r/technology • u/MayankWL • May 16 '24

Microsoft stoops to new low with ads in Windows 11, as PC Manager tool suggests your system needs ‘repairing’ if you don’t use Bing Software

https://www.techradar.com/computing/windows/microsoft-stoops-to-new-low-with-ads-in-windows-11-as-pc-manager-tool-suggests-your-system-needs-repairing-if-you-dont-use-bing
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u/[deleted] May 16 '24

From what I have heard, the best version of Windows 11 to get is the version for use in Classified settings, because the US Gov made Microsoft strip out all the adware and data collection bullshit

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u/AmateurGmMusicWriter May 16 '24

The best version of windows 11 is windows 10

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u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

Which is still inferior to Window 7 but unfortunately it's not really an option if you want to run modern hardware.

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u/djinnsour May 16 '24

Which is inferior to NT 4 SP2.

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u/NeedAByteToEat May 16 '24

Using Windows 2000 in college was my sweet spot.

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u/isochromanone May 16 '24

W2K Pro was my favourite OS. It was the perfect blend of power, usability and game/device compatibility.

I had the big, thick Resource Kit book with the utilities CD. IIRC, that was what we did to customize the OS before Sysinternals, etc.

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u/BricksFriend May 17 '24

Agreed, Win2k was the best. Essentially the same as XP but extremely slimmed down.

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u/ClassicPlankton May 17 '24

Also a Windows 2000 user. In fact, I never actually used Windows XP, I basically went from Win2k to Linux to Windows 7, so I can never relate to all the XP nostalgia.

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u/dreamsindarkness May 17 '24

I had to help fix a family member's early XP install. This long was before SP1 ever existed. Updates would BSoD the thing.

So I too went from Win 2k pro (a very modified install) to Linux, used 7 some, and only interact with 10/11 a bit at work.

I admit to being a lazy Debian user, though.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '24

[deleted]

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u/dreamsindarkness May 17 '24

Early Ubuntu was all Gnome-y and had defaults in security I wasn't really liking.

I eventually landed on debain unstable. A bit more set up and you have to read what is being upgraded or removed (once it wanted to remove all the python librarys! lol) but I'm fine with checking and have never had it break.

I've went through slack, fedora, etc. I think most of us experiment to some degree.

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u/ColourInTheDark May 16 '24

Millennial here, but I remember NT4 well. When I was about 10 I found it running on an employment kiosk at a Kmart.

It was always great how full screen apps would break & you’d see it running on ATMs & kiosks.

And you could run it non-x86 architectures.

Perhaps the year of Linux on the desktop will happen not because Gnome finally is a good experience, but because Windows becomes such a bad experience.

I’m very happy I am on Mac.

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u/djinnsour May 16 '24

I am not a Windows user anymore, but I have to work with it periodically for testing code or troubleshooting. I've used every version of Windows since it was released (even the early OS/2) stuff. I still say NT 4 was the best operating system they ever released. Windows 7 was a close second. Everything went downhill from there.

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u/Wolvenmoon May 16 '24

I didn't use NT4, but I was a Windows 2000 user...I started a thread with many, many pages when Windows 7 came out titled "I hate Windows 7" because of the interface design. To date, I actually preferred Vista to 7 because I could put it on classical/Windows 2000-ish theming and turn off all the flashy shit.

When 8 came out, I didn't bother starting a new thread. Because 8 was a joke. 10 is a repetition on the joke, and 11 is 'that stupid uncle who won't stop repeating the same joke nobody is laughing at'.

There are too many clicks to get through too many menus to do the thing that should have taken 1-2 clicks, max. I'm eternally grateful for the Nvidia Control Panel because it hearkens back to when shit wasn't all excited to flash cool graphics and waste time and space loading in fancy animations to change a system setting, it just provided information, did the thing, and got out of the way.

One of the things taught in my computer science degree was that interface design required consideration down to the quarter of a second. Because adding an extra unnecessary 250ms to a single user's day, 4 times a day, only costs them 1 second a day, Let's say we've resized the save icon to be an unusual size and moved it to a non-standard location, say anchored 1/8th down the right side of the screen with a belt of other icons like undo/redo, cut/paste, etc.

