WINDOWS 10 – More Garbage you Can’t Live Without

I just got a new laptop computer. Had little choice, as the old one is 5-6 years old and it has gotten to the point that it takes several minutes to bootup. I tried all the normal cleanup tricks, but that along with all the major components being badly outdated, made the choice an easy one.

The old laptop had WINDOWS 7 installed. I am not a big fan of any form of WINDOWS, but I have to use it because many of the Applications I need to use (for interfacing to Radios, Cameras, etc.) are only available for WINDOWS OS. So, I found WINDOWS7 to be very tolerable (that is about as close to 5 Stars that I ever get for WINDOWs).

The new laptop has WINDOWS 10 installed, which I have been avoiding as much as possible. I had allowed one other PC to switch to WINDOWS10 and I tested that a bit. It is a huge step in the direction of Microsoft taking full control of my PC and my Network. But it looks like I need to know how it works, because it is surely part of my future, and several friend’s PCs ad already gone this route.

My first experience was to remove a bunch of junk that is installed by default, including several “live tiles” which I assume are eating Bandwidth on my Network on a continuing basis. So I started downloading things I actually WANT on my PC. That went fairly well, but the PC occasionally decided that it was time to perform and/or download some WINDOWS updates. Thought I would fix that by disabling automatic Updates, like I have always done with WINDOWS.  No such luck. You can no longer do that!!! There is a small consolation – I can set “Active hours.” This is supposed to let them know I might be “using” my computer, but I can only have up to 12 “active hours” in a day. The PC Gods have allowed that they will “check to see if my PC is “in use” before rebooting to install Updates. They will still download them whenever they want, and from what I hear “in use” is defined in a way that doe not really fit any kind of “busy” for an actual human using a PC.

Hats off the Microsoft. It just gets worse and worse. And please don’t tell me to “just use LINUX.” I use it when I can, but there are just too many Applications that are only available in WINDOWS, for things I want to do.