Huh, running Windows update on my Win7 computer just installed "Upgrade to Windows 10" malware on my system. Bummer.

On the other hand, running Windows update on my Win8 computer took 5 hours for those 54 critical and 54 recommended updates (and about one hour to reboot). Behold the superior performance of Windows 8.

And I was about to say "Oh, I just found out that MS will provide a free version of Win10 for Raspberry Pi, so I might indeed get it" (probably not big news to most of you, but I only just read about it). However, if MS resorts to using malware to distribute Win10, I'll rather stay away from it.

XP [...] terrible drivers, horrible UI and a multitude of other things

Well I somehow agree on the UI insofar as it really took a while to get used to the plastic look. First impression was indeed "ugh, what's that". But it's something you could get accustomed pretty fast (and besides, you could turn it off any time if you didn't like it).

About drivers and other horrible stuff, I cannot really agree. At that time, I had worked with Win98 and 98SE, which was... well, OK for a "home" computer, except it could sometimes be a challenge to get stuff running if you bought some low-cost hardware (which sometimes didn't come with all that great drivers). Still, most stuff mostly worked kinda OK.

At work/uni, I was forced to work with NT4 in my office and with Win2k in the lab. NT4 was of the OMFGTHISSUXIMGONNAKILLYOU kind. Nothing worked. Nothing. Win2k was slightly better, but not a lot. Plug in an USB device and you get a bluescreen. Excuse me?

The "look" was kind of OK although in comparison to Mac, everything looked a bit unpolished, like something that someone who had no great deal of an idea about design and didn't have a lot of love for his product either had hacked together in his garage or in his mother's basement (like some Linux windows managers still look today).

Enter Windows XP. Looks like plastic (yuck) but otherwise seems to be a lot like NT4/2k, well... except... except everything works, and except things go faster with less CPU usage (which you can hear listening to the cooler). No crashes, no bluescreens. Plug something in, and 50% of the time it works right away, 50% you need a driver CD (not perfect, but well, OK). Eventually, you get 99% of everything you buy (or find in the lab, or even the trash can) to work.

The ugly plastic look wasn't that annoying after a month any more, and after a year or so I actually liked it. The RPC vulnerability that took down so many XP machines the minute you connected them to the internet was nasty, but it never affected me (using ZoneAlarm at that time, never saw a thing... but I had the pleasure of having to remove the malware from 20 or so computers owned by friends and family).

So, no real bad memories, nothing I'd need to forget (maybe your issues came from using WinXP 64, which admittedly had a bad reputation for drivers -- wanting support for 64bit was the main incentive for me to finally switch to Win7).

I never used Vista myself, but I had the pleasure of watching friends and family grow white hair over using it. Trivial things, like you start some program (say, Word), and the display driver just crashes. Or the display driver crashes, followed by the program. Or the whole machine goes down. And of course its... snappy... performance.

Now of course, with Win7, it's more like 90% of what you plug in works "instantly" without a driver CD, which is cool. Win8 is already a step back since it gets into your way a lot too often (and not just because of the Metro stuff).

Media Center is dead :\ http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-media-center-is-dead

My reaction -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=5eT0nZUROQ8#t=45

This is not terribly surprising. Xbox One is basically the replacement, so there isn't much of a reason to continue development on a separate 10foot experience when their existing Win10 UI is already designed to provide a good experience.

For Me, the XONE is not a replacement of a pice of software that enable my PC to what XONE + tv-tuner does. I'm not going to buy a console to replace a piece of software.
WMC was never updated in the last years, but I worked fine, it was simple and its tv-tuner and DVR capabilities were always better than any software I tried.
You might thing that DVR is not important any-more, there is netflix, there is the pay-tv... BUT, the entire world does not move around on netflix and pay-tv. In many countries netflix-like services are not available and pay-tv is not so common. You cannot abandon a software just because it is useless in USA or just because your stupid telemetry service told that. Microsoft should stop making decision only based on their telemetry solution.

I didn't say DVR wasn't important, and I don't have any access to hard data to say something is "useless" or not.

I was simply pointing out that Windows 10, out of the box, provides a "good enough" UI so that Media Center's original purpose has been replaced with the base OS. And if you want a "Media Center PC", that the XB1 is basically MS's version of that.

Nothing is preventing anyone from making DVR software that hooks into the modern UI and lets you use a remote control or Xbox controller or whatever to watch and record your TV. In fact, you can already use your existing hardware to do that.

Or, you know, just keep your Media Center PC and use that instead

But as a business, MS wasn't supporting Media Center anyway - so it makes sense that as soon as they had a replacement they would drop it.

WMC was crap anyway. XBMC/Kodi is way better =)

Personally i am looking forwards to windows 10.

