Windows 10, An Exercise in Frustration

TL;DR: I have a little rant about Windows 10's glitchiness that could probably be either my fault or the OS being its usual self.

It's been two and a half weeks since I got my cool toy for schoolwork and gaming, and it has been a pretty smooth ride so far... except for when it isn't, mainly due to Windows 10 being a buggy mess here and there. I'm not sure if it's because I undervolted my MSI GS63 (as I understand it, sometimes instabilities happen if undervolted too much, I undervolted mine -110 mV) or the updates, but sometimes, some apps would act up and they won't open AT ALL, but they do show up in the Task Manager, and I have to kill the processes. Ultimately, it was a classic simple solution: turn it off and on again.

I don't think of myself as an advanced user, just some college girl new to gaming laptops and Windows 10 after dealing with an old MacBook Pro from 2012. Do I miss how streamlined and relatively safe (as in, a bit more difficult to get viruses) the Apple environment is? Sometimes, yeah. But I immensely prefer Windows 10, to be honest. Much more freedom given than the closed garden that is OS X, and avoiding malware is just a case of common sense and good protection on hand.

But do I like how Windows 10 tries my patience sometimes? Eeeeh, I can live with it, but it's annoying. Of course, a bit of it is user error, no doubt, and a bit of it is MSI's own load of bloatware (that I admittedly kept), but I'm learning the ins and outs of Windows 10. I just hope bugs like YouTube videos not working after an update don't happen again. I actually had to restore back to the version before that, and that was... A BIT AGGRAVATING, because updates aren't supposed to break stuff. Of course, updating back to that version a few days ago, everything seems fine... until the next update, which might bring its own set of problems. So until the next update, it's smooth sailing from here.
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Delerious
There's a reason why people were calling for MS to allow us to control out updates on Windows 10. Thankfully, I've never had any issues, but not every hardware configuration is the same, so the potential for bugs is very real. My own primary issue with Windows 10 is the division between Settings and the Control Panel. Still, it's no wonder why people prefer Windows 7, and even Windows 8.1 over 10, since they had far fewer issues. I honestly would love if MS would announce a new OS, but they seem content with going the Apple route with code-named major updates that tend to break shit for a good chunk of users.
 
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Captain_N
The forced updates are the main issue. Most clients i have fixed laptops for are because of bad windows 10 updates. If your gonna force updates Microsoft, then at least perfect them... I dont use windows 10 on my main machines for that reason and because the data mining. Someone needs to write a program that acts like a virus and prevents windows update from working. Then when the user wishes, they can turn the program off and the updates would happen. There has to be a safe way to temporarily damage windows update like a virus would.....
 
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Delerious
The data mining for personal content can easily be turned off, and anything else that is sent is relative system information (hardware, system state) so no harm done there. There are simple ways to disable automatic updates as well, but it's annoying that they don't just have it in the update settings. There is also the gripe that Windows 10 isn't really efficient with utilizing system resources. Frankly, the only reason I ever even upgraded to 10 was more or less because I knew that security updates were only going to last so long for Windows 7, so I took advantage of the free upgrade (though you can still get the free upgrade today, apparently). That, and having DirectX 11 and 12 was only possible with an upgrade, and there was no point in buying an 8.1 license for DX11. The dreaded fact is that everyone is going to have to upgrade eventually. Even now, game and software developers are starting to abandon Windows 7, it being a 9-year old OS. Like WinXP, it was great while it lasted, but at some point in the near future, you've gotta grit your teeth and rip that band-aid off.
 
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Arecaidian Fox
Windows 10 is... Well, I've said in a couple threads lately that Win10 has gone from being the best OS I've used to being bloated, borderline adware. It's terrible (right now). You do have options, though, ranging from kind of easy to technical. Easy solution would be to install Win7 or Win8.1, just not deal with 10 altogether. The downside there is that official support for those older operating systems isn't going to be around much longer (another couple/few years). Slightly harder is to dual boot, install both Win10 and another OS you want. This can help if you need both OSes. (An alternative to this would be to use a virtual machine, but that might not be the best idea if you want to, say, game on the virtualized OS.) The more extreme measures are to "find" a copy of Windows 10 LTSB (Long Term Service Branch, it's a version of 10 they license out for enterprise-level needs and has things like Cortana removed) or modify a Windows 10 ISO (basically a copy of the installer) and rip out the stuff you don't want.
 
