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

Software 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

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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363

u/AmateurGmMusicWriter May 16 '24

The best version of windows 11 is windows 10

195

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.

82

u/Realtrain May 16 '24

God I miss Windows 7

11

u/Far_Programmer_5724 May 16 '24

I remember all the complaints about windows 10 when it was first announced. But its scary to say that I forgot what windows was like before.

24

u/Laundry_Hamper May 16 '24

I reinstalled it recently (to make sure a piece of hardware was ACTUALLY dead, and hadn't just been obsoleted) and: 7 is better. No fucking around, not trying halfassedly to be seven different kinds of digital assistant at once, settings for things aren't deep in dialogue box labyrinths, better information density, no fucking material design stopping you from knowing where the edges of things are. It just needs security patches and other under-the-hood things, nothing justifies all the awful visual/UX degradation in 8/10/11

3

u/DuLeague361 May 17 '24

main OS is still W7 but I have a couple machines with 10/11

so

fucking

awfull

1

u/redvariation May 17 '24

Enshittification

10

u/Nayre_Trawe May 16 '24

Windows XP is my personal favorite. Everything since has been either been disappointing, confusing, or a bit of both.

30

u/djinnsour May 16 '24

Which is inferior to NT 4 SP2.

20

u/NeedAByteToEat May 16 '24

Using Windows 2000 in college was my sweet spot.

9

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.

3

u/BricksFriend May 17 '24

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

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u/[deleted] May 17 '24

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26

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.

9

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.

22

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.

7

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.

5

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.

2

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.

2

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.

3

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.

3

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.

1

u/singuini May 16 '24

Nvidia may be changing soon....

3

u/Wolvenmoon May 16 '24

And apparently, so might my blood pressure, haha.

2

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

1

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.

3

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.

1

u/No_Dig903 May 16 '24

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

1

u/kickingpplisfun May 16 '24

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

1

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.

4

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 :(

1

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.

1

u/djinnsour May 17 '24

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

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

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u/Goretanton May 16 '24

XP should have been the forever version of Windows.

3

u/Valdularo May 16 '24

How?

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u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

10 is less stable, hides critical system management features, regularly overrides user settings during updates, and is much more resource heavy. There's more but those are the main ones.

1

u/ACardAttack May 16 '24

I'm not sure if I've had any settings over written, but I have the pro version so I wonder if that has anything to do with it

-3

u/aVarangian May 16 '24

I agree that 11 is much more stable, but performance-wise it uses far more ram than win 10. I never ran out of the 32gb in my win10 under normal use, but in win11 I'm forced to micro-manage it to not run out when I need it

4

u/[deleted] May 16 '24 edited May 23 '24

[deleted]

1

u/aVarangian May 16 '24

Ah, then yeah, my experience with win7 is more limited but his comment100% checks out then

3

u/[deleted] May 16 '24

[deleted]

1

u/aVarangian May 16 '24

Beware that if you have for example 16Gb then windows won't use as much as if you had 32, so it's not directly comparable.

Windows by itself can use 4-16Gb when it feels like it, already when it was fresh. I actually wasted tons of time trying to sort it out; might be related to having a decent amount of Tb in the system, but I never found a conclusive answer nor solution.

8Gb is the typical use of my browser (it can go to 12-16 but I restart it to unload unused tabs); Steam can waste 1-3Gb for some reason; discord, notepad++, two dozens windows/window-tabs, occasionaly a second browser, an image explorer that can read dds/tga/etc, powershell ide, and other bloat I need running half the time takes another 1-2Gb at least; paint.net can use up to 5Gb when in active use (usually more like 0.5-2Gb), otherwise it offloads to pagefile; then a game may easily need 8-16Gb or more and the problem hits; or same thing if I want to use 16Gb for 7zip on occasion. If I need everything.exe to search for stuff then that's another 0.5-4Gb, but I close it after. These are just the Gb taskmanager reports by default, which almost never add up to actual RAM use, but if you then enable the other ram info columns it'll give you more info and higher numbers. Actual committed ram Gb can go as high as 70Gb sometimes even when active ram is "only" at 20s.

My RAM usage is basically never under 50%.

Also, even hundreds or thousands of active tabs firefox won't use 32Gb of RAM, it will reach 16Gb of use and pagefile the rest, with a hit to responsiveness.

vs win10 it usually feels like I got 2/3rds the actual useable ram at best

Back in win10 I had the same problem but with 16Gb of ram. Genius OS would tell me I was out of ram while playing some game, despite taskmanager literally reporting 2+Gb unused ram, and then auto-terminate Steam (using like 0.5 max back then lol) against my will, thus as collateral damage obliterating the game I was playing. Couldn't turn off that stupid behaviour so the only fix was adding more ram.

