I’ve been doing one post per day for a lil bit now, but I’ve come to the bottom of the shallow well of my random-ass thoughts. Figured I’d let y’all know what’s going on in my life. As I went to title the new post I saw the keyboard on my cell suggest I fill in a saved payment method. Can you imagine me posting that? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Not really; I got nothin’. So, why am I posting from a cellphone? My future husband’s new $1300 computer is a pile of shit and we’re trying to use the manufacturer’s warranty. I dropped it off with fedex saturday and it probably hasn’t been picked up quite yet because of the holiday. I expect when lenovo’s contractor in texass looks at the thing, they’ll call me to say it’ll cost seven hundred bucks.
I give my dude my computer because he needs it more than I do, but I can’t type for shit on my cell, so it’ll be a minute before I do any more ambitious writing, like finishing Centennial Hills.
Meanwhile I have to wonder why I have such dogshit luck buying computers over $1000 in value. Both times I’ve done that, they were fucked up from go – worse in some ways than computers that cost more like $300.
I think the last one saved money on the phat processor by using substandard parts in other ways – most crucially the wireless, which had connectivity issues with then-current router tech.
This one sat in a warehouse for three years before purchase and had random shit wrong with it so diverse it was probably a motherboard issue, like it got exposed to high heat in AZ and slightly melted, I dunno.
How in the fuck do you buy a low end gaming computer that is worth a shit? Has never happened for me. Swore off HP after that and another went bust, side-eyeing the fuck out of lenovo at this point.
I’m not the kind of person that can plunk down several k once a year just to have my shit work right. Any advice?
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I don’t know if this will be any help…
I used to be a bit of an apple fan-boy, and had that little ~12″ macbook, bought it around 2000ish, and it lasted me up untill 2008 or so. It was pretty reliable, durable, and I took it with me on several trips across the U.S. and to other countries and contitents.
Around 2008, I had reason to upgrade to something newer/faster, and got a decent deal on a refurbished macbook, which promptly died a year or two later – I think it was a problem with the graphics card, and there was a recall around that time, but because mine was refurbished, it wasn’t eligible. I also felt like the mac products were less reliable/durable than previous products, and they shifted more towards planned obsolescence, the iphone, etc. Nothing to really back that on, mostly just personal observations/anecdotes, n=1, all that…
So, I found a decent deal on a few year old pc laptop model, and tried running linux (I think it was linux mint), and it ran pretty well for a few years. I’m on my third computer running linux. Makes it slightly less compatible with some games and such, but like ~90% of what I do is browser-based, so it works okay, and I don’t have to directly deal with either Apple or Microsoft’s bullshit.
previously, I would just spend a while poking around on the various deal sites until I ran across a model with decent specs and reviews. Asus from ~2010 to 2016, and it still works okay, but is incredibly slow (~$400). Dell from ~2016 to ~2020, and it had issues with the GPU (I suspect bad paste, but never bothered to inspect), and bad keyboard – sometimes keys wouldn’t register, sometimes they’d multiple entry, which made it really difficult to log in when I had a long password. :/ (~$800), Clevo from ~2020 to current, still running pretty well, only problem is (I think?) a bad connection on the headphone port, but that’s on me, I end up dropping and pulling on the headphone cord a lot more than is good for it. I should probably consider getting a short extension, so that it disconnects instead of stressing the plug/port. And it does get pretty warm when running some of the games and such. (~$1600)
I also feel like Moore’s law is starting to plateau a bit, and we are getting to the point where computers have parts fail, before they become obsolete, and maybe they are failing more lately because of this? I dunno…
My current computer is doing pretty well, but it is a few years old, and I’d like to replace it with something newer, and keep it around as a “back up” computer, and I’m considering getting one from a company called Framework – they are making laptops with modular/repairable/replaceable components. It’s not really cheap, but I expect it to last longer since an owner can fairly easily order and install replacement parts.
