This article immediately reminded me of a video I saw a while ago.[1]
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
I know we're basically comparing anecdotes, but I've been surprised at how much more I've come to trust my windows workstation than my Mac in the past few years. I can't actually remember the last time my Windows workstation crashed outright (if ever?) but my Mac locks up at least 2-3 times per week. I also have to be extremely careful to avoid high memory pressure under Big Sur now, otherwise Finder spirals into a restart loop that can only be fixed with a hard reset. I also had to give up my Mac Thunderbolt setup because I've been fighting the same Thunderbolt crash that many people have been complaining about since Catalina was released in 2019 ( https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/16/gameover/ ).
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
Not even to mention the willfully broken font rendering on all peripherals that are not "retina enough" since a few versions ago. Using my work macbook with my trusty 16:10 monitors with 1920x1200 resolution in the home office is a literal eye sore since it's impossible to get a clear font image. The company had to send over a retina-enough screen...
The worst font rendering Linux ever had is still better what macOS does today to non-apple-blessed displays. It's a blurry mess.
If you're having color banding, you may need to force RGB on your external monitor [1]. I had to do this a few years ago, it massively improved the picture.
That said, I was in disbelief that this was a problem that both was common enough to be all over the Internet, and so involved to fix. Amazes me that OSX doesn't simply have an advanced setting for RGB/YPrPb, and instead requires that you boot into Recovery Mode (!!!) to fix it!
At least in Big Sur, you can just place the override in /Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides instead of /System/Library/[...]. This may work in earlier versions as well, but it equally wouldn't surprise me if it was only added to Big Sur because of the Signed System Volume thing.
I can vouch that MacOS font rendering really became an eyesore on desktop monitors became after I updated to Catalina. It genuinely results in an inability to parse letters when using certain common fonts, and next to Windows and Linux it is by far the worst of the three.
"apple-blessed displays" means "displays that have a pixel density that is appropriate to the year 2020", not necessarily screens that were manufactured by apple
There are a lot of non high dpi devices out there. The majority of screens are. Whether it's your personal one (and you can't or don't want to change it) or a professional one (and your company may not want or be able to justify changing dozens of screens), you need to use them.
It's possible to display properly and cleanly on them, everyone else does it. It's not as great as on a high dpi obviously, but it's perfectly sevicable for its need.
Apple with osx is the only major os that fails to do it, either through incompetence, malice or just pure disdain for their users facing that scenario.
I'm pretty sure it's deliberate. not as in intentionally punishing users, but intentionally not bothering to test their stuff with any third party equipment (excluding the blessed belkin maybe). if I had to distill the apple brand into a single phrase, it would be "my way or the highway". their way might be pretty good if you buy all the way in, but if not, you can go fuck yourself.
> Apple with osx is the only major os that fails to do it, either through incompetence, malice or just pure disdain for their users facing that scenario.
It’s because of cost involved in maintaining the code that can push the hinting through the various layers of the graphics stack. Coupled with Apple’s culture of ditching old technology at the first opportunity.
> "displays that have a pixel density that is appropriate to the year 2020"
As opposed to what other year? Color me naive, but I thought it was supposed to be the function rather than the form that we were supposed to make those kinds of comparisons about. What about a low pixel density is /not/ appropriate to the year 2020?
No idea if this will help, but I had some instability on my macbook last year after getting my screen replaced. I ran memtest86 on the machine (using a UEFI USB image) and after a few hours it reported memory errors. I took it back to the genius bar and explained the situation. After reproducing the problem using their own internal tool they replaced the motherboard for free of charge and I haven't had any problems since then.
Your RAM might be working fine, but with crashes and lockups I think its always worth checking. Life is too short to put up with faulty hardware.
I have had exactly same issue, though with third party service. They replaced the screen, and when I came home it froze one time, and started beeping 3 times indicating ram problems. Because it was iMac, i had a chance to rearrange RAMs to boot up but it still was freezing up at times. I ran memcheck, found errors, and then figured out which ram planks was faulty.
The thing is that the issue started long before that, my Blender app would crash in tens of times a day, and same with Solidworks on windows.
So yeah, i recommend running memtest and replacing ram if necessary.
I've fixed two MacBooks with "faulty" RAM for family friends, it was a funny experience...
The first one just needed a cleanup and some new thermal pastes. But afterwards, when I was test driving the laptop, I found the machine started to crash randomly - the OS was a fresh install. And later, I found whenever I put the laptop on the metal chassis on my PC (it was on the same table), it could trigger a kernel panic. Oh no, did I accidentally shorted something on the motherboard to the chassis? I reopened the machine and reseated the board but it didn't solve the problem. I also tried to reproduce the problem with a multimeter probe, but it didn't work. I got the final breakthrough while searching the web using the laptop while lying on a sofa - whenever my lap kicked the bottom cover, it would crash instantly!
The DIMMs came loose. Reseating it fixed the problem - the machine was previously dropped, which also explained the cracked plastic I saw on the battery.
Coincidentally, one day later, another family friend (with absolute no relation or knowledge about the former one) sent me a message, showing a MacBook with random screen corruptions. I said "you're out of luck, better to get a replacement from Apple." Later, I was also told that screen corruption was not the only problem - whenever a spot near the keyboard was punched, it would promptly crash! I couldn't stop laughing, "Okay, just send it to me, it's a 5 minute fix..." And yes, the machine was previously dropped by kids.
Nowadays, most MacBooks come with soldered RAMs. But if your machine has sockets, make sure to reseat the RAM and swap the slots first before declaring the death of your motherboard or your RAM.
It also reduces the amount of space taken up by the connectors and such, and have a better testing suite without manual assembly, that can give false positives.
Yes. Every MacOS update is a shitshow of things that stop working. My company always have to send out a message to everyone asking them not to update when a new OS version is out, until it's been tested some more. Always break something.
We do this in IT for windows. A mac update is exactly like a win10 version update, and both require testing before rolling out. We spend months testing Windows10 version updates. You just don't see it because its all behind the scenes. Right now we're committed to ONE win10 upgrade a year due to this.
At some point we all need to understand there's no single perfect platform. Windows works for me so does Linux but both have their issues. I still useful work on both of them. I have very little experience with macos but from what I read and hear from friends it's not all perfect either. We are a point where OSs do so many things which means there's a huge surface of bugs can appear on. What's probably more important is, how much those bugs affect your work and how quickly the "vendor" is fixing them once discovered.