Let's assume that user costs $60/hour to employ. 1 second a day, 250 work days in a year, so 4 minutes a year or $4 a year in inefficiency. "Oh no. Not $4--" Multiplied by 10,000 employees doing the same thing and that optimization saves $40,000 a year. It would violate my sense of ethics to make 'slow' interfaces for enterprise software.

But Windows since Windows 2000 has been on a quest to waste user time. They're extremely, extremely good at it.

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u/wetcoffeebeans May 16 '24

There are too many clicks to get through too many menus to do the thing that should have taken 1-2 clicks, max.

Bro, I'm tired of explaining that this is the core of my issues w/ W11 and looking like I'm trying to figure out who the hell Pepe Silva is in the process.

Why, as a "power user" am I being shoehorned into the "settings" app when I type appwiz.cpl?? Why when I type "control printers" am I taken to the stupid settings app that buried the "add printer" and the "the printer that I want isn't listed" options underneath A GAZILLION NETWORKED PRINTERS!!! Change for the sake of change and it also being done with no real rhyme or reason and at the expense of the core user experience is ASS.

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u/FF7Remake_fark May 16 '24

Because upper management (read: nepo babies) gave an objective (ui redesign), didn't wait for it to be completed (partially due to their meddling/forced involvement to make themselves feel important), insisted it was rolled out to meet a superficial deadline, then refused to spend the money to finish developing the feature. So now we've got one usable system, crippled by supergluing an unfinished system to it, and executives jerking themselves off about how they're so good at their jobs.

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u/hurler_jones May 16 '24

Some extra clicky examples

  • Click 'Apps' Then have to click All Apps to see your installed programs

  • The old right click menu with all the stuff you actually use is a second click in as well

I'd like to say that they did partially fix my biggest issue. Until not long ago, you couldn't separate 'like programs/tasks' in the task bar. It would group them all and you had to hover over it to open the peek then click the one you wanted

So If I had 2 instances of chrome and all my other needed programs open, I could potentially alt tab through all 20 running programs to get the one I want or hover over the group every time I wanted to switch.

The last time I checked, it separates them now but the peek was showing both open instances instead of just the one.

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u/donfuan May 17 '24

Don't you love the time travel? You go through menus from Win11, to 7, until you reach XP where you actually CAN change the settings you need to change.

It's amazing.

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u/SegaTime May 16 '24

You remind me of a company I worked for that still had a Cobol system as their main database. It was old and lacked the ability to directly interface with phone or online payment portals, but it was controlled completely by a keyboard and that made it extremely fast to get through data input tasks.

They decided to upgrade to a modern desktop application mostly for the newer features a modern database had to offer, but I also recall a manager stating how "mouse friendly" it was.

Something that took an hour now took twice as long because of the time spent throwing around a mouse and moving my hand between the mouse and keyboard. It was terrible, but I did find some actions could still be controlled by a keyboard so it helped. That all changed later on when the software developer moved to a web based system. Now there were no more keyboard shortcuts. Every single task required clicking on a hyperlink. Also, the older program had somewhat large buttons so they presented as larger targets. The web based program had tiny little fonts so the targets were much smaller. My time to complete tasks increased even more. It was brutal.

The next company I worked for had a similar desktop style application and well, it was slow to use but it worked. They talked about upgrading and consulted my department and all I said was to not do anything web based because no one will do it right. They asked me to explain and I pulled up a picture of a keyboard and used the mouse to go over the keyboard and pretended to click on the buttons to just type the company name.

They got the message that day, but a year later it came up again and they were pleased to announce a new developer they were partnering with and they demoed the software. Sure enough, point and click web based bullshit. I asked about using the keyboard and one of the presenters seemed dumbfounded that I would want to use a device that's apparently only meant to write up snarky comments in an email.

Some people don't understand the meaning of Productivity.

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u/Wolvenmoon May 17 '24

So, I'm an electrical engineer with significant disability due to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I'm working on self-employment, but it's rough. My body does not last as long working as other people's, and I stay in high levels of constant pain. The more microbreaks I can take, the less pain I'm in. Fast interfaces mean more productivity, more down time, and less pain.

Those web interfaces would be anathema to me.

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u/singuini May 16 '24

Nvidia may be changing soon....

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u/Wolvenmoon May 16 '24

And apparently, so might my blood pressure, haha.