My advice is never by a laptop. The need to jam all the bits into the tiny chassis means they have to sacrifice repair ability and cooling. And pool cooling kills integrated circuits, and you can’t swap the bits when they die
Sorry, probably not useful advice
Also yeah, they cut corners on one bit so they can use a fancier sounding bit elsewhere. PSUs are a common one: a quality PSU is useful, but if they save money there they can advertise a i7 chip instead. There’s the problem that people who know what they’re doing generally buy parts and assemble machines themselves
For the past 30+ years I’ve been buying components and assembling my own desktops. These days once every 4-5 years now, but when I was younger every 2-3 years. Back then I had more discretionary income (but hey, I’ve got a house!), and the changes were happening much faster.
The last two iterations, however, I didn’t do much assembling myself. I ordered the parts from Newegg and let them do the assembly. I build (or now, have built) a slightly better than average gaming rig and it generally plays all the games with a >100 FPS rate (many games get much, much higher). I used to get top-of-the-line video cards, but now I go for the ones which were recently replaced, 2nd tier, because they perform well enough and the price is much, much less.
Assuming you have all the peripherals you need (i.e. monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers, gamepad, steering wheel, etc.), you really don’t need all that much to build a box.
Case – I like a mid-tower. Most cases these days do not come with a place for a CDR/DVD drive or a floppy drive, so if you want to have those options, you’ll need to hunt. I currently use a USB external CDR, and the only reason I have that is to occasionally rip music.
Power Supply – Sized to the motherboard, videocard, and fan requirements. Note that not all power supplies fit all cases.
Motherboard – I’ve been getting ASUS boards for years now. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s I tried other MB makers and they were not as reliable. However, as it’s been 20 years since I’ve tried other companies, I can no longer say for certain that ASUS is the most reliable. I do know ASUS is not the cheapest.
Processor + Cooling – I’m a fan of AMD, but there is nothing wrong with Intel. The motherboard has to match the processor, and so does the cooling fan. You can often find all three sold as a single unit. I’m trying a water-cooled system currently and frankly, I don’t think I really need it. Unless you want to over-clock it’s probably a waste of money, and I don’t know of any reason to over-clock your processor these days. The water-cooling fan is cool though, and it has pretty color-changing LED lighting.
Video card – PCIe, and be certain your motherboard and case can fit it. I once had to take a hacksaw to a case because the video card didn’t fit (I wasn’t going to give up, damn-it!). Also be certain your power supply has enough oomph to drive it. These days, for a gaming rig, the video card is the most important part. If you are going to spend extra money on something, the video card is the place to do it. Just keep in mind the motherboard, case, and power supply requirements.
Motherboard Memory/RAM – It surprises me that this is still a separate component from the MB. However, the amount of memory people want on a MB can vary and there are still enthusiasts who worry about latency. These days I don’t think latency is a big deal, but back in the 1990’s, man, the discussions about RAM latency on USENET were intense. The smallest amount you would want these days is 16GB. My current box has 32GB.
SSD – These days a TB SSD hard drive is a good start. You can get the operating system pre-loaded on it. I have a number of SSD. One with a couple partitions so the OS resides someplace it is hard mistakenly alter those files or for malware to find. Most appear to be SATA these days, but it looks like PCIe drives are coming out. I’d stick with SATA for now, as the PCIe drives are expensive and need special cooling.
Operating System – Sorry Linux fans, I’ve been a Windows user since the DOS days. I played a bit with RedHat back in 1996, but the amount of work necessary to just connect my printer at that time turned me off. I know Linux is much, much, better now, but I just don’t have the interest. For all it’s faults I know Windows pretty well. I did use UNIX at work occasionally, and in school I used AppleBASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, and in the military I used IBM 980B Assembly Code. I never wanted to be a professional programmer, but over time you pick up a few things. I used to like to read code, but these days it’s beyond me.
Yeap, that would run a couple thousand dollars for all those parts. But you would end up with a box that should last at least 4-5 years, and even longer if you are willing to only update the parts which go out of date. Your case, power supply, and drives can be current for 10 years or more, while your processor, motherboard, and video card may become outdated sooner.