I get the feeling those issues are over on the Mac now. Over the years I’ve had issues that are shockingly similar to my PC stuff on the Mac. I have concluded this is possibly the underlying architecture complexity. Most of the PC architecture that is shared is a massive stack of sticky tape and string piled up over the last 20 years and I think that leaks out into the OS. I’m surprised it works for any vendors at all. It’s not as if Linux doesn’t have a ton of problems in that space either.
The only thing I can say is that with the M1 Mac mini I have it’s the only computer I haven’t found any issues with at all yet and I’ve been using it since November 26th 100% of the time. Absolutely no issues at all.
Now windows is mostly reliable from the hardware side of things I’d you are lucky but the software is broken as fuck. Nothing works reliably or consistently. For over a month now Alt-tab on 20H2 has been randomly changing window ordering as an example breaking over 20 years of muscle memory. Their own mail client stops receiving mail twenty times a day. I’m not even going to start the book-sized rant on how unreliable their development stack is. And yesterday I spent an hour trying to delete a file which wouldn’t go away. It’s just motivational poison at the end of the day. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
I’ve battled application, driver, operating system and hardware issues on every platform I’ve used from mainframes to smartphones.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been better or worse times with platforms I’ve used over the decades.
But it does mean that no platform is exempt from flaws or even dark times.
Individual mileages vary wildly depending on a combination of general quality of the product at any stretch of time, personal use patterns at that time, and blind, random luck.
And I’m still using 3 or 4 major platforms daily, depending how you count. None are worth total praise. And none totally suck either. As with many relationships “it’s complicated” :-)
That can be said, but for as long as I know Mac, it has had these lock up problems.
Last year I worked at a location with a Mac on my left, Win10 on my right. Same software / jobs. Mac hangs 3 times a day. Both machines were very well tended to.
Last week I came to my Windows PC to see it was completely locked up. Until that I haven't noticed it, but at some point in my history with Windows boxes, crashes and issues became a rare notable event. I started relying on them. I was surprised.
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
Fair enough, but to be clear - I am not saying that apple software and products are free from problems. Far from it - butterfly keyboard, for example.
I am just saying Apple, for me, has the most reliable and consistent experience. And I have tried most options:
- windows, linux, and macos for my personal and work machines
- android, ios, and even windows phone (remember that?)
So far, may experience has been the opposite of yours - my work laptop is a 2015 macbook pro 15 and still performs really well (no crashes), but I have BSODed a couple of times on my windows 10 laptop I bought last year. Doesn't say much, I know.
I don't really know if this is a head's up comparison -- Apple maintains very tight control over their hardware compared to Windows. So you're trading off, in that Microsoft has to manage an ecosystem with much greater complexity, but you have a blessed path for using Nvidia graphics cards.
This. MacOS fans will sing praises of Apple, while discounting that Apple messes up even though they have very few hardware types to service compared to Windows. And they still screw it up big time - I haven't moved to BigSur for this reason.
That being said, Windows 10 cannot be in the business of "ship and keep calm", due to the number of businesses and governments relying on Windows.
This. I also find it hard to believe how Apple can screw up bigtime with buggy OS releases considering they make and own the full hardware-software stack which has way less variety than what Linux and Windows have to deal with.
Mac fans have defended Apple saying that "QA is expansive and they can't afford it", as if Apple is some low budget indie app developer in an incubator and not this trillion dollar goliath with insane margins.
Well... They aren't wrong on QA being expensive. The real problem though is you can't measure the savings of a prevented problem. Drives most of us that do it for a living nuts, because all the MBA types love metrics, but don't generally have the imagination to take the numbers and go 'Now imagine all those people got bitten by X.' They won't, but if they did, think of the tarnish.
Being a QA is the most thankless way of making the world better imaginable.
>Being a QA is the most thankless way of making the world better imaginable.
As a fellow dev, you might be getting ahead of yourself. I think there are plenty more professions that go thankless and that are actually making the world a better place.
I hope this doesn't offend you but the thankless garbage men or street cleaners on my neighborhood have a bigger impact on my life than the people who do QA on the apps I use on a daily basis.
If github, slack and outlook stop working I basically have that time off and go outside for a coffee. If my garbagemen stop picking up my smelly garbage, then I'm gonna have a pretty bad day.
This is what I tell every macOS user looking to try Linux. Pick hardware that is officially supported.
In every Linux thread on HN, macOS fans seem to disregard the fact that Linux has to support so many more hardware configs entirely. In fact they'd compare the experience of them installing Ubuntu on a $300 Best Buy laptop they got for $150 on Black Friday and wonder why the experience isn't up to par compared to their 2019 decked out $3000 MBP.
I fully agree. I ducked out of Windows when Win7 support ended early this year and loaded Ubuntu on my aged laptop. My experience was ok enough. When it finally died in the summer I bought a well specced laptop loaded with Ubuntu from a Linux specialist (Entroware here in UK), and even now I am knocked out by how great the experience is. Now I would never want to go back to Windows.
Apple is very much a consumer level company. I’ve seen reviews quality wise that they are average with hardware failure rates.
They do try... for instance I’ve heard the reason they always charge more for RAM is labor costs from running additional tests to fail chips other companies ship.
>I’ve heard the reason they always charge more for RAM is labor costs from running additional tests to fail chips other companies ship.
Which is false. Apple uses the same off the shelf DRAM chips from established manufacturers found in any PC/Phone/Laptop.
Unlike Flash storage, there is really not really bad performing DRAM per-se, just defective, And apple is no guarantee of free from defects with RAM fault in MACs being as common as in the rest of the PC industry.
I don’t know, but if you’re shipping mainboards with soldered on RAM it could be worth it to test the modules before soldering to reduce the amount of returns where you have to replace the entire board.
Dram, Flash, CPUs, GPUs and most other high-margin chips made by established manufacturers(Intel, Micron, Samsung, TI, NXP, etc.) are tested to some degree at the fab before packaging. It's very common in the semiconductor industry.
That doesn't mean parts with some defects don't sneak into the final products but the rate is low enough that testing each chip you receive is not monetary feasible for consumer products so you just test the final assembled product to a degree, but even then, brand new Apple products are no strangers to having their mainboards replaced for a defective chip in the warranty period. Just ask Luis Rossmann or people working at the genius bar. That's why everyone recommends you get Apple care.
So the theory that Apple thoroughly tests each chip that goes in their products is false. It would be too expensive and eat into their fat margins.
What you do test, is samples from each batch you receive, to make sure your supplier did not pull a bait and switch and replaced your contracted parts with lower quality ones under the same part number and hope you would not notice but this is more common on low margin parts and Chinese suppliers are notorious for this since for them it's just regular business practice and see nothing wrong with it.
