Is Windows 10 the worst Oparating System Ever

Before I moved on to Windows 10 I noticed they we are no longer told what any of the frequent updates for windows 7 were. One of the later updates was causing my computer not to shut down. In the end I got sick of pressing the shutdown button and then coming home many hours later to find my computer still burning electric.

Foolishly I thought the free Windows 10 update I was being offered would solve my shut down problem.

It fixed the shutdown problem but now I have an OS that is slower than XP. Even with 16 GB of RAM and 4GB DDR5 graphics card XP and Win 7 were faster than Win 10. The title bars look awful and too bright. Everything is too bright in Windows 10 and it is slow. The Apps just suck as they just clutter what was once a decent start menu. So many junk so called Apps might make Windows look colourful but in all honesty they are just junk apps for wasting time.

When I 1st installed Win 10 there was an App called Cortana. It worked for a while until Microsoft with it’s now invisible updated stopped it working. Even though I am in a country that Cortana is supposed to work in the app does not work. Even after installing the language pack for the UK it does not work.

Cortana process does not show up in my task manager.

By the time it does work I will have lost interest in Cortana and probably Windows 10. I have no problem with using the voice search with my Android phone.

I have to say in all honesty for the time we are living in Windows 10 is by far the worst OS Microsoft has come up with. They were so many things that it could have improved on. Instead they have made Windows look cheap with the bland and blank settings panels.

The Indexing system now means you can not find anything unless you let the indexing run forever. Windows Xp did not have this problem with indexing and yet we are told Windows 10 is the superior OS. If I want the colour back in my title bar I also get a horrible bright background on my desktop.

I think people should be honest and speak up about just what a load of junk Windows 10 is. Stop pretending the new features are great because they are not. Be honest and fix it so people can go back to XP or Windows 7.

Many have paid fortunes for more RAM and expensive graphic cards only to get the slowest OS ever.

Task Manager does not work so well in Windows 10. I now try to have it open all the time because ones Windows decides to lock down an application the Task Manager hides itself so that you can never recover from a frozen screen.

The worst version of Windows ever released

Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable. But was it really the worst OS Microsoft ever produced – worse even than Windows 8?

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Contributing Editor, Computerworld |

Twenty years ago this month Microsoft released a stink bomb of an operating system, Windows Me. Unstable, unloved and unusable, that was Windows Me. Many people believe it was the worst version of Windows ever built.

The anniversary got me thinking: Was Windows Me really the worst Windows ever, or was it outdone by other notable flops?

I’ve used every version of Windows since the Windows 1.x version that shipped with the desktop publishing program Aldus PageMaker (later Adobe PageMaker), so I’ve had plenty of experience with the best and worst of Windows. Here’s my list of the worst three Windows versions of all time. I’m offering them in order of ascending horribleness, so you’ll have to wait to get to the bottom of the article to find the worst of the worst.

Drumroll please! Let’s get started.

Second runner up: Windows Me

Microsoft rushed out Windows Me (Millennium Edition) in September 2000, even though seven months before, in February, it had already released another millennium-named Windows, called Windows 2000. Why two Windows versions in one year? Because Windows 2000, which originally was going to be for both consumers and business users, ended up being only for businesses and was based on Windows NT. Microsoft wanted to make sure that consumers had a millennium operating system to call their own.

Microsoft shouldn’t have bothered. Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process – which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn’t try.

Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.

Windows Me also introduced System Restore, designed to let you go back to a previous snapshot of Windows if you ran into trouble. Unfortunately, if you had a virus in that Restore Point that you had killed, Windows Me would restore the virus as well.

There are too many other issues to go into here, but the operating system was so bad that people began calling it Windows Mistake Edition (Me), instead of the Windows Millennium Edition.

First Runner Up: Windows Vista

Ah, the special kind of badness that was Windows Vista. Released in 2006, five years after the well-received Windows XP, Vista was born under a bad sign, jinxed from the beginning, destined for failure. Work on it began five months before the release of Windows XP. It was supposed to be only a minor update to XP, to be released in 2003, a stopgap of sorts before a larger Windows update that was codenamed “Blackcomb.”

But developers will be developers, and soon many of the new technologies and features designed for Blackcomb nudged their way into Vista development, slowing things down drastically and leading to chaos and confusion during the development process.

Microsoft Co-President Jim Allchin, then in charge of Windows, admitted in a front page Wall Street Journal article on Sept. 23, 2005 that development of the not-yet-released Vista had been “crashing into the ground.” That would foreshadow exactly what happened when Vista was finally rolled out in 2006.

I don’t have enough space to recount the full extent of how bad Vista was, but start with the introduction of an intensely annoying feature called User Access Control (UAC), which forced people to confirm that yes, they really did want to change a particular setting or use a specific program. It was a constant nag, requiring you to interrupt your work to do things as simple and basic as open Disk Defragmenter.

Vista was also notoriously unstable. It wouldn’t work with countless peripherals, including many popular brands of printers.