I wouldn’t worry about a sound card. These days the audio chipset on the motherboard is probably good enough for anything you want to do, unless you are a professional audio editor. Even then, the audio chipset on the MB’s today is better than what the professionals were using back in the 1990’s.
Now, if you are not into high-intensity gaming, I recently set up my wife with a Hyundai Mini PC. It’s an entirely solid-state, air-cooled, fan-less, system designed more for office work. She uses it with two monitors, keyboard and mouse. She surfs the web, does spreadsheets, watches and posts to Instagram (she quit Facebook a couple years ago), and plays some games on it. I haven’t seen how well it would do with a high frame rate FPS, but I don’t think it would keep up with it. But it worked so well that I purchased one to replace my parent’s PC when it died last year. Here is the Amazon link:
https://www.amazon.com/HYUNDAI-Celeron-Desktop-Computers-Computer/dp/B0BLRJX6N6/ref=sr_1_1?c=ts&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7_QlYOoyP6gKvjT37KcdrQJWA6NjvvqQn4kUIz4csnU.34kC_OlPMFbE5BBD6Qo2oIyroXvusDvtcFQbWCZXTIw&dib_tag=se&keywords=Mini%2BComputers&qid=1725457903&refinements=p_89%3AHYUNDAI&s=pc&sr=1-1&ts_id=13896591011&th=1
I wrote a long message with a lot of humorous asides and great advice based on my experiences over 30 years of building my own desktops from components.
And it was eaten! I refuse to re-write it! And it probably wasn’t that good anyway.
Short answer. I’ve been building gaming desktop boxes for the last 30+ years and there isn’t any reason why you can’t build a box which will last 4-5 years if you are willing to spend a couple grand on components. These days I generally go to Newegg and even let them do the assembly.
But if you are not playing high-end games, which require top-of-the-line video cards to keep the frame rate up, you might be able to get away with something like the Hyundai mini computer. Which is a cheap desktop, fanless, box really designed for office work. My wife uses one and does all her interneting, audio books, Instagram, Pandora, and even video games which do not require a high frame rate. You might want to look at one of those as a stopgap.
And, the long message eventually posted. I’m I an idiot, or what?
i think bc long comment had a link as well it got flagged as spam. i had to manually clear it, which could only happen at the soonest moment i checked my moderation biz, hence the delay.
sorry about not responding to comments at the moment; pretty busy with work and lack of sleep. but i appreciate the info and perspectives, thx!
No prob.
You are not required to wait on your commenters, it would be extremely silly to think so.
Get some sleep. Do what you need to keep the bills paid. We’ll still be here. We aren’t going anywhere. Chill.
flex@3:
My experience has been similar, but my loyalty to Windoze is wavering these days.
Up through Windoze 7, Microsoft seemed to at least somewhat respect the user, especially if a power user. Sure, they would do sleazy marketing things like the IE bundling that got them in a wee bit of legal hot water, and buy out competitors and outright plagiarize stuff and do dirty tricks like make early Windoze versions refuse to run on top of DR-DOS. But if you were a customer rather than a competitor the worst you got was the odd buggy update and their general lack of interest in fixing non-security bugs or in getting the security right the first time. As long as you stayed away from the dangerously insecure IE you were probably okay, and though the OS did push IE at you as its default it did also respect it if you changed your default browser to, say, Firefox.
At that point, there was a clear trichotomy of “ownership philosophy” depending on which hardware/OS stack you had.
On PC: you, the user, were in charge (though if you used Windoze rather than Linux, M$ would try to reach into your pocket now and again).
On Android devices, the app developer was in charge. If you wanted to, say, back up some savegame or block some ads, and the app developer didn’t want you to do that, the OS would block you, unless you jailbroke the device.
On Apple devices, the OS vendor was in charge. App developers and users alike had to bow to the almighty Jobs. It was his way or the highway.
That was how it was until the Dark Times; until Win10.