I'm going to wait a few months for the dust to settle after the initial release, and then probably upgrade to it. I've never been an early adopter of Microsoft products simply because it's a good way to get burned. It's much more fun to let your friends be the early adopters, point and laugh as they get BSOD's, crashes, bad drivers and poorly thought out UI decisions (windows 8.0 anyone?)

Once it's settled down a bit after about 6 months of windows updates and hardware vendor driver fixes, it's generally OK to update to it.

So far, it's looking better than windows 8 which i avoided like Ebola. I'm not a big fan of the unified mobile/desktop UI push, and resist it in all it's forms (Unity desktop on Ubuntu, Windows 8, etc) but at least it looks like windows 10 is more in tune with what us users have asked for, and is scaling this back and/or making it part of a sensible desktop-centric layout for non-mobile hardware.

Time will tell if this remains the case as MS have a habit of mothballing entire subsystems that looked promising late on in the development process (the database oriented WinFS for example looked interesting back in vista... but was thrown away and might reappear as something else later).

But as a business, MS wasn't supporting Media Center anyway - so it makes sense that as soon as they had a replacement they would drop it.

The likely reason is that they couldn't be bothered to pay the abusive high license fees for the obnoxious bluray encryption stuff.

Which, of course, like all this DRM crap, only prevents legitimate paying customers from playing the movies for which they paid real money on their computer, legitimately, while the Chinese movie pirates just laugh at the stupidity of the movie industry.

With bluray becoming more and more common, this becomes more and more a problem for a supplier of a program-suite-that-plays-movies kind of thing. At least, if it's provided for free, or as an add-on or otherwise insignificant part of another software (like, an operating system).

Unluckily, most people will still buy blurays (I sure won't, after having had this exact problem before), so the customer abuse will go on. The movie (and music) industry hasn't learned during the last 35 years, so why would they learn now.

The likely reason is that they couldn't be bothered to pay the abusive high license fees for the obnoxious bluray encryption stuff.

As just about every news site reported when Windows 8 was released, that's the reason they dropped DVD playback, mpeg-2 playback (basically the same thing) and Dolby audio codecs.

Microsoft wrote they were paying $2 per Windows license for mpeg2 licensing alone, "slightly less" for Dolby audio, and that Blu Ray would be "an additional cost". In the comments to the article, the MS rep points out that "additional codec support" had costs as well, and they decided to just dump the whole set of them for financial reasons. The claim is that they were paying about $5 per Windows license for these codecs and that most computers were not using them.

The reasoning (which is pretty solid) is that by dropping support at the OS level and encouraging users to get their codec licenses on a retail basis, all of society will pay less for the operating system and also the codec licensing companies will lose the money funding their stranglehold on the tech.

Since they made the decision three years ago there has been an explosion of those free programs and codec packs, such as vlc media player, and an uptick in software like SlySoft's AnyDvd for those who actually watch physical discs rather than stream. Yes it means that the people who still use physical media rather than streamed video pay a higher cost individually, but it also means less money to the cartels and more money to individual businesses you choose to support with your wallet.

Since they made the decision three years ago there has been an explosion of those free programs and codec packs, such as vlc media player, and an uptick in software like SlySoft's AnyDvd for those who actually watch physical discs rather than stream.

Does that actually work? I'm not updating my software every 2 days, so I might just have a too-old-version. But to my knowledge, neither VLC nor any other free program can play bluray DVDs. The "best deal" that I'm aware of costs around 75 euros (which is kind of WTF just for watching something I already legitimately own).

This is of significance to me since for example when I'm in France, I like buying (and, obviously, watching) a DVD. All that great streaming shit doesn't work abroad because said cartels which you pay to stream the content will deny you service based on GeoIP. Now of course, buying a bluray DVD doesn't work either (although my laptop's drive can read it) purely due to deliberately denying the legitimate user (me), which is a major annoyance.

But yeah, as far as Microsoft is concerned, from a financial perspective, this is entirely understandable. The license fees are crazy (plus, they change keys every 3 weeks so Microsoft would have to update these continually in addition to truly important updates, too).

Yesterday I took the best crap I’ve ever taken. That doesn’t mean I didn’t flush it.

As long as they are making claims comparing themselves to themselves they can say whatever they want.
I’m not anti-Microsoft, I’m just not pro- …anything else. I hope they deliver better than they ever have, but I learned at 13 not to get my hopes up on any new operating systems.


L. Spiro

I learned at 13 not to get my hopes up on any new operating systems.

Just out of curiosity, what OS came out when you were 13 that crushed all your hopes and dreams? :)

None. I learned from experiences with school computers.

The lesson really came for me with Windows ME.

#1: Get.

#2: Doesn’t work.

#3: Reformat within a week.

#4: Upon the first time seeing the desktop after reformatting, I moved the AOL icon to the trash bin (literally the most obvious first-step move—one you would expect to be the most-tested feature of the operating system). Blue screen.

#5: Reformatted again in the same day.

L. Spiro