We did a study on how often we used AppleCare vs the cost and, to no one’s surprise, AppleCare is not financially worthwhile on computers if the small chance of having to replace the hardware won’t be a significant hurdle. (It doesn’t cover liquid damage, which are a significant fraction of early hardware replacement.)
Apple may be a consumer level company, but then, business level hardware has ceased to exist anyway. Thinkpads are not what they used to be in terms of reliability.
It’s a shame really. Thinkpads used to be built like tanks.
A friend of mine was once stationed in a jungle in South America. Most laptops couldn’t handle the humidity there. His IBM Thinkpad was the only one that held up.
On work, I never had so much trouble, like with my HP ZBook and Win10. It had already once a complete reset, but still, I have a lot of trouble. Special since the new BIOS update about a month ago, it crashes once or twice a day again.
In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat ..
So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.
HP's drivers are the worst I came across. We got HP Elitebook notebooks at work a few years ago and replaced them with Lenovo and Dell because the HPs kept crashing and slowing down over time. Their "utility" software like HP Sure Click slowed the whole system down and turned into nagware. There were at least 3 HP programs hogging the tray area and made discovery of my actually wanted tray icons hard. On top of that the fans just didn't spin down, even after a reinstall, so I were forced to work with constant fan noise in the background.
I never felt so miserable using a notebook before and dreaded each day I had to use it.
Secret to a (semi)happy life with HP - Identify the hardware and install drivers directly from the manufacturer (or any other company, like Lenovo heh) and do not install any HP software, ever.
On work I have no rights to do that. There are hundrets of ZBooks in the company and every one has different troubles with it. Is it to much to ask it has just to run troublefree. We all just wanna use it. It just has to work, like a car or whatever. computers are just tools to make our life more easy. I'm to old to spend more time with my computer on work just for fun. My time on work cost money.
Oof, yeah, without a proper configuration, they can be a pain in the ass. Out of the box, brand new, they overheat already. HP software is absolute trash.
I literally use drivers from Lenovo because the ones HP provides are like 5 years old and they don't plan on updating them.
Updating the BIOS is like playing Russian roulette, they seem to introduce more bugs than they fix.
But the hardware itself is nice, I've been using HP workstations for more than a decade. Quality has gone down somewhat (less metal, more plastic, less durable compared to early Elitebooks imo), but they're still nice machines.
Yes, HP seems really like worse machines. I just set the max. CPU to 80% because of the costant fan noise. He is quiet now but also slower (of course). Also just the sound driver is around 500MB in RAM, serious? Lucky me I have 32GB.
Since I work in a large company, I have nothing to say about the computer brand. At home I'm a happy Fujitsu user since many years.
Notebookfancontrol works with HP ZBooks G1-G2 (same controller as the Elitebook 8760w), you can use that. But it won't fix their terrible cooling system.
ZBook 15 here (2014) and no such problems. I always used it with Ubuntu so they seem related to Windows. Strange because one expects that HP optimize their hw and sw for Windows.
Windows 10 has a lot of issues on the ZBook G1/G2. It's even worse when installed under UEFI, so it could be HP's shoddy firmware. Windows 7 is rock stable, though.
I have a ZBook 15 G3, from 2016, I think. No stability issues at all (running Windows 10, but the cooling is crap, which in turn means the fan noise is really annoying.
I worked IT at a newspaper a few years back and we instituted a strict "never HP" (I believe we had one HP printer that got grandfathered in) policy, so strict in fact that when we were looking to upgrade our fleet of laptops the company president (in his defense he was trying to be helpful) walked into our office area and told my manager he found a great deal on a palette of HP laptops. My manager, myself, and two co-workers all spontanously shouted "No!" in such perfect unison we considered forming an acapella group just by channeling our hatred of HP. The president backed out the door quietly and avoided eye contact with us for the rest of the day.
It's not as straightforward when you're trying to create a master image for your corporate machines, though. Several steps [1] are required to properly remove it from all users on the machine after it is silently auto-installed or auto-updated, and this requires trawling through the error log to find the root cause [2].
Install 0 clicks, uninstall 3 clicks plus slight annoyance. Multiply by whatever autoinstall Windows Store crap Microsoft is pushing at any given time.
same, I often end up having to force reboot my mac as it seems to do strange things and freeze up. My windows machine is going strong, haven't really had a problem for a long long time
Same. To the point where I finally gave on my mbp and built a windows pc. Network (wifi and ethernet) dying repeatedly and at random, only coming back after a reboot, got to be too much when working remote. Random lock ups, I got more kernel panics in the last year than I have in the last 5 ish prior combined. Not reliable and it feels like the OS is sacrificing stability for features I don't want/need.
I have the exact opposite experience. We're running an older version of Office (2016?) at work with Windows 7. Thse are supported by MS via the extended support contracts. It will be upgraded shortly.
Basically I get blue screens, rendering issues, slowness, freezing, crashing, random glitches. I regularly lose emails. The changes to Outlook are abysmal too. When a meeting invite I've accepted is amended (e.g. a 'Starting in 5 minutes email or update'), the calendar invite is no longer accepted so the reminder doesn't pop up. Whomever decided that un-accepted invites shouldn't pop up, has caused so much upset, tears and hate.
I would describe my windows machine as entirely useless. It has got so bad that I use my iPhone to respond to emails and to use the calendar features.
I've been considering learning some .NET to write a pop up app that is always on top so that when there's a meeting it shows up. Has anyone done that? It seems pretty basic.
Depends on the company for upgrading, not the employee. All the financial institutions in America are still running windows 7 mostly bc the managers and execs fear switching over, so they would rather run the whole corporation on an essentially unsupported and obsolete closed source operating system than upgrade and figure out a nominally different ui than they are used to.
Inertia is a powerful force in the IT departments of Corp America.
Try disabling the Chrome background update mechanism in MacOS, it seems to be a common issue there... Not sure if Edge does the same, but that may be an alternative option.
The person you're responding to has an agenda (perhaps is even a paid astroturfer), and his story is not based in reality. My Windows 10 systems are rock-solid. I switched from all Macs years ago and never looked back.
Blue screen is almost always a hardware issue, mostl likely ram or gpu related. Another possibility is a bad driver, but windows 10 can gracefully recover from them most of the times.
I haven’t seen it often, but it’s always been extremely impressive to me when my GPU driver crashes and Windows just restarts it without even losing my place in a game.
Hard to say but for me I would say:
1. Windows
2. MacOS
3. Linux
I had more crashes on Linux than any other, all related to the Gpu driver (intel iGpu), and it really depends on the kernel version but newer not necessarily means better. In a VM with i3, it never crashed.