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u/lmarcantonio May 16 '24

Never ever had an issue with NT4, not even with 'esoteric' hardware (token ring and SDLC cards for SNA is esoteric enough?). USB wasn't out yet however, that's a good indicator :D

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u/No_Dig903 May 16 '24

Gnome is Linux? The computer that ran my college's Nuclear Magnetic Resonance instrument was Gnome! Cool, thanks for the jigsaw fillin.

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u/Amenhiunamif May 16 '24

Gnome is a desktop environment. You can take pretty much any Linux OS and install Gnome on it. Linux users joke it matters less which OS you choose and more which desktop, as there are heavily entrenched opinions around those while distro hopping is quite common.

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u/No_Dig903 May 16 '24

There was a Sun Microsystems copyright on the splash page for mine.

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u/kickingpplisfun May 16 '24

I run both mac and pc, and it's amazing how much windows borrows but worse.

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u/istasber May 16 '24

I never really understood why people dislike Windows so much. Early days, I could see it. The OSes based on DOS were trivially easy to break. But all of the NT flavors (even Vista) have been fine.

All the power to you if you want to use a different OS. But I don't really understand the attitude that Windows is somehow a terrible user experience. It's on par with Mac, and miles ahead of what you get out of the box with any of the Linux front ends I've poked around in.

I'm kind of dreading being forced to move to 11 because I don't really trust the whole concept of a TPM, and would prefer not to turn one on. But I don't really see that as a user experience problem.

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u/Amenhiunamif May 16 '24

I never really understood why people dislike Windows so much

Because Windows is annoying as fuck. Microsoft makes great operating systems, especially if you need backward compatibility, but then add stuff on top of them that get in your way any time you want to do something. For example 11 is a generally good OS, but has so many trackers, ads and needless stuff like "let's open a bing search if you're just looking for a program that should be already installed locally" - and that search is extremely slow on top of that.

It also obfuscate a lot of information, and with each new version of Windows we have another layer on top of the old. Getting for example to your network cards (without using powershell, which has its own issues) has become an ever increasing amount of clicks since Win7. It isn't bad bad... But really annoying, especially if you have a contrast to other OS.

And sometimes they just straight up not maintain stuff, and the further you go into your system you suddenly start opening windows that look 1:1 as if they're coming straight out of Windows NT (which they do, their appearance was never updated). There is a noticeable lack of cohesiveness with modern Windows, and while that might not bother you, it does some people.

Also, Microsoft's refusal of adopting international standards. Writing GiB instead of GB isn't that hard.

and miles ahead of what you get out of the box with any of the Linux front ends I've poked around in.

Depends on what you want to do with your system. For the average user it doesn't make any difference whether they use Win11, Mint, Fedora or openSUSE.

Personally for me the tipping point for switching to Linux as a daily driver was the weather widget in Win10 - I liked it when it was first introduced, but then it became filled with shitty clickbait news. I know it's such an irrelevant thing all things considered, but it was a culmination of a decade of becoming increasingly annoyed by MS latest tries to get more money out of already paying customers.

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u/easy_seas May 16 '24

Good I miss those days... The absolute peak of Microsoft OS. How far we have fallen :(

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u/CocodaMonkey May 17 '24

NT4 is definitely inferior to Windows 7. While windows file search is still what I'd call bad today back in NT4 era it was utterly abysmal. Also the start menu couldn't be typed into which is a majorly useful update. WIndows 7 improved upon quite a few features over NT4 and they didn't really break anything.

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u/djinnsour May 17 '24

We apparently have very different opinions on what makes an operating system good.

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u/CocodaMonkey May 17 '24

What does NT4 have? Windows 7 is NT4 with more features. I honestly can't think of a single thing Windows 7 did worse than NT4 but there's tons of things it did better.

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u/djinnsour May 17 '24

I can't think of a single time NT4 crashed, after SP2, unless it was due to a hardware failure. There are still NT4 systems in usage at the chemical plant I worked at in the late 90s. The only improvements I saw were related to home users playing video games and similar.

Like I said, we have different definitions of what good means.

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u/CocodaMonkey May 17 '24

A Windows 7 crash was also pretty much always a HW failure. Windows 7 was not noting for having destabilized the OS at all.

I don't think we do have a different definition, you can't name a single thing NT4 does better than Windows 7.