With Win10, Microsoft began very clearly trying to emulate Apple and take over control of your own PC from you. In particular, disabling or even deferring OS updates was made hugely difficult and hoop-jumpy, compared to how easy it was in W7 and earlier. It also ceased reliably respecting the default browser setting. On W7, if Firefox is configured to be the default browser, clicking anything that triggers a web page to open opened it in Firefox, whether in a third party app or in the OS or other M$-provided apps and components. On W10, most OS and M$-supplied stuff will ignore the default browser setting and launch Edge no matter what. Edge, needless to say, is their attempt to shake off the buggy-and-insecure stigma that had become indelibly attached to Internet Exploder, so obviously it is best avoided (in fact it’s now the worst of both worlds, with M$ proprietary cruft, bugs, and security holes and Google surveillance in one single miserable package). Oh, and W10 (and Edge) are chock full of M$’s own surveillance, much more than IE and W7 had and much harder to find it all and pull it all out by the roots.
W10 also tries to strongly push you to various paid services, such as OneDrive. It can be disabled — sort of. For some reason, even if it’s disabled, one of its components (“FileCoAuth”) will run from time to time. I don’t know why, or where it’s being launched from, or whether it’s invading my privacy (probably).
That brings me to another “it’s really Microsoft’s computer, we just let you use it sometimes” bit of fuckery: W10’s kudzu infestation of background tasks. Get ProcessExplorer and keep it running — even if you don’t care about nerdy under the hood stuff, a lot of malware checks for it and other common hacker/techie/security-researcher toolkit and aborts instead of infecting your machine if it detects it, so it’s a good part of defense-in-depth. (Another is installing a Russian keyboard definition, even if you leave it set to English. Just having the RUS alternative loaded and available in the menu is a red flag to all of Putin’s privateers’ malware: they won’t infect your machine for the same reason privateers of sixteenth-century Spain, concerned not to lose their letters of marque, wouldn’t attack and board ships flying a Spanish flag.)
ProcessExplorer will, especially if sorted by task start time, show you a never-ending ferment of background stuff launching, using CPU and memory, and then exiting, on W10. Much more than on W7 and earlier, and a lot of it is demonstrably unnecessary and in many cases harmful to performance. Some only launch if the machine is idle, but when you come back it will be sluggish for several minutes because all your foreground tasks got paged out to make room for them at some point. Others will launch at any time they find it convenient to, even if you’re sat there using the machine, and even if the machine is under stress and struggling to remain responsive. There’s no check for the system’s resource headroom to maybe not run now and wait until later with many of them. Among the most egregious culprits I’ve observed:
– There’s a combination of a BackgroundTaskHost and a RuntimeBroker for a “Microsoft Office Hub”. This pops up at least hourly on my machine, even though I never use Office and don’t even think I have it installed (just the “on-ramp thing” M$ bundles that will, if you try to use it, want to get your credit card number and then download it, and which has been a thing since at least Vista if not earlier). In any event, since I never use Office, these background tasks cannot be providing me with any value, yet they often elbow apps I’m using into pagefile right while I’m in the middle of using them. Suddenly they’re slow and balky and there’s a lot of disk drive noise, and lo and behold when I bring up ProcessExplorer, there’re those damnable two processes. Using PE to nuke ’em immediately relieves the strain … for a while. They’ll be back, usually within the hour.
– There were other Office associated tasks that would run from time to time but I found ways to disable those ones. One called OfficeClickToRun.exe, plus an updater.