But all that pales in comparison with a far bigger hardware problem – the operating system simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed.

There were several versions of Vista, and the consumer version of Vista was delayed until January 2007, after the 2006 holiday shopping season. Microsoft worried that people wouldn’t buy Windows XP PCs during the holiday season if they knew the PCs wouldn’t run Vista when that operating system was released in early 2007. So Microsoft cooked up a scheme to put “Windows Vista Capable PC” stickers on XP machines, in the hopes people would buy them during holiday shopping.

There was only one problem with that bait-and-switch scheme. Many “Windows Vista Capable PCs” weren’t in fact capable of running Vista, something that even Microsoft executives admitted to each other in private.

A class action suit was launched against Microsoft as a result. Emails from top Microsoft executives uncovered during the suit were remarkably damning. Mike Nash, then a corporate vice president for Windows product management, wrote in an email, «I PERSONALLY got burnt. Are we seeing this from a lot of customers. I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine.»

Jim Allchin, a member of the company’s Senior Leadership Team, wrote in an email, «We really botched this. You guys have to do a better job with our customers.» And an unnamed Microsoft employee chimed in via email, «Even a piece of junk will qualify» to be called Windows Vista Capable.

All in all, Windows Vista was about as bad as it gets. Although not quite as bad as it gets, thanks to our winner.

The baddest of the bad: Windows 8

You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft’s business plans back years?

Then Windows 8 was the Windows for you. If you instead wanted a useful, solid operating system that made your life at the PC easier, you had to wait for Windows 10.

So much was wrong with the worst operating system Microsoft created that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the most basic. It wasn’t really a single operating system, but rather two separate OSes badly bolted together.

One was built for mobile touchscreen devices, and wouldn’t run applications built for the desktop, Win32 apps such as Office. That part of the operating system was designed from the ground up to work via touch, not by keyboard. It also was designed to run apps that Microsoft through the years has called Metro apps, Universal Windows Platform apps, Windows Store apps, and now, just Windows apps.

The other operating system inside Vista was the one that had been around for years, with a desktop and Win32 apps and everything that went along with it. That’s the operating system that nearly everyone used, because when Windows 8 was released, there were few Windows tablets. But in Windows 8 everyone was forced to live with the problems and limitations of an operating system designed for touchscreen tablets.

People were forced to wrestle with a useless Start screen designed for mobile rather than the desktop. And they were forced to constantly switch back and forth between a traditional desktop and that Start screen.

As for those Metro apps, they were significantly underpowered, to the point of being useless. They couldn’t be resized, so they took up the entire screen, unlike Win32 apps. And there were hardly any available. At the time, I wrote that the Windows Store, from where you download them, was “as barren of goods as a Romanian grocery store during the depths of the Ceauşescu regime.”

Many of Windows 8’s problems were due to Microsoft’s decision to use it as a blunt force object to become a mobile powerhouse. At the time, Windows Phone was an abject failure and Microsoft felt it had to make a splash in tablets. So it decided to build an operating system built more for mobile than the desktop. And it decided to create Metro apps which would theoretically someday also work on Windows Phone.

That all-in approach to mobile on Windows 8 led to Microsoft’s buying Nokia’s mobile business for $7.2 billion – and Microsoft eventually shutting down that business. Microsoft spent years trying to succeed in mobile, depriving the rest of the company of resources, money and time.

It wasn’t until Satya Nadella was hired as CEO and changed the company’s focus towards the cloud and away from mobile and Windows that the company began to recuperate from the disaster of Windows 8.

Will we ever see another Windows as bad as Windows 8? Not likely. With Windows 10, Microsoft no longer makes drastic changes to Windows. What you see today is what you’ll see tomorrow and a long time into the future, with only modest changes along the way.

So Windows 8 will likely hold the crown of the worst Windows ever, for as long as there’s a Microsoft.

Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld and the author of more than 45 books, including Windows 8 Hacks (O’Reilly, 2012) and How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).

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Windows 7 vs. Windows 10: 5 Reasons Your Old Love Is Still Going Strong

Some people refuse to give up Windows 7 and upgrade to Windows 10. Why? Well, there are lots of contributing factors.

Windows 10 is now more than three years old. The operating system certainly isn’t perfect, but users and critics both mostly agree that it’s is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced.

And yet some people refuse to give up Windows 7. Why? There are lots of contributing factors. Let’s take a look.

How Many People Still Use Windows 7?

Windows 7 and Windows 10 are almost neck and neck in terms of user numbers.

Precise figures are impossible to find. However, StatCounter said Windows 10 had overtaken Windows 7’s market share back in February 2018. Contrarily, the latest data from analytics company Net Applications (August 2018) put Windows 7 on 40.3% and Windows 10 on 37.8%.

In truth, most of the Windows 7 market share is made up by the business sector. Many of those companies are now scrambling to make the switch to Windows 10. Free extended support for Windows 7 will end in January 2020, less than 18 months away (we’ve got tips for Windows 7 at end of life.) If they want official support through to 2023, they will have to pay a considerable price.

