Windows 10 - a bucket load of pain

As Windows 10 is a commercial offering, one would think it will be working as expected and it does so long as like me one has come to expect pain from Microsoft in general and Windows in particular - because pain is what you get when you use Windows 10.

When we work in office environment we are not as heavily exposed to the pain that accompanies Windows usage, mainly because everything is configured and dealt with through a central desktop provisioning team and there is usually a dedicated IT Help-desk in a big corporate.

However, using Windows at home is not as smooth a sailing (I am really being liberal with usage of word smooth) and if you don’t trust me just try searching for issues that accompany upgrade to windows 10 and look at the range of issues.

Now I, ofcourse, don’t blindly believe these search based opinions and have my own take based on my very own personal trauma. The story goes like so:

Why - one may ask - do I even bother with windows at home if it is so painful? This is because as much as my daughter loves the penguin, the windows is what her teacher uses and so she does need to be aware of the necessary evil.

So, there is this laptop I have which is exclusively for Windows and is only ever used by my daughter for her schoolwork. It isn’t some cheap stuff but a state of the art touch screen detachable monitor kinda laptop from HP with intel core i5 inside.

However, as it is a detachable tablet, it has two HDD - 50 GB for monitor and 500 GB on keyboard that acts as extended memory.

Now, it originally came with Windows 8 and then came Windows 10 followed by Windows 10 anniversary edition. When I upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 10, I suddenly found that the whole of 50 gig was fully utilised making it impossible to do anything at all.

Now a quick duckduckgo search later it was as simple as removing the "previous installs" which windows itself removes after a month or so they say.

In my case the self-removal-a-month-later thing just did not happen and disk clean did not help either so I was basically left with no choice but to reformat the whole damn thing.

This as I recollected from my old days with windows is quite a long process with lots of downloads and waits…and boy has that continued to be the same… Microsoft is nothing if not consistent. Finally after several hours of ordeal, the system was refreshed and my storage space reclaimed and a semi-functional laptop was there or thereabouts.

I say semi-functional because unlike on Linux not all drivers are there and you have to individually download the drivers from HP website, install and then keep your fingers and toes crossed while you hope it works…finally sound was sorted but WiFi is still flaky.

Now compare this to the seamless upgrade from one major version of Fedora 23 to Fedora 24…it did take a while to download and install but the actual effort involved was typing 4 lines on the terminal - that’s it. When I logged into Fedora 24 upgraded machine, everything just worked as before - no driver issues, no WiFi problems, nothing.

RANT OVER