Windows 10 [2014 - 2017]

[pjbliverpool]

I have been feeling tempted to turn Cortana on just so I can yell & swear at her on the off chance it may help convince Win10 that when I put the computer in Sleep mode with Allow Wake Timers set to Disable, this means something other than:

Sleep for about 10mins then wake back up for no obvious reason just in time to prevent me from falling asleep.​

Also that the subsequent rageful multi-click on the Sleep button means something other than:

Blank the screen & keep on doing whatever the shit I woke up for until about 2mins after my alarm goes off in the morning.
​

This shit is driving me fuckin nuts

I really shouldn't be having to resort to Power Off overnight in these modern days.
Also I'm not convinced that Hybrid Sleep is actually doing the Hibernate bit at all even though its on & worked perfectly fine with Win7

Yes I'm having the same problem, happens roughly once every 1-2 days. And mine also says no waketimers active.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Huh, haven't run into the touchscreen / pen+tablet issue just yet. Unfortunately I've discovered a new bug: my wife's Surface now has this random challenge where after a few days of not rebooting, the wireless + BT module (Marvel Avastar) goes completely to shit and the only way to fix it is a reboot.

The device still shows in device manager, but it loses all connectivity to everything. There's no newer drivers,and it seems like others are having the problem too. Bleh.

Thankfully, I haven't run into that issue on my Surface 3 yet. Windows 10 is annoying enough to use without that.

Hopefully in the next big update they'll provide an option for the old start menu. But I'm not going to hold my breath on that as it's probably highly unlikely. So many things are just so disappointing in Windows 10 from a touch and pen perspective.

Using pen input to input text into text fields (like the address bar in a browser) is incredibly bad now compared to Windows XP tablet edition, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1. They basically took a wonderful pen to text interface and completely ruined it with something that is incredibly dumbed down and almost non-functional, IMO. I find this especially insulting because that was my primary way to enter text on a tablet. I absolutely hate using onscreen keyboards.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

Well, SB, maybe it's time to just go back to 8.1 as I have. Maybe the inevitable 10.1 will suck less for your pen tapping needs, and everything else.

 

[hoom]

Well its some relief that others have same thing, at least reduces the likelihood of it being related to some Malware that had been lurking.
Or confirms it?!

 

[Grall]

Edge is really starting to annoy the shit out of me. It's so fucking bad, but I haven't met any other browser I really like either, other than - ironically - the now-abandoned IE. Yeah, it wasn't perfect, removing the separate search bar and fucking with the icon layout was pretty crap, but other than that it served me great. Chrome creeps me out by essentially being nothing but a Google angler-fish's bait for your personal data, and I've had nothing but bad experiences with mozilla's shit in the past (and what I've heard over the years haven't been very encouraging either), so I don't feel very keen on trying that again either. And the less said about opera the better I think.

Many of my problems with edge stem from it not actually being a proper windows program, but instead a god-cursed metro app. Its look and feel differs from real windows programs; the menus, the iconography, overall look and feel. It doesn't respect window positions; when monitor goes out of power saving, almost always the window's size (and sometimes also position) will have changed. When I exit youtube from fullscreen, edge has been squished up vertically to almost nothing at all. Today, I had to get up in the middle of the night because I can't sleep due to worry over having smashed my phone and nobody being able to contact me since I don't have a spare to resort to, and upon sitting down at my PC, I find that edge has - true to its name - has been shoved outside the right-hand edge of the screen for some unknown bizarre reason, making the tiny area at the right side (if you got enough tabs open) where you can actually move the window inaccessible.

Microsoft's incomprehensible reason to not have a title bar just continues to confound and annoy. WHY do they do this?! More annoyances:
*The home button doesn't send you to your "new tab" page (which I always set to blank page), but rather some fucking microsoft page full of bullshit I don't give a damn about. And this can't be changed either, like with so much else that is bad with edge.
*Doesn't support tab groups.
*Doesn't seem to remember your open tabs between restarts.
*No way to drag tabs between windows like in IE11.
*Uses different set of favorites compared to IE11 (wwwwtttttffffffff.......)
*Rendering glitches on certain sites, random flickering, layout errors, corruption and so on.

