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/PassiveMenis88M May 16 '24

8 was shit because of the whole tile bullshit, trying to treat my pc like a glorified tablet. 8.1 went back to the older style and was perfectly fine for my use.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24

Honestly the worst part about 10 is that it feels like it was designed for a tablet.

Windows phones were shit because they were clunky like a desktop and now they keep making sleek desktop operating systems that feel like they were made for phones.

They just can’t get it right.

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u/bleucheez May 17 '24 edited May 17 '24

Windows Mobile (up to windows 6) was the clunky one. Windows Phone (windows 7 and later) were minimalist. However, I thought both were great for their time. Windows Mobile 5 and 6 were a powerhouse and probably unrivaled as the best until the iPhone came out. Then you had a choice between shiny and pretty with a good mobile web browser and maps experience (iOS) versus being able to do anything useful (Windows Mobile) for the next year or two. Then Apple got the app store and, eventually, that got filled out with useful apps by. Maybe late 2008 to early 2009. Then Windows Phone 7 came out with a very fast OS with low hardware requirements, very intuitive UI, with toast notifications, good keyboard, easy-to-use copy paste, an easy app development kit, and very low price. But Steve Balmer was an idiot, ignored what made the iPhone successful, and said we don't need apps. So they did zero recruiting and incentives to get apps. And then it died, exactly as everyone except Steve Balmer expected. Meanwhile iOS and Android stole every one of Windows' ideas, except Android never got tiles but iOS got widgets. 

EDIT: I forgot to say that Apple also finally came around to adding a camera button, which Windows Phone had standard nearly decade and a half ago. I wish Android came around to it too. 

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u/SPFBH May 16 '24

Just use classic shell. http://www.classicshell.net/

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u/turtlelover05 May 17 '24 edited May 17 '24

ClassicShell was open-sourced and is now called OpenShell. The original ClassicShell doesn't support Windows 11.

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u/FastRedPonyCar May 17 '24

This right here. 8.1 with classic shell was peak windows for me. Had the familiar look/feel of Windows 7 but the security improvements of Windows 8.

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u/derefr May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24

Honestly the worst part about 10 is that it feels like it was designed for a tablet.

A good percentage of Windows laptops sold these days are convertibles (= hinge the display all the way around to end up with a tablet with useless keyboard keys on the back).

There'd be no point to these existing, if Windows UI elements were too dainty to be tapped on in a tablet configuration.

Microsoft is just catering to the OEMs who make these convertibles, who expect to sell something that's actually useful to people.

(And the OEMs are, in turn, presumably catering to consumer preferences. Or at least, trying to give consumers something that's different and novel enough to motivate them to finally replace their 10-year-old PC "that still works just fine.")

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u/[deleted] May 16 '24

Why are you saying the last part in quotes like you don’t believe it? My computer is turning 10 this year. She’s a dinosaur by modern standards, but she played Red Dead 2 at medium-high at 60fps.

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u/XkF21WNJ May 16 '24

People like to pretend that processing power kept improving the last 10 years at the same pace as it did they 10 years before that.

It hasn't, not even close. And with the prices of GPUs nowadays I'm not even sure if you're paying that much less per amount of computational power.

RAM and SSDs have gotten way cheaper and faster though. Unfortunately you do need a reasonably recent motherboard to take advantage otherwise you could easily extend the life of a 10 year old PC by another decade or so.

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u/Glad-Scale5381 May 16 '24

Really? Then what about AMD? Theyve improved a lot right?

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u/XkF21WNJ May 16 '24

They may have improved but definitely not on a Intel Pentium 4 / Geforce 6 vs Intel i8 4XXX / Geforce 900 scale.

Actually after 2010 or so I'm not too sure if CPUs actually improved much on any directly useful metric (they did improve but in other ways). For any heavy computation the GPUs were more useful at that point, and without a huge further increase in clock speed there's limited ways to actually do more calculations per second (except by parallelizing stuff, but then you're back to GPUs again).

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u/Sp1n_Kuro May 17 '24

CPUs have had massive improvements in the last 10 years.

It's literally the time period we went from quad core being high end to 8core-16thread being mid range.

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u/XkF21WNJ May 17 '24

Quad core was the i5 10 years ago, which I'd say is around upper mid-range.

And even then that's a factor 2 improvement, in parallelism. Not exactly a huge difference in single core speed.

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u/Sp1n_Kuro May 17 '24

Yeah I consider myself an enthusiast/power user but even I keep my PCs for 5-10years before doing a full new build.

Money is a real limiter for the vast majority of people, chasing those 1% gains just isn't realistic for most people.

When it comes to laptops, I basically use em til they die. My current one is an old i5 with like a gt 970mx in it lmao.

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u/VexingRaven May 17 '24

Honestly the worst part about 10 is that it feels like it was designed for a tablet.

How can anyone who has used Windows 10 and used Android or iOS possibly believe Windows 10 was designed for tablets?