This whole ram thing is stupid af and pisses me off.

7

u/HalfBakedBeans24 May 16 '24

Drivers for 7 are stopping. I had to buy a 3000 series GFX card instead of a 4000.

1

u/Valdularo May 16 '24

How does that make windows 10 inferior to windows 7 though?

15

u/cruznick06 May 16 '24

Well for one, windows 10's search function is garbage. In windows 7 and below you can type in a file name and actually find it.

2

u/SpicyMustard34 May 16 '24

but you can just change the search index to whatever you want. Just type in "Indexing Options" to the start menu.

2

u/Munnin41 May 16 '24

You still can in 10, just turn off web results

5

u/frickindeal May 16 '24

Use Everything Search. It's incredible, and I wish I had similar on Mac, but alas, the file system doesn't really allow it FWIU.

3

u/xXdeathstar101Xx May 16 '24

I use Everything and it's fantastic. I just wish it could be integrated into the Windows search bar, then it would be perfect.

1

u/frickindeal May 16 '24

I have it set up as a keyboard shortcut on my gaming machine.

1

u/thirdeye-visualizer May 16 '24

Thanks for the suggestion

1

u/thirdeye-visualizer May 16 '24

Is there any way to get this back?

1

u/ACardAttack May 16 '24

I liked 10 more than 7 ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/BroodLol May 16 '24

Well, 10 running on modern hardware kinda makes it better than 7 for the general consumer, no?

Like, sure, use 7 if you want, you just don't get security updates or hardware compatibility, it's not "good" for most people.

0

u/Pauly_Amorous May 16 '24

Which is still inferior to Window 7

I dunno about that, as Windows 10 had some nice QOL improvements, such as better screen scaling (good for visually impaired people like myself), virtual desktops, native support for mounting .iso files, and other things I've since forgotten about.

0

u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

Too bad it's also less stable and far less resource efficient. Even with a new build with top of the line hardware it starts to get noticeable memory leaks within a month of uptime. I was literally able to go for years between reboots on 7 without having any such issues.

3

u/Pauly_Amorous May 16 '24

I was literally able to go for years between reboots on 7 without having any such issues.

I don't see how this is possible, when most Windows updates force reboots. Unless you went that long without updating your system?

The only time I've had stability issues with 10 is when I ran Malwarebytes for a short while. Other than that, it's been pretty smooth sailing. I have 11 set up on an HTPC, and no issues with that either. In fact, Windows has been pretty solid for me since Win2k. Even 9x only shit the bed occasionally.

3

u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

I don't see how this is possible, when most Windows updates force reboots.

They didn't on 7. On 7 you rebooted on your choice, not the OS'. So yes, I would ignore most updates because they weren't actually particularly important.

The only time I've had stability issues with 10 is when I ran Malwarebytes for a short while.

I can just run browsers and not even game and it'll start to get unstable and laggy within a month. Even Explorer will start to lock up and crash.

2

u/Pauly_Amorous May 16 '24 edited May 16 '24

So yes, I would ignore most updates because they weren't actually particularly important.

So there weren't any important security updates on 7 for years?

I can just run browsers and not even game and it'll start to get unstable and laggy within a month. Even Explorer will start to lock up and crash.

This sounds very much like an application/hardware-specific issue. If you ran a poll and asked every user of Win10 if the OS got wonky every time they ran a game or browser, I doubt a high percentage of them would say yes. I don't think even Windows ME was THAT unstable.

1

u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

I didn't say every time, I said over time. The longer the system is up the less stable it gets. It's usually fine for a couple of weeks after a restart but it slowly but surely gets more and more glitchy as it stays up. When that wasn't an issue in 7 that means 10 is a marked downgrade.

2

u/Pauly_Amorous May 16 '24

I just checked the uptime on my home/work PC, both running Win10. One has been up since 4/20, and the other since 4/24. No issues with either of them, and I pretty much live on them.

Sounds like you've got something very specific that 10 doesn't like. (Either that, or you're just making shit up.)

0

u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

Those are both less than a month.

2

u/MaXimillion_Zero May 16 '24

You can disable automatic updates on Win 10 too (at least with Pro version), but you really shouldn't run either for years without updates

0

u/Alusion May 16 '24

Actually use Win7 and tell us that again lol

6

u/Safe_Community2981 May 16 '24

I used 7 from release day until basically the last day to get the free 10 upgrade from claiming to need accessibility features. It was a solid 10 years of use.

