[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Windows 10 – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

by madbadgalaxyman, 3rd November 2016

After three days customizing two new installations of Windows 10, this article was going to describe the bad points and the good points of this Operating System. But the ease-of-use and intuitiveness and User Experience when using the brand new Graphical User Interface of Windows 10 is not any better than the user experience when using the Windows 7 interface, so there isn't that much that comes under the category of “The Good”,

So this review will only describe the many frustrations & limitations of using this new operating system; the bad things, and the really bad things.....in other words, all you will read about here is ”the Bad” and “The Ugly”.


THE BAD


Windows 10 is Bloatware that takes up a lot of memory & resources ::

This O.S. is Bloatware, as compared for instance to the spare simplicity of Windows 7, but there is little significant gain in usability. Win 10 uses a large space on your disk drive. The very large size of this program isn’t a problem for those with 500GB and greater Hard Disk Drives, but if you have a small Solid State Disk (60 GB to 240 GB) instead of a larger Hard Disk Drive, you will be really annoyed at how much drive space Win 10 uses up.

Win10 also has a distressing tendency to use a lot of RAM, for instance my system memory use was never less than 20 percent, and apparently some installs have it even worse due to a memory leak problem.(go to Task Manager; then click on “Performance” then click on “Memory” to bring up memory usage. Windows Geeks then click on “Resource Monitor” to get the gory details of CPU, Memory and Disk usage.)

The original purpose of the User Interface of an Operating System, that its job is to allow you to get your job done quickly and efficiently, without too much tweaking of the OS, has been lost in Win 10 ::

Win 10 has an inefficient user Interface that needs cleaning up. The brand new Graphical User Interface is too crowded, and arguably not as intuitive to use as the much simpler Graphical User Interface of Windows 7, nor are essential commands easy to find in Win 10, leading to slower operation of this OS by the new user ::

(1)Win 10 has vast numbers of (mostly not strictly necessary) apps & programs & features pre-installed, filling up the Graphical User Interface and the Start Menu, thereby making it harder to find the actual program that you do want to run. To achieve efficiency, the first thing the user has to do is to spend a long time removing/inactivating large numbers of unwanted programs and apps, and removing some of the large numbers of programs in the Start Menu.
(2) There is nothing intuitive about the new command structure, so trying to accomplish relatively simple tasks can have the new user of Win 10 reaching for the Help file .
(3) The windows that pop up for the giving of commands are radically oversimplified in Win 10, so that commands that bring into effect simple Management changes in Settings & Configurations are often not even available in the first-order command structure. Therefore, you often have to figure out what to do, or give commands to Windows, by using nerdy/geeky utilities like gpedit.msc, msconfig, and the Task Manager.
(4) Thus, the original Really Good Idea of having a single Control Panel enabling the user to easily accomplish all of the most important Operating System management tasks has been deprecated (and just about lost) in Win 10. The (new design) Win 10 Control Panel leaves out the commands needed for many common tasks.
(5) If you do run into trouble and you want to figure out how do something in this OS, there is no longer a comprehensive Windows Help facility to answer your questions, and instead you have to use the fairly useless Cortana application, which can hardly solve any problem except for the most trivial ones. (See next paragraph)

“Windows Help” is replaced by the much less useful “Cortana” ::

Windows 10 doesn't have a comprehensive “Windows Help” facility anymore. It's got Cortana instead, and this friendly new “Artificial Intelligence friend & helper” is like that Talking Vending Machine that annoys everybody with its chatter in “The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy”;
more of an annoyance than a serious piece of software that actually does what you want it to do properly! Too often, Cortana gives much worse answers than an old-fashioned Help facility! But if you do want answers, you might be stuck with it, as it is very very difficult to remove.

Too many unnecessary apps & programs are turned “on” by default ::

The vast multitude of bundled apps & programs are actually pretty poor on average, often intrusive and trivial. Some are all too similar to spyware & adware. You are never going to use many of these apps & programs, as there are much better alternatives available, and they tend to use up considerable system resources. These “rubbish” Apps should be easy to remove, but actually Windows tries to make it hard for the user to uninstall them.......so what is there to distinguish many of the Very Trivial bundled apps from spyware and adware?

CONTINUED IN NEXT TWO POSTS - PARTS 2 AND 3