sifted through in search of solutions I am far from the only one. It‘s perfectly fine to not have the newest update at all times so as long as you update once a month when you can afford a potential faulty update. Having an older than most recent version is far from your biggest concern regarding security. I would even say it‘s a non-issue compared to good old fishing mails.
I’ve been using windows 11 since general release and have had zero issues. Not with ads, not with updates, not with one drive. Well, unless you count clicking away pop-ups to use new features from time to time. Not once has a file been saved to onedrive.
I find this to either be a lie or self inflicted. I manage a small fleet of a few hundred windows systems and all updates have been fine for years.
In the windows admin user groups there are more than a few that are deploying updates within 24hrs of release to thousands of servers and workstations and have not reported issues.
Lastly I think that tech bloggers say things like this to get clicks, so they can get ad revenue. Then they also tell you how to disable updates so they can get more clicks and ad revenue.
It’s disingenuous and probably harmful to be telling people to disable updates that lead them to be exposed to vulnerabilities.
I hate Windows for all the monetisation and privacy issues but I never really had problems with it killing my computer.
I had a Windows 10 update fuck up my laptop for about 15 hours until it somehow magically unfucked itself and started working again once.
But thats about it
The primary issues that I faced with Windows (Win10 nearly a decade ago) are
If I had never used Linux, these wouldn’t even seem like problem; just normal Windows shenanigans. But after using Linux, I can never go back. I don’t know how much worse/better Win11 is now but can’t be bothered to try.
My biggest issue with Windows (at least on my desktop) is with my GPU driver for my Intel Arc A770 LE. Windows Update will not stop automatically “updating” my driver to a driver that was made about a year and a half ago. It’s too old that Intel Arc Control doesn’t even work with it. It doesn’t matter how I install the latest driver from Intel, I can DDU the old one, install the driver and wipe all custom configurations or just install it normally. Nothing works, upon the next reboot, it automatically says “there’s an update” and installs regardless if I want it or not. The driver installation also has a 50/50 chance of blue screening my whole system when installing, both the installation from Windows update, and from Intel. The Window driver “updates” for my driver have also just happened randomly with no notice, they’ve occurred during hour long Blender renders, crashing it and wasting hours of my time redoing work. (This is all on Windows 10). It is frustrating to deal with
Meanwhile, my Linux install on the same computer just runs mesa and I’ve had no issues at all with my GPU. (Or any issues with drivers really, it all just works).
Although it didn’t “kill” my computer. Whenever I still used Windows, it would spontaneously install this outdated driver which would either blue screen or crash whatever I was in the middle of doing such as working in Blender, playing a game, etc.
It’s kind of disingenuous of you to proudly say, “I don’t use the same version of Windows that this person likely does and I don’t have the same issues that this person does so they must be full of shit”.
There aren’t many versions of windows since 10 and 2016. They are all very similar now.
There are vast differences between Windows home and Windows pro and Windows Enterprise editions as far as how easy it is to control and block off the annoyance ware that Microsoft builds into it.
If you use deployment software to roll out your images after standardizing them and have a set image that you can deploy to a thousand computers as easily as one then it’s very simple to sign in with a local domain account and disable the windows things through a group policy and just start rocking and rolling whereas your average Windows home user is not going to even have access to GPO and we’ll have to tediously for each and every single computer every single time they reset it redo all of the things to disable all of Microsoft’s crap activation.
They are not entirely different but definitely distinct versions of Windows and dismissing the home and non-enterprise users that their experience is inferior to your experience on the Enterprise side is what I’m saying is disingenuous
I’ve found the more you mess with defaults the more likely you’ll encounter problems.
The article author was talking about their work PC anyways.
Gpo/Intune just allows you make mistakes at scale.
The author was talking about their work computer suddenly not booting up the next day. The windows version differences wouldn’t cause this.
It’s kind of a wide disparity for something that’s so locked down, though. It’s not as though one person is saying they get occasional issues and the other is they often have issues… it’s one person basically saying their own personal computer is nigh unusable and the other providing an example of a large number of examples of that being extremely unlikely…
It’s far more likely this individual is fucking up their computer on a regular basis, or has a very high bar of usability that is broken any time there is even the slightest hiccup or inconvenience.
“I’ve never experienced what you describe, so it must be either imagined or your own fault.”
I’ve seen this nonsense over and over again in communities of all kinds, most often in tech forums (where there are always a few participants suffering from a big-fish-little-pond effect). It’s a very rude and foolish bit of human behavior.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I think the guy you’re replying to is probably right, just because you can tell from the article the author is not really an expert or advanced user.
But I upvoted you because honestly we do not get enough random Shakespeare on online comments lol
Not just me, many others.
That’s the difference between the Home and Pro versions though. The things that generally break on the Home versions are all the things not generally enabled on a domain controlled Pro version. Thisbis more about Microsoft just being bad at small updates versus these giant roundup packages they like to ship.
What things? Home just doesn’t have GPO as far as I know.
The interesting thing for me is that I own two different surface pro 7 tablets. I have one for work and one for home (now that work doesn’t require me to bring my own device anymore). The work surface has windows 10 pro on it. My home one doesn’t, The difference is very interesting. The IT team have disabled a lot of stuff on my work surface that I don’t even have access to on my home unit. I don’t often have bugs from updates breaking things at work. I do at home though which is enough for me to perhaps upgrade the windows key on my home unit someday. If I don’t install linux first which is a possibility.