But regarding hardware support except for the Gpu, I had better experience with Linux than Windows on the same machine. On Windows my mouse is stuttering when connected on my TB3 hub, Wifi connectivity is much more unstable and strangely my battery consumption is higher (5-6 h on Windows, 6-7h on Linux)... But the issue on Linux is the lack of proprietary software to manage these device (talking about my Canon printer and scanner).
As for Mac (MBPro 2015 early) I had quite some issues with Bose QC35 II bluetooth connection. I have to reboot sometimes. And one issue with Mac I noticed is compared to Windows, is less support for corporate software. For instance, for my AWS remote certification exam, I could not connect with my Mac.
I never had crashes of Linux on the last 5 years, except 2 or 3 because I was using all the whole RAM and the system freezed.
However, I had blue screens with Windows 10 on the same hardware, plus that Windows 10 it's nearly useless on a magnetic HDD.
Linux (and possibly BSDs, did not test) has broken OOM killer, which works the right way only if your swap is disabled. To prevent these situations from happening you need to install EarlyOOM.
That’s weird, Linux is usually incredibly stable and I sometimes have the system running for months, whereas Windows is hard to get a long “uptime” on.
All of our experiences are compatible if you look at it through the lens of modern kernels being ridiculously stable, with third party drivers causing all of the issues.
Linux on a server is basically bullet proof. There's just no surface area for issues, it's talking to storage and a network card. Desktop Linux with the wrong display drivers can crash daily.
Windows can be rock solid. I do game dev and am forced to have it as my daily driver. I have a 3900X, 2070 Super, do machine learning, VR development, game playing, peg it at 100% CPU overnight and I haven't had a blue screen since I bought it.
Buy the wrong laptop with shitty drivers, though, and BSOD is a way of life. Although Microsoft cracked down hard on this over the last decade, the WHQL initiative. They were well aware Windows stability was suffering at the hands of third parties, and put processes in place to validate their work.
And OS X, since it barely has to work with third party drivers, is more or less rock solid. You buy a MacBook Pro, plug an Apple mouse in and use it like that for years, maybe you never see a fault.
When it does interact with third party devices in my experience it's not better than Windows. Bluetooth handling in particular is quite poor.
This wasn't intended to be some kind of argument. Defending MS on the internet is of zero interest to me. I was intending to say, if you're forced to use Windows professionally and it's not stable, you absolutely do not have to put up with that. I don't.
For me, a system that ran Win7 fine for years, has now bluescreended a far too high amount, and wiped notepad++ sessions etc more than once ... So it can't be the hardware.
Hardware can go bad and connections can loosen over time. I've had drives disappear only from the cable coming loose. Unplugging and plugging back in solved the issues. My current desktop is only report 48GB RAM when there's 64 installed. Undoubtedly at least one of the 8 DIMMs has become unseated or gone bad, but I've been too lazy to troubleshoot because I don't use that much currently.
I have a laptop that was stable for 18 months, then started crashing with increasing frequency. Booted in to memcheck and the memory was faulty. Replaced it and the crashes went away.
Not saying it's definitely the cause, but strongly suggest you check if you haven't yet. It doesn't take long.
I've seen the same. In fact my Arch Linux laptop seems way more dependable than my 2016 MBP, so much so I switched my work MBP for an Arch setup too. I'm actually seriously thinking of replacing macOS with Windows on the MBP, which is not something I'd ever consider back in the Snow Leopard days.
Tonsky, the creator of the popular 'Fira Code' monospace font, has a great blog post about monitor DPI and font rendering. A big section is on just how terrible font rendering and display scaling on a modern Mac really is.
I only use the desktop mac so that's not much an issue probably, there it is probably 2x scaling. Interesting how Windows can handle anything as long as the hardware supports it!
250 sounds nice, compared to 220 retina ppi for macs. If its only constrained by the display that would be good. I will love buying 3080/5950x as my new workstation. hmm
I run Arch on a Surface Pro 7, (ironic, I know), which has a HiDPI display and the experience is good for me under GNOME, even fractional scaling is supported.
One thing to keep in mind is that Windows/Mac/Linux do render fonts differently - they may not look identical to macOS out of the box, but there's a lot of configuration options (if you want to play with them) to get them to look the way you want.
I've been mostly Linux since 2011 and the few times I had to install Win10 for something I've been very displeased. We've fallen quite far in Windows, with ads everywhere, hundreds of services that do God-knows-what, fresh installs that break as soon as the updater runs for the first time. I'm really not impressed and I try to use it as little as possible. Just a bloated, unstable mess designed to sell Microsoft's value-added services.
It's a bit hard to take this serious because of the hyperbole, but I'll bite on the services bit: how is that different? Supose you didn't use linux for a decade, then went to a linux box with a desktop environment and looked at the process list: how different is that from 'hundreds of services that do Go-knows-what'? I mean I use it daily and don't know what half of them do.
> how different is that ... I use it daily and don't know what half of them do.
knowing what the other half does is usually a couple clicks away on the web, a 'man ...' away in the terminal, sources are usually available at a similar distance, and most of these services can be stopped and (forever?) disabled with a 'systemctl stop/disable ...' (you might even go the extra step and apt remove them). Trimming down stuff that you know you don't need is a pleasure (assuming you know what you're doing), and the end result is a leaner, faster system. Eg. after I installed AnyDesk, I didn't like that it started with the system (I'm paranoid, and I'm only using it occasionally), so I systemctl disabled it. This doesn't stop me from using it when I need (that is, to assist others. In the rare events when I need remote access to my system, I just use a reverse SSH tunnel, which is more practical for me)
You can lookup what processes on windows do as well. You won't get the sources for them usually, but that's what you get for choosing a closed source OS. Similar for disabling them. Since you mention AnyDesk: at least on Windows it also comes as a single portable executable which needs no installation nor extra services i.e. only runs when started manually.
I'm not sure it's that simple. One of the things in my process list is "Service Host: Server". That's so generic I can't even properly google it. One of the answers I found was "A server is an application which serves functionality to other network participants."
In services.msc you get a description: takes care of file and printer sharing and the likes. Otherwise you look for "what does windows server service do?"
In most, but not all installs, the start menu pre-installs game ads, explorer advertises for onedrive, and the lock screen advertises things on top of the pretty pictures.
What drives me nuts is that those ads are also present in the "Pro" edition as well. I could understand MSFT pushing games into start menu for Home users, but doing so for Pro licences is outrageous.