– Some of these background tasks are connected to Windoze Update. On W10, Windoze Update is very aggressive and will even reboot your machine out from under you without asking. And most of its components are not modifiable by a normal user account or even the built in Administrator account. Yeah, that’s right, M$ half-assedly did the Apple thing and made the owner no longer root on their own box. Instead, the true root account is called “SYSTEM” and has a sidekick named “TrustedInstaller”. You might be familiar with the latter as a process on W7 involved in the update check and install tasks, but on W10 it gets a whole namesake user-account with higher privileges than the Administrator account. But M$ left a loophole in the form of DOS commands like “takeown” and “icacls” that can, if you learn how to use them, be used to root your W10 box and take control of the update components. Why would you want to, you ask? M$ provided a nice “Pause Updates” feature, eventually, didn’t they? Except a) it is arbitrarily restricted to a maximum of 35 days at a stretch because Nanny M$ Knows Best, and b) doesn’t work anyway. If you so much as look at the update screen it might start downloading and installing something, even if it’s supposed to be paused, and including even the so-called “optional” updates that are supposed to require manual interaction to trigger. Oh, and sometimes it just ignores it altogether and starts downloading stuff. One time I had a Youtube video start buffering and stuttering for no obvious reason, brought up Resource Monitor, and saw that some non-Firefox process was hogging all the bandwidth. It was a svchost running the BITS executable — the Background Intelligent Transfer Service W10 uses for downloading updates. Updates that were, at the time, allegedly paused. I killed the svchost in task manager and watched maybe five minutes more of the video before it began glitching again. Sure enough, BITS had relaunched and was sucking down bandwidth without authorization from me, the sysadmin, again. I disabled it in services.msc as well as terminating it this time, and it waited several whole hours after that before naughtily trying to download some update a third time. At that point I gave up on relying on the built in “pause updates” feature and used a hack to get gpedit.msc onto my box, finding the setting in it that would allegedly restore W7’s options for manual control of updates. It didn’t. Since then I’ve dug out much of the W10 update machinery’s roots, taking care that I can reverse the changes when I decide that it is time to install updates. This has entailed disabling BITS, Microsoft Store Installer Service, Microsoft Update Service, Update Orchestrator Service, and, of course, Windoze Update Service, in services.msc; disabling and in one instance outright deleting a lot of stuff in Task Scheduler; and running a script I made by combining two others that takes the “execute” permission of UoSomethingorother.exe even for TrustedInstaller (stops Windoze Update Medic Service from firing up and undoing all my hard work) as well as blocking the Windows Update Service from un-disabling itself in services.msc. I can, in a few minutes, undo or redo all of this to do, then defang, updates on my own timetable.
It really should not require that much work. And it’s still imperfect. I don’t see WU itself, its Medic Service, or BITS running unexpectedly any more, but I do sometimes see DoSvc, “Delivery Optimization”, with no idea what is launching it or why. And that, too, is a Windoze Update component. And of course it comes with a bunch of other resource-hog background tasks that have a bad habit of popping back up again after a few minutes if I catch them slowing down my machine and taskkill them.
Another annoying background task is HxTsr. It says it’s a part of Outlook in its description. I don’t use Outlook. I wouldn’t touch Outlook with a ten-foot pole. I remember Outlook back in the WinXP days — it made using IE seem hygienic by comparison. I never used it but was frequently reminded of its existence because every two out of three warnings about computer security back then were “Beware xyz — this spam will infect you even just from seeing it in the Outlook preview pane! Right click delete it without ever left clicking on it or better yet use some other email client.” And now, on W10, one of its components insists on running in the background from time to time, even though I have not set up Outlook with any email account credentials or other configuration (so it has no email accounts to check for new mail periodically in the background), never run Outlook, and might not even have it installed. I don’t know if it’s exposing me to malware (or privacy) risks, but I do know it is a waste of my time, because it very often launches right after I resume using the machine after it has been idle for a while, and it causes significant slow downs and disk thrashing when it does. I don’t know where it comes from (have three times looked for anything relevant in Task Scheduler, without success, in particular) or how to disable it. I do know that it is probably providing no benefit to a user who never uses, nor plans to use, Outlook.
And M$’s lack of consideration for system owners is on full display also in their lack of much documentation on any of this stuff. Googling things like “how to disable HxTsr” or “MicrosoftOfficeHub task” turns up little to nothing, beyond the mere facts of their existence and that they are not, officially at least, actual malware, but “legitimate Windoze tasks”. There’s no help at all given to users who want to strip out some of the optional cruft and optimize their machine for the things they do use. Again, Nanny M$ Knows Best seems to be the attitude here.
