Hacker News Reader

Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy with Windows 11 after tweaks to fix it. I certainly sympathesize with Windows 10 users who can't upgrade. But it seems to me Windows 10 users aren't getting the message: Microsoft just isn't that into you.

Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases? I'm guessing not (I don't have the figures) and Microsoft would rather you replace your 10 year old laptop that can't run Windows 11 or run Linux on it. They really don't care which, just as long as you go away and they don't have to support you anymore.

I'm not assosciated with Microsoft, just someone who has been using their products for 40 years. I am someone who can read in between the lines, and this is my take.

View on HN

The author just wants Microsoft to stop harassing him. He's not asking for handouts. He's not even asking to be allowed to bypass the hardware requirements for Windows 11. He just wants to stop getting nagged by Microsoft to upgrade.

He could buy new hardware and run Windows 11. But this pattern will only continue from Microsoft. The only way out is to run a non-Microsoft OS (assuming he can).

You're not getting what I'm saying. Hassling him is the point. They want him to use Windows 11 or go away. He's a security update expense because he's too cheap to upgrade his laptop or run Linux on it.

I don't think you understand the situation. He's not getting security updates. He's not an expense. Microsoft is incurring no costs by allowing him to continue using his existing operating system without updates.

Microsoft doesn't want him to go away. They want him to buy their new product.

The important point here is that data collection and telemetry is worthless and was never about improving the experience for you as a user. The coders behind the update nag had every opportunity to do a hardware check, but as I say, big data is never used to improve anything for end users.

How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time. Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone. Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update. Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell. I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking. At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous. To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.

From my experience, a computer running that slowly is out of memory and hitting the swap file constantly. The tweaks I did are in settings. I turned off widgets, OneDrive and Ads. Also there have been comprehensive scripts for cleaning Windows 11 shared here on Hacker News if you look for them.

It is not out of memory, with 32GB it is just slow even on a fresh start. It all goes to say that Microsoft willingly chose to use UI kits with 100x overhead compared to real functionality and rendering. It needs to die, when FOSS can make 12 year older hardware outshine 8x more expensive hardware in every single aspect, without any tweaking. It's the very definition of insanity.

Windhawk, O&O ShutUp10++ and a few other manual registry tweaks

There is no free support, e.g. call center agents for Windows 10 users. As for security vulnerabilities in Windows 10, Microsoft is going to continue fixing them until at least 2032 (probably longer with extended support) anyways, as Windows 10 1809 LTSC end-of-life is 2029 and Windows 10 21H2 IoT LTSC is supported until 2032.

Microsoft isn't that into you either. With Windows 11 you are not a customer, you and your data are the products.

Meh. I'm also a Linux destop user on a second machine. I'll completely switch when Windows 11 becomes a problem for me. Microsoft used to be a OS company, but is now a cloud company that offers Linux on it's cloud services.

> "Do you think Windows OS is a profit center...?"

The consumer editions are not all there is to Windows. Nearly every seat of Windows 11 Enterprise used in corporations is a paid license and there are a lot of corporations. Nearly every instance of Windows Server is a very expensive paid license and is required to run Active Directory, MS Exchange, SQL Server, etc.

I have no experience with Windows Server or Enterprise and don't know anyone who does. Forgive me for omitting "consumer" from my description. Yes, I mean consumer Windows.

> Do you think Windows OS is a profit center, especially after factoring in the cost of security fixes for older less secure releases?

They get money out of almost every computer sold all over the world. Are you saying that's not enough to keep a system that hasn't seen improvement in 2 decades and barely get bugfixes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com