Well, if the user has paid for Windows 10, whether as part of a new machine, or at retail, they shouldn't ever get advertisements in the OS. Even for Home editions. This constant encroachment of advertising into all aspects of life needs to stop. Please.
And people really need to stop expecting that paid products won't show ads. From the POV of the provider, not showing ads would mean leaving money on the table (you likely won't quit paying over just an ad here or there). On top of that, as a paid customer, you self-identify as a real person with disposable income, making yourself much more valuable a target for advertisers.
It tells you a lot when all of the few Microsoft employees I've met run the server edition of Windows (in this case 2016) on their development machines; these are people who basically have completely legal access to use any of Microsoft's OSs, and they don't pick Win10. The one who I asked about it said it was faster to boot, more responsive, and "less distracting" (probably an euphemism.)
I'm a Softie, and I use Win10. Server 2020 is the same codebase now, I'm not sure there'd be much difference, and I appreciate the creature comforts of the shell.
But.. I still get winrot, and my dev environment drives me mad. I've been working on a laptop since covid started, and my dev machine is a VM on the laptop, so it's a nightmare.
At home I run NixOS with a Win10 VFIO setup for games. Both Linux and Windows at home are drama-free, but I don't abuse my home computer nearly as much and it's much more powerful than the work laptop.
At least you can still turn off the Lock Screen stuff.. I’ve not seen ads. It’s more random trivia about the geographic location they’re showing. I disable that overlay.
- The Start Menu shows "suggested apps" by default
- On first install/boot, the Start Menu is preloaded with about 10 sponsored apps, and many of them install automatically even if you don't click them.
- These sponsored apps have a tendency to reinstall themselves _even after you just uninstalled them_ if you haven't rebooted your computer at least once or twice after first boot up.
- Microsoft Edge ads appear in the Taskbar at times, Action Center at times, and sometimes when you are changing the default browser to Chrome, and sometimes even after Chrome is default.
- Windows Explorer occasionally advertises OneDrive.
- Most built-in Windows Apps like Weather, News, and Sports contain lots of built-in ads.
- The Mail app comes with an "Upgrade to Office 365" button always visible.
- Cortana occasionally pops up by itself to ask if you want to use it. And there are ads in her search results and "suggested apps" from her for you.
- The default Lock Screen, "Windows Spotlight," occasionally advertises games, Microsoft's latest political agenda, or Bing when your computer is Locked.
- Office 365, on new installs or accounts, has links to _every web app_ on the Start Menu by default.
- When adding a user, Microsoft will hide the ability to create a Local account not linked to a Microsoft account under, like, 3 pages of advertising for why Microsoft accounts are awesome.
- The new Settings app has a new header that is in A-B testing right now, which (among other things) has a big obvious link _in the Settings app_ to Bing/Microsoft Rewards.
- Microsoft Edge has, by default, the entirety of MSN as your New Tab page and your Homepage. Plenty of ads on that, and worse, they serve ads from Taboola and Outbrain. Those types of ads with "You won't believe what celebrity XYZ..." or "Take this 2 minute quiz to learn..." kind of junk. (In fact, all of the built-in Windows apps seem to serve Taboola/Outbrain. You just want to check the Weather!)
- If you are not signed into OneDrive, OneDrive will inform you of this fact _every single time_ you log in with a giant error message.
- If you are not signed into Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams will inform you of this fact _every single time_ you log in with an Office 365 Sign-in dialog. It frequently fights with OneDrive to see who can make you sign in first.
- The operating system will sometimes randomly pop up with messages from "Windows Tips." While (theoretically) making the experience nicer for new users, the actual Tips app is pretty barebones and really motivates people to click a button to "Learn More"... using Bing search.
- If you want to use Google as default search engine on Microsoft Edge instead of Bing, that is a.) extremely nested deep in the UI and hard to find, and b.) if you do manage to find it, there's a three-section ad explaining the "benefits of Bing."
Thanks! I finally have the name for the wretched hive of scum and villainy that spews forth those horrendous ads.
> Taboola is the world’s largest discovery platform. Through our exclusive partnerships with many of the world’s top publishers, we serve 360 billion content recommendations to over one billion people across the web each month. You have probably seen our feed serving recommendations on sites like Bild, Bloomberg, NBC News, Le Figaro, MSN, The Independent and The Weather Channel.
Yup... MSN is right there in their list of customers! They mention "native ads" quite a bit on their front page. What are native ads you ask? They tell you:
> Native advertising is the concept of creating ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer feels the ad belongs there.
and:
> As consumers become more resistant to traditional forms of advertising, Fortune 500 brands and consumer startups alike are allocating bigger budgets towards content marketing and non-disruptive ad formats.
Translation: People are starting to become resistant to the overt brainwashing, so we're making the brainwashing covert.
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
How do the people that work in these places sleep at night?
* The Settings app currently advertises "Rewards: Sign In" on two of the three Windows machines I have access to
* After every version update I'm prompted to finish setting up my account by converting my local sign in to a Microsoft account. The wizard itself only gives options to go through with it or be reminded in 3 days. Disabling it is a checkbox in notifications settings page "Suggest ways I can finish setting up the device to get the most out of windows". This to me feels like deliberate disguising of the true purpose of this setting
I haven't had any of these issues, this is what I did when setting up my Win 10. (The watermark still shows up 90% of the time, but with dual monitors I never notice it.)
So you did have most of these issues, but jumped through a lot of hoops and maintained a bunch of brittle fixes to address them?
Also, your link to "Windows 10 Pro N" just leads me to the download page for Windows 10 -- I don't see any option for "Pro N". Smells like dark patterns to me.
Ironically, I'm actually on a VPN already... just not one into the EU! I suppose this is how EU users must feel when new tech products launch and they're only available in the US.
Some ads take the form of tiles in your start menu. These are there right after installation if I'm not mistaken, but you can easily remove them. Then there are prompts to "finish setting up Windows" which take you to a screen that offers, among other things, a Microsoft Office trial. Apparently there are also adds in Windows Explorer, but I'm not 100% sure I've ever seen them.
It’s one of those tropes that keeps getting repeated but on the occasion I have said to someone “show me these ads” it turns out to be a recommendation in the Microsoft Store or something. Apple does those too in its App Store.
This perfectly sums up my views, being a Linux only user since 2013. Windows used to be so... Less awful. It's like all the people who use it have been slowly trained to accept more and more anti-user features.
Yes, agreed. But at this point you want to buy the products that has decreased the least in terms of quality. In my experience, that usually means apple.