Like, I know edge is supposed to be a new browser and all (except its guts have been transplanted straight from IE), but that's not an excuse to launch today with a browser more primitive than what we had back in like, 2008 or even earlier. Expectations have evolved, you gotta roll with the times, and not screw stuff up and make things worse than they used to be for your own customers. Blah.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, SB, maybe it's time to just go back to 8.1 as I have. Maybe the inevitable 10.1 will suck less for your pen tapping needs, and everything else.

I'm very very very seriously considering it. But I'm trying to use it as much as possible to see, if, after some period of time, I get used to the way things are done in it such that it becomes less annoying and more "normal." Unforunately, sometimes it makes me want to smash my Surface 3 because of how crap it is compared to Windows 8.1

And don't even get me started on Edge. I love the speed and whatnot. But I hate that they are trying to be like Chrome when Chrome's UI, interface, and way of doing things is the last thing in the world I want. Not to mention how much the useability has regressed compared to IE 11. It has some nice new features, they don't come even remotely close to all the ways in which it is so much worse than IE 11 which itself was so much worse (UI and useability) than IE 9.

Every version of Windows up until now, I've seen many facets that were an obvious improvement over the previous version even if they regressed in some ways. Always 2 steps forwards, maybe 1 step backwards. Now Windows 10 is like 1 step forward, maybe 5 steps backwards. It's absolutely mind bogglingly bad. I honestly can't think of a worst Windows (ME was way better than this, IMO).

Regards,
SB

 

[hoom]

Edge is really starting to annoy the shit out of me. It's so fucking bad, but I haven't met any other browser I really like either, other than - ironically - the now-abandoned IE

I was gonna say 'well don't use it' then except for my earlier recommendation of using it for finding the website of & downloading your preferred browser, but then I read that last bit & well I just don't know what to say about that

So there were 3* Win10 updates today, hoping that one of them might enable sleep to work properly.
One of them turned off the GUI transparency quite annoyingly.

Also: has anyone actually tried to use the Win10 edition of Mail?
I mean, its less horrifically incredibly awful than the Win8 one but its still extraordinarily difficult to use for more than the most simple email tasks once you get someone else to set it up for you. (because most users will fail miserably to get it to work even with someone on the phone who knows how to work it)
My semi-official (at my small ISP) recommendation is still (same as for Win8/8.1): Go to google -> search for Windows Live Essentials & install Windows Live Mail instead.
Because fuck using that piece of shit.
Or at least make the customer call Microsoft for help with that PoS instead of us.

 

[orangpelupa]

dont forget to flood the windows feedback app with your feedback. although o think it's useless. better use Microsoft answer forum because MS employees sometime reply

 

[rcf]

IMHO, nowadays Windows Server can be a better desktop/workstation OS than regular Windows. It has less crap installed by default, so it requires less disk space and RAM, it's more secure by default, it doesn't spy on you and it's pretty good after "Desktop Experience" and "Media Foundation" are installed. There are few glitches but they can be fixed or bypassed.

 

[Malo]

It's also a LOT more expensive.

 

[hoom]

And people who install Server without knowing wtf they are doing cause a hell of a drain on Helpdesks.

I still 'fondly' remember the time period where lots of people used Server2000 instead of ME or early XP:
-Yeah that error means you haven't turned the Services you need on.
>Oh, what Services do I need?
-I don't know, don't use Server if you don't know.
>But its more secure & stuff...
-Sure but don't complain to me that your internet isn't working if you don't know what you're doing.
>But you're my ISP & my internet isn't working.
-...Because you haven't turned the Services you need on.
>But what Services do I need?
...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

This may or may not help some people with the computer waking itself up even if you have wake timers disabled.