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ry755
You should give Linux a try. You can run lots of Windows programs with Wine

Of course, Linux isn't for everyone. You should try it out in a VM first
 
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SagaP
I would also recomend giving Linux a chance, try booting Linux Mint form and USB, later you can install it along side your current OS if you like.
 
Dust2dust
This ^^^ ! Linux is a great alternative to Windows. I'm running Kubuntu in dual boot with Win7. There are a few annoyances here and there on Linux, but definitely no more than when using Windows, and nothing that a quick Google search can't fix.
 
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Delerious
It's been a while since I've tested gaming on Linux. From what I understand, WINE has come a long way in recent years. How good is performance in most titles compared to Windows?
 
CatmanFan
Use Winaero Tweaker to get rid of forced updates.
https://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836
 
thekarter104
Windows 10 is frustrating sometimes yeah. On my i5 laptop, updates are painfully slow. On my desktop, i7. I have black screen which is caused by App Readiness which for whatever reason can't be stopped. I disabled it, but there's still black screen. Sometimes de desktop loads after like 5 minutes.
Also sometimes when I drag stuff into a folder, it says I need admin rights, which I have, I've checked. Buggy stuff here. If I rename the folder, then it allows me to copy some stuff. Reinstalling Windows is not an option since I don't have the code anymore.

Ofcourse you can install Linux next to Windows. But I think I still need Windows because of my capture card...

Some games too, but I'm not a PC gamer anyways ^^
 
G
After a certain point I just moved on to dual booting Linux and Windows. Most of the time ArchLinux. when I need to, Windows.
 
The Real Jdbye
Updates can cause issues, as there can sometimes be compatibility problems with certain software or drivers, and they can't test every scenario.
But I think maybe you should try lessening the UV a bit to see if that helps the problem.
 
Steel-Winged_Pegasus
To everyone who suggested Linux, cool, I'll look into that after classes today, or maybe on the weekend, when I have a bit more time. I might stick with dual-booting, but we'll see, mainly because I have a capture card (an Elgato HD60S, to be specific), which does work with OS X and Windows, not sure about Linux, so not sure if it's worth the hassle to keep rebooting to Windows every time I wanna record. Luckily, that shouldn't be very often.

@CatmanFan Sounds like a more noob friendly way to do that, I'll check that out after classes, too. Lots of studying to do!

@The Real Jdbye, yeah, I undervolted that much because I heard that's generally a good range for MSI laptops, but I'll lower it to -100 mV to see how that goes. Warframe did crash when I booted it up for the first time yesterday, but it ran fine after booting it up again, so I'm not sure if the UV's the cause.
 
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The Real Jdbye
HD60S doesn't work with Linux, only the original GCHD does through an unofficial driver.

Every CPU is different, you might be lucky and get one that undervolts really well, or you might be unlucky and get one that you can barely UV at all (or not at all)
 
Subtle Demise
In my experience 10 seems to run smoother than 7 did on my 8 year old potato. The worst thing is that the updates are asking for like 10-12 GB of free space now, and I only made my system partition 30GB because I was following bad advice from the Windows 7 era. Since I was unable to update due to lack of space, I kept getting these fullscreen nags that would pop up once or twice a day, even if I was gaming. With some clever use of symlinks, I was able to get it updated to a certain point. Just enough to stop the nags. Still don't have the creator's update because that is downloading somewhere else and I don't really want it anyway.
 
the_randomizer
Like, when it comes to performance for me, all my games and other programs run as smooth as butter. I've disabled Cortana, installed standalone version of Skype (integrated one is pure garbage), and installed Classic Shell. Not to mention, it has been quite stable for me, BUT, there are some things I wish I could permanently disable and/or remove, but noooooooo, they had to be forced :rolleyes:
 
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