I'd say the exact opposite, my 2014 MacBook Pro I use at home still functions fine, the battery is failing due to age but that is expected for 6 years of heavy daily use.
My 2018 work USB-C MacBook Pro has several keys failing and several others with mushy tactility, has a failing battery which you have to wait to reboot from because the charger is so low voltage, has a bluetooth chip that hard crashes and requires a reboot to kick it back to life, often kernel panics while asleep.
The 2014 arguably had harder use too because I used to use it for 3D rendering while all the 2018 has done is 2D design and Javascript.
Not even gonna bring up 2002 Titanium Powerbook that I used daily until I bought that 2014 which fared best of all and didn't even have a fraying power cable like the modern Apple chargers where they switched to "eco friendly" rubber that failed dangerously requiring more chargers to be purchased negating any eco saving.
It seems to me that Linux has only steadily increased in quality for the past few years. Dell now support Linux out of the box, and System 76 is Bringing Linux to the Mainstream user.
Wells Fargo and the US Army are well capable of paying Microsoft enough money to change their incentives.
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
I agree that any sort of data loss is completely unacceptable, especially given the amount of force with which MS has been pushing automatic updates and making it difficult to completely disable.
> Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life.
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, to be honest I much prefer - and trust - fully automated test pipelines to manuality. It affords more frequent and thorough verification of the final artifacts.
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
The other problem with the type of "in the field" testing that Microsoft does is that it can only capture issues that it can physically report back to the head office.
I had two separate computers with very distinct hardware that both failed to upgrade to any of the semi-annual Windows releases. They would just get stuck in a reboot loop at the SSD storage driver loading section of the installer, which means that no errors could be written. Hence, no specific errors could ever be sent back to Microsoft other than "failed".
I eventually found a workaround myself, but the root cause was never fixed, and will never be fixed, because Microsoft is blind to it.
Similarly, anything that causes a BSOD gets reported back via telemetry, but hangs and freezes aren't. Random performance issues, glitches, etc... are in the same bucket of permanently invisible issues.
If you're wondering why Windows is crashing less but glitching more... there's your answer.
Gah, glitches. Just spent two weeks trying to figure out the sudden seizures a Win10 running on a spanking new T14s. After 15 years of Apple Mac it’s insane, how can people put up with this horror.
I"m a huge proponent of automate the crap out of your tests, but you also have to break out of the automating mindset to get at the better problems. People are not machines, and automated tests are machines verifying machines.
It's why I like having a few non-automators and program noodlers around.
Well, there’s something to humans - testers in particular, who seem to be wired like hackers rather that programmers - that is superior to any fuzzing or “QuickCheck” approach. It’s the intuition, the art of second-guessing the mental model of the programmer that authored the code under test. That’s why it’s such a shameful tragedy to waste human capacity on scripted tests, the human factor should be authoring the automation.
LTSC really is the way to go for a stable windows experience, unfortunately there's no legal way for consumers to get licenses without a much larger investment than what a home or pro license costs.
You can meet in the middle and run transcript on pro which disables most of the worst new features.
> LTSC really is the way to go for a stable windows experience, unfortunately there's no legal way for consumers to get licenses without a much larger investment than what a home or pro license costs.
...and if you pirate, you might as well go the whole hog and get the Server edition, which could now be considered to be the closest you can get to a non-hostile, classic Windows experience.
Any word of when is a new version of LTSC supposed to come? I bought a very new laptop that just launched last year. The windows version out of box was I believe 1909. I haven’t yet tried running LTSC on it yet but worried about drivers or other issues. My CPU in the laptop was released in March 2020 and 1809 was released in 2018. I didn’t think it was too good of an idea because of that, even though prior I always ran LTSC and would love to go back if I didn’t have to worry about too new of hardware messing with it.
according to that link, support for Ryzen 9 4xxx began in build 2004. It says even build 1909 doesn’t have support for Ryzen 9 4xxx only Ryzen 3/5/7 3xxx. Confusing because 1909 definitely worked ok since my laptop came with it and ran okay.
LTSC isn't really meant as an enterprise desktop version. It's meant for industrial systems, the ones you don't expect to touch for years because they're controlling some vital factory process.
The expected version you'd be running on enterprise desktops is just the regular semi-annual release, delayed by a few months so the SMB sector can test the major bugs for you.
>LTSC isn't really meant as an enterprise desktop version. It's meant for industrial systems, the ones you don't expect to touch for years because they're controlling some vital factory process.
But why? Is it for the bleeding edge features? I looked at the previous feature updates and everything there looks incidental, nothing that would warrant an upgrade.
That's exactly what it is and it's becoming more common. Java went that way. Windows went that way. CentOS is going that way. Office 365 is even worse because the low paying users get more frequent updates than high paying users. I know because I tracked down a long file name issue for someone and was shocked they were paying for it and still getting to be a beta tester for the "real" customers (huge businesses).
> Office 365 is even worse because the low paying users get more frequent updates than high paying users.
AFAIK all office subscribers can change their update channel from monthly (default) to SAC (the one that "high paying users" use). The only difference is that the low paying user has to do it via group policy or registry, whereas the high paying users probably have some sort of enterprise admin tool that allows it to be set at the organization level.
The really sad part about this is that Microsoft was the systems programming startup. Their software engineers changed the world. Of course, that was 40+ years ago, but it's sad to see them turn away from their technical roots.
Windows 10 has been the most reliable, productive, stable system for me over the past few years. No doubt they use a lot of automated testing -- how could they not? But today's Windows 10 is -very- reliable.
It's filled with enough annoyances for me to be frustrating at times.
The night light is awful and blasts you with full blue light whenever monitors come out of standby mode and then it'll be "On" but not actually on until you toggle it.
Lately explorer hasn't been refreshing properly, so when I create a new folder I need to right-click, refresh before I see it and can rename it.
Things that auto-install drive me crazy. No, I don't want to "Meet Now".
Every SAC update tries to trick me into enabling OneDrive "backup" (sync is NOT a backup) and I missed it once so all my stuff got uploaded to OneDrive.
BitLocker with a PIN and Windows Update don't seem to know each other exist. Updates auto-restart the computer and then it sits at the BitLocker screen or, in my case, reboots continuously every few minutes spinning the fans up to max on every reboot.
I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones that annoy me daily.
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
AFAIU Windows updates roll out to regular users first, and to corporate customers much later (perhaps depending on how the admin configures it). In a way, regular users are test monkeys. But this makes it less likely to brick corporations. (Of course this can still happen to due unique corp settings).