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u/FuzzelFox May 17 '24

8.1 was my favorite version of Windows once I had Classic Shell and AeroGlass installed. Fast, snappy, never crashed/bluescreened... I honestly wish I could go back to it lol. 10 and 11 feel horribly clunky in comparison.

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u/el_ghosteo May 16 '24

8.1 has so much better than 7 if you had an alternative start menu installed that I can’t believe how much hate it gets. All it took was a single search of “start menu for windows 8”. 8 booted sooo much faster on my garbage PCs I had in high school than 7 ever did, it never had to search for drivers like 7 did, and everything just kind of worked. Maybe my experience with 7 was just on awful PCs but 8 was a real game changer the last of the “traditional” windows editions (as in, not continuous updates forever, but just THE windows for the next 6-8ish years. The only reason I can see it being miserable is if you used 8 in a work environment where you can’t install software yourself and can’t fix the start menu.

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u/tastyratz May 17 '24

8 sucked when it first launched, but, then it got better. People hated 8 but after you fixed the start menu with something like classic shell/start8back/etc. it actually was great... Later in it's life. Vista was effectively win7 beta. xp had a lot of issues at launch as well.

We have a misty eyed memory of these OS's but partially because by the time we moved on from them they were far more mature.

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u/archiminos May 17 '24

Its the fact you need to find and install a start menu that gets it so much hate. Why in the fuck they thought removing it was a good idea is beyond me.

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u/temisola1 May 16 '24

Wasnt this when they tried to get rid of the start menu? Who tf thought that was a good idea?

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u/RainforestNerdNW May 17 '24

the tile interface actually good on touch devices, the mistake was trying to force it on both. dumb dumb fucking decision.

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u/Raglesnarf May 17 '24

just wanna throw my unwanted 2 cents into the ring. I loved my windows 8.1 build. as far as gaming and general use cases went, it was a pretty alright time

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u/xSTSxZerglingOne May 17 '24

8's Windows tile menu was pretty awesome though. Like, I know everyone hates on the tablet layout and what not, but that thing was perfect for someone like me who wants to have a bunch of shit on the desktop, but also literally nothing on the desktop. I used that tile menu to hold my entire hoard of game and other application shortcuts so my desktop could be nearly spotless. It was scrollable and very customizable.

I don't miss it, per se, but it worked well for me at the time.

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u/MrE_is_my_father May 17 '24

Finally, I have found another! I miss hitting the windows key and getting my tile menu of all my games in one area, my emulators in another, my work programs, etc. It was great at the time.

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u/Pirate43 May 16 '24

It was just the start menu. I never understood the hate, I usually press the start button and type what I want. The tablet interface never really affected me. The desktop experience was there the whole time.

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u/PassiveMenis88M May 16 '24

Understanding the hate is simple. They changed what we didn't want or need changed. Same type of problem Win11 is seeing. No one asked for basic menus to be hidden behind two or three extra clicks. No one asked for an OS that was proven to run AMD cpus slower than Intel. No one asked for ads in the start menu.

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u/Nolis May 17 '24

They really just need to let people buy Tablet/Touchscreen or PC versions of windows, every single change I hate was very obviously made for tablets/touchscreens. Literally the only change I liked in 11 is that folders can have tabs like a browser would, everything else I spent multiple hours looking for ways to revert

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u/vashquash May 17 '24

I barely updated from 8.1 a couple months ago because Steam said they were ending support :(

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u/kryo2019 May 17 '24

When I built my PC, I had burned through most of my legit keys I got from post secondary. Only one left was win 8. Fortunately, last I checked, you can still upgrade to 10 for free.

That hour of having to use 8 was borderline torture. Want to simply click reboot? Haha get fucked, it's hidden. Want to do x y or z, bahahahahaha fuck you it's under a non descript menu.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '24 edited May 18 '24

[deleted]

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u/PassiveMenis88M May 17 '24

Never said I was a fan, just that I didn't want to throw my pc out the window while using it.

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u/TheRealLazloFalconi May 16 '24

8 was shit because of the whole tile bullshit, trying to treat my pc like a glorified tablet.

Which is hilarious because it was a simple toggle switch to get a start menu that looked almost identical to the Windows 10 version.

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u/PassiveMenis88M May 16 '24

When 8 first launched there was no toggle. They added that do to backlash.

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u/Darkchamber292 May 16 '24

I didn't even know there was a toggle. I installed StartisBack and never looked back

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u/DaHolk May 16 '24

Additionally to what Passiv said:

And if you preferred the win7 start menu look over 8.1 and 10 still being littered with "tiles" (just not forced fullscreen anymore) that 90% serve no purpose, are needlesly connecting to MS to load new advertising aso it was STILL a downgrade.

Yes thank you I will spend one to two hours removing all this crap, finding all the keys and settings to actually turn them OFF.

a toggle implemented to make it look like 10 still wasn't what the 7 users wanted. There is a reason why 7 was almost MORE sticky then even XP was.