But even away from the business world, lots of home users refuse to upgrade—despite mainstream support ending in January 2015. Before continuing, make sure you know how to check your Windows version if you’re not sure.

Why Is Windows 7 Still So Popular?

In July 2019, Windows 7 will celebrate its 10th birthday. The fact it’s still clinging on to its title as the world’s most popular operating system nearly a decade after its release is a testament to its original quality.

But let’s be honest, there’s no way that a 10-year-old operating system should be number one. So, what’s going on? Why do so many people and businesses still use it?

Here are our top five reasons.

1. Security and Privacy

If you spend some time browsing this topic on the web’s various dedicated Windows forums, there’s one reason that stands out above all others: security and privacy.

The biggest criticism leveled at Windows 10 is its ongoing collection of telemetry data. It’s a valid point; Windows 10 does amass far more data about your usage habits than Windows 7. Lots of users are uncomfortable with it and choose not to upgrade.

Luckily, if you’re a privacy fanatic, there are plenty of third-party tools you can use that’ll entirely disable the telemetry on Windows 10.

As for the operating system’s security, the argument that Windows 7 is more secure than Windows 10 is downright false. Features like Device Guard, UEFI secure boot, BitLocker, and Windows Hello all make the newer operating system much more robust.

The facts support the theory. Security firm Webroot says the average Windows 10 machine had 0.04 malware files present in 2017, while the average Windows 7 computer had 0.08 malware files. Furthermore, just 15 percent of all malware was on Windows 10 machines, while 63 percent was on Windows 7.

2. Software Compatibility and Legacy Apps

Windows 7 still boasts better software compatibility than Windows 10.

Of course, we’re not talking about Photoshop, Spotify, Microsoft Word, Steam or any of the other mainstream apps; they all supported Windows 10 from its release day.

Instead, we’re talking about the millions of third-party apps and proprietary in-house software that often perform a very specific function and which lots of people rely on every day. Indeed, the reliance on legacy software is why so many businesses have been slow to upgrade.

Similarly, lots of people don’t want to upgrade to Windows 10 because they heavily rely on legacy Windows 7 apps and features that are not part of the newer operating system.

For example, Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Movie Maker can be installed on Windows 10, but in practical terms, they are both dead. Microsoft has also completely killed Windows Media Center in Windows 10. Perhaps apps like Kodi and Plex can fill the void, but a lot of users want to keep using the same apps that they’ve used for the last decade.

3. Familiarity

Many people worry about adapting to new things when it comes to technology. Menus and settings in different places can lead to confusion and decreased productivity.

One only has to look at the debacle over the Start menu in Windows 8 to see evidence of the hysteria in action. In hindsight, was a Start screen rather than a Start menu really that bad? Probably not.

If you’ve been using Windows 7 exclusively since its release in 2009—and you never used the transitory Windows 8—the different between interfaces, layouts, and menus is jarring.

For some Windows 7 users, it’s simply not worth spending the time to adapt to the new version.

4. Hardware Restrictions

On paper, Windows 7 and Windows 10 have identical hardware requirements. They are:

• Processor: 1 GHz or faster.
• RAM: 1 GB (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit).
• Free hard disk space: 16 GB.
• Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver.

However, if you try to install Windows 10 on a computer at the bottom end of those specs, you’re going to run into considerable difficulties.

I speak from experience; my wife had an old Dell Notebook lying around with a 1Ghz processor and 1 GB of RAM. I performed a clean install of Windows 10, but after completion, the hardware struggled to complete even the most basic tasks in a timely manner

For people whose hardware is showing its age, it’s just too much of a risk to upgrade to Windows 10.

5. Forced Updates

Three years after launch, and the Windows 10 forced update saga is still rumbling on. Yes, the situation is much better than it used to be. But no, you still don’t have 100 percent control over your operating system.

And for lots of people, that lack of control is a red line. What happens if an update breaks an app you rely on every day? After all, it’s not like Microsoft (or any other company) has a blemish-free record when it comes to buggy updates.

Again, for some people, the potential risk is simply not worth taking in exchange for the perceived limited benefits.

Should You Upgrade to Windows 10?

In a word, yes. MakeUseOf strongly recommends that you upgrade to Windows 10. The new operating system offers more features, a more modern user interface, and enhanced security when compared to its predecessor.

We also recommend that for problem-free Windows 10 experience, you perform a clean install of the operating system. Just make sure you create full backups of all your data before you do so. And before you upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, see whether it’s worth the cost.

Need to restore your Samsung Galaxy phone back to its factory settings? Here’s how to do it.

Dan joined MakeUseOf in 2014 and has been Partnerships Director since July 2020. Reach out to him for inquires about sponsored content, affiliate agreements, promotions, and any other forms of partnership. You can also find him roaming the show floor at CES in Las Vegas every year, say hi if you’re going. Prior to his writing career, he was a Financial Consultant.

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