Apple's has done the same thing regarding QA. Lots of companies have eliminated their QA departments, moved the QA engineers under development managers, and transitioned the QA labs to virtual machines allowing all tests to be identical and repeatable on each machine. You will never find edge cases or problems unique to certain hardware and software configurations.
As an example, Big Sur bricked lots of Late-2013 MBP laptops, but Apple had no way of knowing this would happen because they never tested them.
It's sad to say but I've had more hassle with Windows 10 than any previous (NT based anyway) release. 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all served me well. 10 has done everything from deleted my files (thanks, October 2018 Update) to DESTROYING my Linux boot loader that was placed on a separate hard drive.. it has no business touching that!
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
I've had pretty much the same experience as you. Honestly, linux runs faster uses less resources and is infinitely customizable. If anyone's work allows them to make the switch (eg. No hard dependencies on windows) then consider doing it, it is absolutely worth it.
Lately I've had great experiences with running any windows programs on linux in wine. It seems to have really matured a lot. There are some issues with my tiling wm but other than that zero problems.
Fortunately I've been able to find native alternatives for almost everything. If it wasn't for games and Winamp I'd probably not bother installing wine. (Winamp is the only player I've found that I can get midi files to play to my Roland UM-ONE).
I had the same thing happen to me with Windows destroying my Linux boot loader. After that, I gave up dual booting and have been on Linux 100% ever since. I don’t see myself ever going back.
I unfortunately need to due to professors not being OS friendly...
If there is a software they want us to use, you're gonna use it. Oh you use Linux or mac? Sorry, you gotta go to the computer lab at the school or find a windows machine.
Windows's quality has been downhill quite a lot. For the past more than a year, I struggle with intermittent touchpad scroll failure on multiple laptops (including surface pro, thinkpad, etc). Of course, the only support you can get from searching the web is to update the driver. In this case, I don't think driver is the problem, the windows multi-touch and precision touchpad component has internal bug, the cause scrolling, either touchpad or touchscreen, to loss response every a few minuets for 15s-ish period. Super annoying when you browse web without a mouse. I don't see any solution in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, I cannot just dump all my windows PC and switch to either mac or linux, because I stuck with a few CAD software that only runs on windows.
That doesn't mean anything, I ran into a bug after 2004 that meant DPAPI protected secrets would be randomly corrupted. It was an incredibly frustrating bug that cost me a bunch of data.
After a few months without progress, I ended up debugging the problem myself and mailing them an analysis.
It's still not fixed, and not on that known issues page. I wrote a twitter thread about it here:
I really enjoy reading abour your findings, thanks for sharing!
I would love to see a how-to for the way you debug these things with IDA, as otherwise I consider myself good at debugging, but have never even tried to peak under the hood of Windows.
I suppose it's because they now "test" using virtualized hardware. So even if chkdsk runs during their tests, it's running on a virtualized disk, not a real SSD.
Honestly, I'd pay money so they bring back the testing team and not use all of us non-enterprise users as beta users.
I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery is utter fucking voodoo, and it's usually better to flatten a machine than attempt to repair things.
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
My favourite Windows bug is the Start Menu search function.
Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.
Try using the Start Menu.
Nothing will work.
The search upon typing will not show all items.
If you click on a search result, it won't launch.
Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.
Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.
Etc...
It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
For me, for the rare time I need Edge, typing 'edge' will not show me the Edge browser. It offers an internet search for that word, however if i stop at just 'edg' it will correctly suggest the Edge browser.
There are many similar examples with this same pattern.
The wildest thing to me is that on out of the box Windows 10, from its release to now, you can't type a search into the Start menu and drag a program out of the results to create a shortcut. That feels like a "copy and paste doesn't work" level mistake to me.
No, Windows regularly changes the index order and "learns" what you commonly type and what you click for which phrase.
This leads to absurd situations where the index show different programs for each letter.
For example on my machine:
Up > Windows Update first
Upd > Lenovo System Update first
Upda > Windows Update first
Update > Lenovo System Update is the only result
When I search for Visual Studio, only a few programs are found. I made a shortcut for the Visual Studio Command prompt because Windows search regularly threw it out of the results. One day it's there, the next it's gone. Horrible UX.
What planet are you from that it takes a server nearly 170 hours of processing time to index... what... a few dozen kilobytes?
And why, for the love of god why, does it have to index the Start Menu!? Why isn't it indexed synchronously on install!?
Why does it even need indexing in the first place!? Do you have any idea how few milliseconds it takes to just brute-force search through a few dozen KB of text?
I implemented real-time character-by-character completion and search for an index over a 100M records in a web application in 2007. Are you telling me that Microsoft, one of the world's biggest corporations struggles to solve the same problem in a week for an amount of text that a child could index using play cards in a matter of minutes?
You get neither bonuses nor kudos for implementing a bruteforce solution. A self-healing machine-learning AI-based n-dimensional hyperindex search sounds much better, and is the natural choice for any career-conscious programmer
My counterpoint to this is: do you realize how many new Windows machines come with such terrible hard drives that your ask would bring the machine to a near stop for hours?
This is one of those places where Microsoft has let the OEMs that install Windows on 5400rpm hard drives or slower to this day ruin the experience for others. Hence we get this weird performance detection system that tries to guess how slow your system is when it comes to search and seemingly fails miserably at all cases.
And then certain people suffering from some variant of Stockholm Syndrome wonder what other people see in so-much-more expensive Macs.
It's the fucking OS, that even with its problems (Spotlight has gone downhill on macOS too) is still a generally more pleasant experience than the other 2 options.
I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
Why bother with patches then, just send the latest version. Now that Microsoft doesn't even support partial updates anymore, it's the rolling release train or nothing.
I hear a variation of this type of thing from windows fans constantly. "It's your hardware's fault." But never Window's fault. My experience is this; most of my computers are dual boot with windows and linux. When I have a problem with windows, I'll boot into linux and the problem goes away. Same hardware.
Hopefully you have extended security updates or use zeropatch.
Admittedly I have a test rig running windows posready 2009, aka w7 with esu cooked in from the beginning for contractual reasons. It is a bit like running windows xp embedded b on a normal desktop but seems good enough that I could use it as a daily driver if I wanted to.
I gave up and installed it on some machines. Feels like a damn upgrade! Unified, customizable UI, better performance, better Search, local accounts, smaller footprint :D
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve had two instances where I let Windows update and a whole bunch of system stuff (including Windows Update itself, once) proceeded to break, even through a few reboots.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
It was reasonably common advice, (around 2000-2004) in the MS Small Business Server groups to tell people to wait for a few days before installing updates, to see if other people had problems.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
I'd be very curious to see a deep root-cause-analysis of this, especially because it seems to be SSD-specific and in the "detect if the drive is an SSD and do something slightly different" way, which IMHO is not good behaviour in general as it is leaking the abstraction.
