What is particularly impressive about all this is how many of the exciting pain points are also present in ‘pro’ and ‘enterprise’ SKUs. Access to GPOs makes some of them easier to stamp out; but an exciting hit of “Candy Crush Soda Saga” is, in fact, the default even on fancy corporate editions.
The wonderful world of OEM shovelware has delivered many amazing things; but even they, notoriously tasteless as they were, tended to let shame keep them somewhat in check(eg. HP’s affair with ‘Wildtangent Games’ was typically confined to their consumer shit). Microsoft appears to not even be letting these constraints stop them.
I have, between my university, Windows, Google, and Amazon, access to more cloud space than I could use if I tried. I use virtually none of it. I don’t trust people with my data, though some data sharing is inevitable and a necessary evil.
Caveat: With the exception of schoolwork. Because it’s well integrated into the university’s computer system and it’s impossible to download or save files on the many campus thin client terminals without using it. But that’s schoolwork, and if it disappears tomorrow I’ll shrug, and a system outage where everyone loses data is hard for a professor to be a jerk about. Although… I do have a small, prize GIF library that I maintain for when I use the BBS on campus…
Weird. I just have a local account only and other than the get office which I have shut off and we would like feedback which I actually left on and used for a bit I got nothing for ads at the OS level itself.
As one who manages Window 10 for a corporate, it really isn’t that bad.
Of course, I get to deploy W10 Enterprise and can turn off most of the crap via deft use of GPOs. At home everything I have is running W10 Pro, so I can eliminate most of the crap with other tweaks.
The Continual Upgrade mode is a bit to get up and accepted, but I think we’re basically there. And 1607 is a much better experience than 1511 and RTM. 1702 looks to be even nicer when upgrading, but I’ve not had the time I’d like to vet it out in preview builds, so I suppose it’ll be current branch before I’ve any time to really play with it.
Wait. Don’t you have that reversed? If you have a new processor, you’ll need to be on Windows 10 as they aren’t updating previous versions (7, 8, 8.1) to support them. Which really doesn’t sound that unreasonable. Pretty sure if I bought a new Mac Pro with Sierra, i’d have a hard time getting it to run with OSX 10.7.
This error occurs because new processor generations require the latest Windows version for support. For example, Windows 10 is the only Windows version that is supported on the following processor generations:
That’s the particularly insulting thing: ‘Software Assurance’ customers do pay for MS software on a subscription basis. And they still get the shitware.
It’s not news that they’ve been pushing to get the consumer side on the subscription treadmill; but for the customers where they have already succeeded, continuing to hammer on them is just adding insult to injury.
Apple has always been deeply uncooperative about support for prior OSes on newer hardware(I haven’t kept track of how the OSX86 kiddies and friends have done; but official party line is that no hardware is supported on any OS older than the one it shipped with. Makes keeping a fleet of macs at a consistent OS version in the face of hardware failure a PITA).
What differs in this case is that MS is going from ‘not testing, not our problem’ to ‘actively checking, actively refusing’ for those CPU models. Expecting them to test the newest hardware against every Win7 patch until they fully EOL security updates would be unreasonable; as would expecting them to backport AVX-512 stuff(if that is even relevant) to Win7); but any time you go from ‘yeah, we didn’t test that’ to ‘lockout logic added’ you are crossing a line.
Not to mention open source software is often best-in-class in a lot of fronts but for anything involving video, audio, or graphic design, it’s generally abysmal.
(Next person who tells me to use Scribus for anything gets to format a newsletter and a poster of my choosing. lol)
My big Win10 complaints are that they still allow applications to steal focus, and even with their nifty new notification center, they’re not forcing apps to use it so most of them are still dumping the notifications on my screen any which way.
Using Windows is like begging to be interrupted at anytime whatsoever. It’s extremely disruptive.
Neat new thing I found out yesterday … If you have to kill Explorer.exe for any reason, it now takes most (if not all) of your open applications with it. Twenty minutes of work I’d like to get back because one of my apps I was working with by definition doesn’t auto save.
Bah. The last tolerable version of Windows was whatever was around in 1996 - which is the last time I had to use the foul crapulence for work. And that only makes it tolerable because it was the last.