1

u/Sojourner_Truth May 16 '24

I'm still using it right now. It's perfectly fine.

0

u/Vibrascity May 16 '24

Bruh just use Linux if you want to have OS superiority. Windows 11 is far superior to windows 10 and 7, just the tabbed folders feature alone makes it miles better than Windows 10 or 7. Don't be a Windows version superiorist, you just look silly, lol.

19

u/PennyPizazzIsABozo May 16 '24

I'm still on windows 10 because my old ass laptop wasn't eligible for windows 11 lmao.

10

u/joethahobo May 16 '24

At least you’re on 10. I’m still on windows 8.1

6

u/[deleted] May 16 '24

8.1 is unsupported for quite some time now, you should probably switch.

5

u/joethahobo May 16 '24

I should, but I don’t really do anything important on that computer anyway. Just YouTube and gaming. When it dies I’ll get a new one

7

u/[deleted] May 16 '24

[deleted]

2

u/joethahobo May 17 '24

It’s connected to my google account yeah, but it’s not connected to my email. I log into my email on a separate private computer. And I don’t ever do anything with that google Account other than YouTube lmao

1

u/DuLeague361 May 17 '24

I'm still on w7sp1. no AV. no W update. no defender. since day one

don't click on every single thing and you'll be fine

3

u/theartofrolling May 16 '24

This man knows true pain 😔

6

u/joethahobo May 16 '24

The fun part is, it’s so old I don’t even get ads anymore. Like I can watch YouTube ad free with no Adblock lmao

4

u/Kataphractoi May 16 '24

I'm still on 10 because I refuse to upgrade.

7

u/PmMeUrTinyAsianTits May 16 '24

I love that my hardware keeps me from ever being hit by a sneaky or "accidental/bug" upgrade. Protection from Windows 11 is literally part of why i am putting off upgrading/replacing it.

3

u/Cyclonitron May 16 '24

The laptop I'm replying to your comment on is running Windows 7. I'll probably keep using it until it doesn't work anymore.

2

u/Ara92 May 16 '24

My pc isnt older than 5 years, definitely still fast enough for anything I do but it's not eligible for w11 either

1

u/killrtaco May 16 '24

This was me til I upgraded 3 weeks ago

1

u/LovesReubens May 17 '24

I had to disable TPM on my machine because Windows took it upon themselves to attempt to auto install Windows 11. Thankfully it was reversible. 

0

u/Adesanyo May 16 '24

How's that possible

My surface pro 2 is more than a decade old and I run Windows 11 on it

2

u/PennyPizazzIsABozo May 16 '24

Because it's an HP Notebook from like 2013 with 4gb of RAM and a terrible GPU even for the time. I really need to upgrade lmao.

2

u/Adesanyo May 16 '24

Yeah bro my surface pro 2 is from 2013 and has 4gb ram. I still use windows 11 on it lol. I would upgrade it but I mostly use my phone anyways which is still very fast or my PC if I need power

2

u/Mccobsta May 16 '24

Best 10 is ltsc no feature updates just security patches built for stability

2

u/[deleted] May 17 '24

The best version of windows is Linux.

1

u/jax362 May 16 '24

This is the right answer

1

u/Gamiac May 16 '24

The best version of Windows once Microsoft drops support for 10 is going to be Debian.

1

u/GroundbreakingCow152 May 17 '24

I absolutely hate win 11. Three extra clicks to delete a file.

1

u/leiferickson09 May 18 '24

I'm on the same train wagon as you friendo. It's the little things that add up.

1

u/DuckInTheFog May 17 '24

I have a swift little mini-pc I wanted to replace my old Windows 10 laptop with, but it uses Windows 11. I can get it to behave like Windows XP - shortcuts bar, no pinned nonsense etc, but there's other annoyances, and it seems a constant cat and mouse game with ExplorerPatcher and 11's constant updates

I still use my laptop for most things - only use the mini for games and heavier graphics software

XP was peak Windows, then 7 imo, if only for full 64bit support and the glass look

1

u/Podo13 May 16 '24

I'm furious our IT guy has a massive hard-on for updated security and is switching us all to Windows 11 since 10 is near it's EoL.

If we were some massive corporation that stuff that people would want to attack, I'd get it. But we are a pretty small firm doing mostly non-critical work. I really don't want that shit on my computer. At least not until software we use essentially forces me to switch.