“I’m Watching you Anon-kun~!”

After upgrading via clean install on the boot drive and reconfiguring and installing some software, I’ve finally got a focus of what Windows 10 has to offer in the long run. And for the most part, flaws aside, it’s very good but nothing really to sing praises about.

The GUI - limited, vanilla, and just right.

One of the things that turned me off from ever moving on to Windows 8.x was the GUI. It was too simple and overly limited to a point where I figured productivity could be affected. In Windows 10 I have to be quite honest: I don’t like it and I have to end up highly depending on setting up the common applications I use regularly on taskbars on each monitor I have. If I had only one monitor to work with, I’d probably end up using the tile menu system at the start menu almost exclusively coupled with some heavy use of taskbar shortcuts.

In short, the problem is still there with the tile system and I have to find a way, as I go along, to make it work in one screen.

There was also another thing that I really didn’t enjoy: the new integerated Photo desktop app. It doesn’t have the ability for you to be sent precisely to the file system location of that image that you’re viewing like you did in Windows 7, Vista, and XP (although the very last example I can’t remember honestly). But it was a feature that was quite convenient and I’d like to see it back in a major patch. Otherwise I love it and really like the dirty quick-fix enhancements that allow for editing and making images look somewhat cooler or allow you to make a highlight easier and stylishly to then immediately share with others.

But later I found out that you can have this small little feature if you add the folders containing the images, or of which happens to be itself the location of where you’re likely to store images all the time in. And from there, Photos will then arrange things according to the meta-data that it can recognize from the images and then organize them automatically into albums and such for you to then view and use.

There’s not a lot of options outside of the very convenient image enhancement tools - which are great by the way - but don’t make up for the lack of controls for how to organize quickly and efficiently your images.

In the most recent updates to the operating system, the Photos app now crashes after 10 seconds of boot time, and at the moment, I’m trying to figure out what exact update caused that.

Telemetry and always-online desktop features: Not good.

Since day two of release, Windows 10 users have been skeptical of features like Telemetry, the data collection services that you can’t turn off at all unless you do a dirty registry trick that forces the service to turn off along with turning off two direct services built-in the operating system to not turn on automatically on start up.

This is something that many will consider an eventual flop and really anger those that really are under tight bandwidth cap constraints by their ISPs.

I understand that privacy, no thanks to some contemporaries that mindlessly jumped into social media prior, eventually legitimizing it’s importance to a point where now I use it only because it’s a means that’s proven itself to allow people to directly come into contact with one another, such as Twitter. And not mention that the base technologies that power the internet itself were all designed originally to keep tabs on what people do on the internet effortlessly begin with (it was originally an military-industrial complex telecommunication innovation for warfare purposes after all). But when it comes to this kind of data collection in the name of quality control by a company that has a history of not being too kind at times with its customer base, business partners, etc; you can’t help but feel annoyed at the very least, paranoid at most.

The Good things: it’s lightweight and fast.

Since 2009, I’ve enjoyed having a hardware configuration that is way more powerful than any of the two pre-built computers I’ve owned in the past (a first-generation iMac, and a single core AMD processor powered Hewlett-Packard Pavilion) but was dismayed when I learned that two of the current Windows operating systems of the time were resource hogs (Windows 7 really was a thoroughly bug fixed and edited Vista Service Pack 3 release). And I skipped Windows 8.x series because I was not impressed with the “mobile first” concept that was being forced upon desktop users which left me wanting to stick with Windows 7 longer.

But when I heard that Windows 8.x was lightweight compared to Windows 7, I started to get interested likely upgrading my operating system given that many reported that that it was one of the first modern Windows OS that worked really fast and didn’t have as much resource requirements as Vista or 7.

The Apple Factor Or is it the mobile?

And once I heard, and now see, that the whole de-emphasis of the desktop in terms of building an operating system, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a lot of Apple’s Mac OS X’s constant design focus and functionality doctrine which is summarized with the word “minimalism”. Let’s remember that roughly 10 years ago, Apple did the move to port their entire desktop operating system by scaling it to be able to fit their proprietary smartphone, the iPhone.

Meanwhile at the time, Microsoft in it’s usual manner or trying to go its own path, decided to build Vista to compete directly with Mac OS X with the technologies they had developed, and they all were met with criticism by it’s own regular users and commercial customers to the point of not wanting to upgrade from Windows XP as it was lightweight, ubiquitous, and did everything that could be asked of an operating system. The cost of development, licensing, hardware upgrade requirements all resulted with Vista failing to penetrate that market which resulted, in what could be argued, as a repackaging of Windows Vista in the form of Windows 7.

7 was a bit fast, lean, and clean in operation. But it still had that heavy stack that called for a top-heavy hardware configuration - one that my system was able to handle fortunately (not that anybody else’s computers couldn’t out there although there are some friends that did report to me of some configurations that didn’t work as well until expensive hardware upgrades were made).

But with Windows 8.x and now 10, hefty-hardware upgrades are not necessarily required (although I still plan to upgrade my CPU, motherboard, and RAM soon to of which I’ll make a post later on about).

And I believe this is due to the influence of Apple’s developmental direction went initially 10 years ago for mobile. And though Microsoft could be accused of being “late in the game”, one should always remember that they are not to be underestimated with their bidding of time. The mobile market is the incentive for following along similar after Apple’s operating system development. Take into account of the number of reports of failed attempts to penetrate the mobile market with smartphones and tablets - with slightly more positive receptions by consumers with the latter.

Final Verdict

The reason for me to upgarde my operating system from Windows 7 was simply because I was becoming unhappy with Windows 7’s sluggish performance with my hardware setup. It would require many instances of routine cleanups in order to have it run responsively. Many of my friends and acquaintances point to upgrading to solid state drive to boot off and run Windows 7 on to mitigate this problem dramatically. But in light of the fact that solid state drives are just starting to come out with 3D NAND, a solution of where you stack multiple wafers of NAND memory material vertically instead of horizontal expansion for capacity - as has been the trend up until recently; and given that Microsoft has put Windows 7 on an extended support program of 5 years till 2020, I decided to hold off on hardware upgrades and simply go with the operating system upgrade as it would be a cheaper option in the long run.

So for those among you that are using games to primarily game, you can hold off on the upgrade until 2016 or 2017 once Windows 10 has matured a good bit and, hopefully, game titles built with DirectX 12 will start appearing by then. Given that most games still use Direct X 9c and 11 (with a small few using DirectX 10), there is really little incentive to move on to Windows 10 in the meantime.

On the other hand, game runtime performance on average is reported anecdotally as being much better in Windows 10 than in Windows 7 in terms of start up, response time, and runtime performance. So even though DirectX 12 is not an incentive, support and performance overall should be enough to get PC gamers to get interested in upgrading.

The changes in the user interface are still something to get used to, but it’s not so bad as it was with the Windows 8.x series. And if you’re an audiophile that doesn’t really care much for installing third-party codecs, then you’ll be happy to know that FLAC audio file support is native to Windows 10 (if only they could also have Opus audio file support added later on).