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
> "detect if the drive is an SSD and do something slightly different" way, which IMHO is not good behaviour in general as it is leaking the abstraction.
I'd argue the opposite. Thin or leaking abstractions are how operating systems and video games harness the full potential of the hardware. Trade-offs are ugly nonetheless.
> I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
In that case, running Hyper-v might be a good thing. (Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning your logged in session is running in a vm with dedicated input/video)
Looking beyond the obvious problem here, just curious why the admin ran chkdsk /f for no reason, then did it on 6 more systems after observing it caused ntfs failure.
https://m.xkcd.com/242/ maybe. One hopes the reporter had backups (or was testing on disposable systems) before trying to reproduce a data-loss condition.
Yep, this happened to me. Destroyed my entire data on my SSD, and forced me to Linux. Now I've literally ditched Windows, save for MS Office, and am currently using Linux for code, and even recently games, since they seem to run faster in Ubuntu.
I have a very strange SSD related bug at the moment on that Windows version too:
I've downloaded my Google Takeout Backup, so 74 4GB sized zips. After I was done extracting them and storing them on Dropbox, I tried to delete the zip files, but my machine froze without so much of a bluescreen. After a hard reboot, I could reproduce the behavior. I can still change the focus of apps, but everything that requires the ssd to do anything is waiting for i/o until the system freezes completely.
Unplugging the notebook seems to help, sometimes, but I can't make this work coherently at the moment.
Until this post I thought my SSD (Samsung Evo 970 Plus) was faulty, despite working perfectly for everything else.
Might that be your problem, or part of it? Not 100% sure, but whenever I access machines with Dropbox all kinds of weird things happen like there's a ghost in the machines. E.g. deleting a directory managed by Dropbox through explorer consistently results in all its subdirectories and files deleted, but the directory itself remaining there, requiring deleting it again.
That directories reappear empty thingie was an sync engine issue, I believe. It was fixed in latest sync engine update (though this issue was never mentioned, it stopped happening).
Regarding the parent poster, on Windows Smart Sync is enabled and, while extremely useful (and better that Onedrive’s equivalent IMO), it did cause issues in the past. Since it seems to work as a file filter, it can cause some issues.
That being said, I haven’t seen those in a while.
SATA Link Power Management (LPM) and Device-Initiated Power Management (DIPM) could also be the culprit here with similar symptoms - after using the computer for a while, the SSD will stop responding to I/O activities, leaving you a half-dead system. Existing programs like a browser, taskbar or window manager will still work for a while, until they need I/O too, eventually everything will be progressively dead.
It should be a persistent problem that shows up immediately after you've just installed an incompatible SSD, and it should only affect those who installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. So, if it only appears after a system upgrade, it should not be the problem here. But apparently it's still a possible cause.
Also, if you are using the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver, LPM and DIPM can be disabled by making the following registry changes. After making the changes, reboot the system and test.
1. It disables LPM and DIPM blindly for Port0, Port1, Port2, Port3, Port4, and Port5. It may miss your SSD if you have more ports (unlikely), and if you know the location of your SSD, one entry is enough.
2. I only tested it many years ago on an old version of iaStor, perhaps a new upgrade has made these register keys ineffective. Who knows.
3. Previously, uninstalling iaStor and using the built-in AHCI driver in Windows could be a workaround. But I'm not sure whether it's still a solution.
Thanks, as this is an AMD Notebook with an PCIe NVMe SSD i'm not sure the SATA Link Power Management is applicable. I've turned off the PCIe Link Power Management though, sadly without improvements.
I have to say this problem ONLY appears when DELETING these specific 4gb zip files. I really can't reproduce this in any other way.
Okay, it appears not to be your problem then, don't forget to switch the option back to save power when you've finished troubleshooting. I must suspect that the other comment on TRIM might be relevant...
Someone suggested on-access-antivirus/Defender being the culprit, those want to take a peek inside the files, and that might take a long time to unpack. Try excluding the folder they are in before deleting.
I had a very similar issue. Samsung 860 Pro, system somehow got slower and slower until it froze. After a hard reboot, my partitions on 2 dynamic drives were gone. Easily restored with Testdisk, but that was a weird one. Never had it happen again.
I ran into what I believe was this issue last week, BSOD stating Stop error NTFS File System. Couldn't boot, startup repair did nothing, and then the worst thing occurred was no restore points were available. Even if system restore is ON it will periodically remove/clean them up which I never knew. Since reading about this issue I was trying to recall my steps of recovery frustration, but I think ended from the startup repair opening up the command prompt and issuing a chkdsk and rebooting a few times initiating automatic repair and finally came back to life.
This must be an older bug because after an upgrade ~2 months ago an automatic chkdsk run when fastboot was enabled took down all partitions on a SSD where I had Windows 7 installed. Intel system.
I wonder if it's just a case of running chkdsk or if there's something more endemic on the filesystem.
My friend woke up two days ago to find out that 500gb of source video and 24 hours of edits from Adobe Premier were mysteriously missing from her computer having only recently copied them there.
If this was macOS this post would be at least a 10x the upvotes in 0.1 the time, full of testimonials from people about to lay their last Mac in a grave.
But we’re too desensitized to news about shit like this happening in Windows. Why?
I just walked past an ATM with a blue screen of death. Business as usual.
First of all there's no reason to ever run chkdsk/f in the first place if there are no problems with your SSD.
Secondly, just never use chkdsk /f - chkdsk /scan is faster, requires no restart and no further action is needed if no problems were found. Problems can be fixed using chkdsk /spotfix otherwise, which doesn't cause any problems.
But if you ask "how to fix problems in Windows" you're likely to end up reading a guide[1] [2] [3] [4] that suggests "run chkdsk /f". Why? Because the diagnostic tools available to most users are so poor that shotgun debugging is the only option. And /spotfix is too new to have made a dent in 30 years of being told that's the way you do it. (This is the first time I've heard of that option.) The internet is very bad at forgetting.
Not delaying updates is like opting in to be a beta tester. I don’t want to sound smug, that was just a word of warning. It’s just a switch to flip and it will save you from many headaches.
Why am I not surprised at all? Heard that M$ has completely removed the testing team by adapting to DevOPs, which makes end users in production environment the white mouse.
People always seriously frown at me when I say I disable Windows updates. I've never had any problem stem from it, and I've bypassed all the homegrown issues.
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-microsoft-employee-ta...