In Win8.1, in the Action Center under Maintenance there's an option for Automatic Maintenance. By default this is set to automatically wake the computer at the scheduled maintenance time. This will ignore the global wake timer settings.

I finally tracked this one down as what's been waking my computer. There might be other things though. If you go into Task Scheduler, anything that has the option "Wake the computer to run this task" under conditions will ignore the global wake timer setting.

Which makes me wonder, what use is the global wake timer setting if just about everything ignores it?

Regards,
SB

 

[hoom]

in the Action Center under Maintenance there's an option for Automatic Maintenance. By default this is set to automatically wake the computer at the scheduled maintenance time. This will ignore the global wake timer settings.

Thanks, I'll check it out

 

[hoom]

Hmm.

So Action Center is now Security and Maintenance and I already have that option unticked.
Guess I'll try a toggle on & off.

 

[Grall]

Which makes me wonder, what use is the global wake timer setting if just about everything ignores it?

Indeed! Or at least, put the friggin' machine back to sleep again once the maintenance or whatever is complete!

 

[orangpelupa]

blooody hell. windows yelling need restart for stupid backgrounding update that I'm not aware (no wonder my internet gone to shit).

after reboot. fuck fuck fuck Microsoft. nothing changed! the title bar is still fucking grey/white, the audio bug is still there, edge still need two click to start typing, explorer still eat 100℅ 1 core to generate video thumbnail, music library still a mess, moved 'library' folder still wrongly linked (metro apps still use the old location on c), start menu still missing lots of software

what the fuck are they fixing?

the funny thing is, PREVIEW have proper sound and colored title bar

edit: even worse. now typing WINDOWS UPDATE only give bing search.....
edit: it works again after I search from cortana then back to start

 

[Grall]

what the fuck are they fixing?

Sweet fuckall by the looks of it! At least it was free, you're not allowed to bitch over the price of nothing...

 

[Albuquerque]

Indeed! Or at least, put the friggin' machine back to sleep again once the maintenance or whatever is complete!

This was actually an issue with the old backup process from Windows Home Server's little agent / client thing. Good news: it wakes up all your PC's and backs them up at night when you're not using them. Bad news: some of them never go back to sleep.

I ended up writing a tiny app that always ran and had a WBEM sink for the OS wake-from-sleep event. If the OS woke up, my little daemon would watch for five minutes to see if the WHS backup process began. If it did, it would recheck every five minutes until the process thread was no longer present, and then would wait an additional two minutes to see if the mouse position changed at all. If the process was gone and the mouse hadn't moved for two minutes, my little script would but the box back to sleep.

I ended up adding the mouse movement check because, on occasion, my wife might go pick up her laptop and start using it at the butt-crack of dawn after the laptop had already awoke and was in the middle of backing up. She'd go about her surfing or emailing, and then my little script would force the box to sleep Decided to put that little checker in there to make sure she wasn't back to using it again...

 

[Grall]

Sounds like a rather useful app. I've had issues in the past with sleep where my computers (various PCs over the years, and my Macbook also I might add) went to sleep and then woke up all by themselves again, never to go back to sleep after. I'd get up in the morning and the fans and harddrives and everything were happily whirring away... *sigh*

Of course, sleep has always been wonky and buggy under windows IME; often my PCs have either simply crashed outright on going to sleep, or not woken up again afterwards - or crashed trying to wake up - or else they've gone to sleep, slept for all of two seconds or so, then woken right back up again... *sigh again*

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Hmm.

So Action Center is now Security and Maintenance and I already have that option unticked.
Guess I'll try a toggle on & off.

Something else to try if you haven't already is the command...

powercfg /lastwake

If you wake after a night of sleep to find your computer on, you can run that in a command prompt to find out what event woke the computer up. Of course, tracking down that event and how to disable its wake up toggle can be time consuming.

Hopefully, I've finally tracked down the last rogue wake up timer on my system, but I'll have to give it another week or two to be fairly sure. And then hope I don't install something in the future that decides it needs to ignore the global wake-up timer setting.

Regards,
SB