That is probably why Microsoft forced updates on people in W10.
Seriously, anytime people make complaints like these about windows, it just tells me they are either
#1 is by and far the cause I see when people ask me ‘why did thing break?!’
There’s a lot of ‘Well, I edited the registry and then deleted these two files and installed this 3rd party software so that it looks like it did in Windows XP!’ floating in my circles, which almost entirely correlates to the people who are mad that their install is, yet again, broken/not working as expected/having weird problems.
Of course, people are doing this because Microsoft can’t stop shitting up Windows in a way that annoys people, and thus leading them to do things that maybe aren’t the best idea.
So, in summary: it’s a land of contrasts, but stop adding bullshit nobody wants Microsoft.
Yet further proof that all anyone really wants is Windows xp with modern support.
Well, people are trying to do just that. Small team and moves slowly, but slow progress is still progress.
Will it run on a Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB?
The year 2000 was peak human technology. It’s been downhill in every way since, until generative AI - which is f’in amazing. But let’s be real, the future belongs to the bots.
Can confirm. N64 existed before year 2000…but not WWF No Mercy, which came out in 2001. Lets call it 2002 was peak. Pretty sure GTA Vice City was out by then.
Honestly, I’d get on-board with just about anytime 2000 to 2010. The enshittification of the internet and social-media-driven comment culture didn’t start in earnest until smart phones took off.
That is what people want out of Windows, it dove off a cliff from there. I’d still be using Linux, but it’d be a harder choice if the alternative was XP instead of Data Harvesting Simulator 11 begging me to subscribe to me own hardware.
The thing that usually kills windows is shitty drivers. So people with different hardware can have completely different experiences.
It’s not harmful to tell average people who run windows to disable updates, because you can’t disable the updates as a single-license scrub.
(Theres usually some hacky bullshit to delay or block updates, but they break constantly and you have to keep finding new ones, because Microsoft thinks of their userbase as stupid babies who can’t be trusted with their own hardware).
Also, you live in your own personal slice of Windows control with your hundreds/thousands of systems being managed with group policies. I have no doubt that you don’t see issues, because your company chose a few models of laptop or desktop and know how they’ll react to the updates. You can turn off the annoying shit, and choose specific updates at specific times. Microsoft doesn’t want to piss off their corporate customers, especially the ones with massive spending contracts with Dell/HP/Lenovo.
Thing is, outside of you - and your groups of other corporate windows admins - the general user (with varied hardware/software configurations) don’t have the safety of catching issues on a few test machines and delaying a deploy to the fleet, or even the option to delay updates at all, and they’re screwed over constantly by random broken drivers, system setting that aren’t respected between updates, and bloat/backdoors that you can’t opt out of.
It is you who is being disingenuous, by suggesting that the windows update system has no flaws, because you operate in an extremely controlled environment with tons of safeguards and - ironically - way more autonomy.
My personal devices haven’t had the issues described either and I install a lot of different software and hardware. I’ve also supported a lot of friends and family. I didn’t want to bog down my comment with my own blog post.
My two cents, I could say the same as the author. My Windows work laptop most of the times cannot wake up from sleep (you know, opening the lid after it’s closed) so I have to force a restart. There’s a 50% or less chance that Bluetooth and WiFi won’t work at all (they won’t be displayed on Windows, like it’s not even a feature) after I turn the laptop on, so most of my pre-work morning is restarting the laptop until it’s working as intended. It’s the third laptop I got from them, they’re different models but they’re all HP, and they all had problems. The Macs and the same HP laptops running Linux have none of these issues.
There have been two distinct Windows updates in recent memory that have broken things.
The one that stopped network printers from working, and you had to change a specific GPO setting which was not available in Intune at the time, meaning I had to do it manually on each computer.
The one that removed all shortcuts to Office 365 apps from the desktop and start menu, necessitating a repair… manually on each affected machine.
So it does happen on occasion. It’s not as bad as in the XP days, but it still can be a little sketchy at times
Odd, i didn’t need to address either of these.
I would have scripted it for Intune.
This was before proactive remediations were a thing. Script probably would’ve worked, although I find them a bit vague as to how they work
Intune was def missing a lot of features early on.
I can kind of feel the author on this. I’m in charge of a lot of “special projects” at work that basically come down to, “figure out a way to replicate this extremely expensive technology or software using low cost or free alternatives”. It ends up being an unholy mix of programs and hardware that is held together with duct tape and super glue and any minor perturbation means something breaks.
Sounds like less of a Windows problem than an individual problem, though.
Blaming Windows cause your Frankenstein machine breaks often is disingenuous.
I’m not passing blame. Just giving an example.
Doesn’t even need updates, in the 10 years I was on Windows it didn’t want to start after shutting it down again like 7 times
I hated having to reinstall every year
I‘ve had several faulty Windows updates in recent years and my machine is pre-built. And going by the threads I sifted through in search of solutions I am far from the only one. It‘s perfectly fine to not have the newest update at all times so as long as you update once a month when you can afford a potential faulty update. Having an older than most recent version is far from your biggest concern regarding security. I would even say it‘s a non-issue compared to good old fishing mails.
I’ve been using windows 11 since general release and have had zero issues. Not with ads, not with updates, not with one drive. Well, unless you count clicking away pop-ups to use new features from time to time. Not once has a file been saved to onedrive.