🤦‍♂️ Two months with Windows 10

Since switching jobs, I’ve moved back to using Windows 10, an OS I haven’t used in the past. I dabbled with Windows 8, but never took up the mantle to upgrade to 10. I used the tools to prevent it.

After using it daily for 2 months, I find it…interesting.

Some of the big annoyances:

• Weekly system updates that require a reboot. That reboot can take 10 minutes or two hours. There’s no way to know. And all apps have to be manually restarted and restored when finished.
• Application updates that interrupt work to do their business. Again, not a simple 30 second restart. It’s a slow process and every document has to be checked if it needs to be saved, then reopened manually.
• Giant tooltips everywhere. Not a small one with a single tip. A wall of text that covers what I’m looking at. A tooltip shouldn’t look like a user manual.
• Giant mail notifications. Just like tooltips, the new mail notification is gigantic. It’s not the simple “toast” of years gone by, but a massive banner you simply can’t ignore.
• Taskbar preview. I’m not interested in seeing a preview of the app. I want to see the app when I click it. This preview jumps out as soon as you get close to the taskbar icon with no way to turn it off.
• Application grouping in the Taskbar. This is more annoying that helpful.
• Incredibly poor spell check, grammar check and autocorrect features. At best, Windows will underline a word in red, then ignore it. It won’t fix common spelling mistakes. That only works in Word. It’s an app feature, not an OS feature.
• Way, way too many buttons. Every app is loaded to the gills with buttons across the top taking up a huge amounts of the screen. It’s by no means clean or efficient.
• Driver updates make me laugh… and annoyed.

Windows is very noisy. Unlike other experiences where the technology fades into the background, Windows is very much in your face, making it distracting. Each popup, tooltip and preview is a small hurdle that interrupts the flow of getting work done.

This space for rent.