> Windows (the technology) is okay. Not good, but okay. Windows (the experience) degrades every day. Everything is slow even though the specs are good. Granted, corporate “additions” like O365 ATP don’t help and aren’t part of the core system. But many users have to bear with them nonetheless.
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.
1) it hardly matters since the point is that excessive disk access by an OS when, essentially, "nothing is happening" (opening the start menu, say) is a bad sign for generally giving-a-shit about performance and spinning rust just exposes the error,
2) they pushed Win10 upgrades on a bunch of well-performing spinning rust Win7 machines back in the middle of 2015, not 2020, immediately making them much worse,
3) most normal home users don't replace hard drives, don't replace their computer very often, buy the cheapest thing they can aside from that they think higher number = better and are often up-sold a large (=spinning rust) drive they don't need and can be up-sold because they buy them at real stores (yes, really), and only very recently did SSDs mostly displace magnetic platters on base configurations of cheap mass-market desktops. I guarantee a high percentage of home users are still booting off traditional HDDs, yes, even in 2020, and they're exactly the same sort not to have been able to figure out how to not upgrade to Win10.
It's unusable on spinning rust now. Basic UI interactions lag badly. I think they hit disk a ton and just rely on SSDs to hide it, but of course it's still harming performance, just less noticeably. Plus who knows what other bad resource-use patterns have crept in, if that has.
> And have you looked through the diagnostic data Windows sends? That cannot be turned off without hacks?
I've done the hacks and still don't feel confident it's not spying on me—which, why is my OS spyware now? WTF. Plus it still shows me ads on my lock screen. And, it's a small thing, but having to unlock my lock screen before I can start typing my password is incredibly stupid. No if I just start typing it doesn't go in the password box, it misses the first 2-3 characters. Yes I'm on an SSD and have a ton of RAM and all that.