And it is because of that attitude that I am once again giving serious thought to this being my last Windoze box. I don’t know how I’ll run some of the software I use on Linux, but I do know that I don’t want to even contemplate the nightmare that trying to tame W11 will undoubtedly be, given how I still haven’t fully tamed W10, and yet I had had W7 housebroken inside of a week back when that was new …
Fact is, Linux is probably the only OS you can actually trust nowadays. Windoze will put M$’s interests above yours now, quite clearly, no longer just in its default settings but in a circumvention-resistant, bondage-and-discipline kind of way. Android will put app developers’ interests above yours, and iOS and MacOS will put Apple’s. And none of them show any respect for any notion of owner override anymore. For legacy reasons, Windoze remains full of loopholes the tech savvy can exploit to, with time and a lot of effort, still defang the worst of it, but the writing is on the wall. Windoze now needs to be jailbroken almost like a phone OS, and it will undoubtedly get harder and harder to do so with every further version number or feature update release.
Time to face it: sooner or later, Windoze must go.
As to Windows vs Linux, I use Windows at work, and am constantly frustrated and apalled at the update process.
With my home computer, I run some auto update periodically, it will download and install things in the background when I tell it too, and once in a while will notify me that I need to restart my computer to complete the update. I can keep playing games and doing internet stuff without interruption
With my work computer, I frequently find it stuck in an update loop where it is literally unusable for me, for anything while it downloads/installs updates, and then needs to be manually restarted, and then sometimes repeats the process. At a previous job, I was once tasked with getting a computer that had been offline for a few years fully updated, and that process literally took more than a week, of constantly approving manual restarts. It was ridiculous.
And, with Linux (and I believe MacOS, but it’s been a while…) there is some (minor) resistance to malware and such through having to log in and enter a password for significant changes/installations to happen, but this is probably not much of an issue with most people who are even slightly internet savvy.
I think Linux has gotten significantly more compatible/easier/usable-out-of-the-box in recent years. I think I first used Linux around 2006 or so, when that was what was the OS in a computer student organization that offered free printing on campus. It wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was a pretty bare-bones, minimalist, and not very user-friendly OS on their computers (I have no idea what distro). A few years later, I tried a few distros on my new computer, and went with Linux Mint, since that worked “out-of-the-box” with my computer’s hardware. More recently switched to PopOS, because it worked “out-of-the-box” with my current computer, but functionally, it’s not terribly different. I feel like once you get through the struggles of installation, set-up, and configuration and such, day-to-day use isn’t terribly different twixt Windows, Mac, and Linux. They are all primarily GUIs, and use many of the same menus and keyboard shortcuts. Aside from that bit about the windows update nightmare, fuckyou windows…
Oh, I neglected to mention the Windoze PushToInstall Service, which also has to be disabled or it will un-disable and launch Windoze Update from time to time; and the fact that, as of a few weeks ago (and probably the last batch of updates I installed, July’s), the clutter of mostly-disused background tasks now often includes a whole passel of “msedgewebview2.exe” processes. Even though I never use Edge. So now M$’s dangerously insecure browser is running as a headless background task sometimes, in multiple instances, unbidden, and potentially accessing the internet and creating a possible vector for infection, without any obvious way to plug this vulnerability short of finding and deleting (or de-execute-permissioning with icacls) the executable or finding what needle in the Task Scheduler haystack (or even larger haystack of that, services, and startup items) is launching it.
Lovely.
It’s not even just that W10 tries to steal control from the machine’s owner, or that its security-endangering bundlings are multiplying (with both Outlook and Edge components now running autonomously, as well as macrovirus-prone Office, whether you actually use those apps or not). The plain old bugs are getting worse and harder to fix as well. Just two examples:
First, the photo viewer. In W7 and earlier, if you double clicked an image you got a photo viewer viewing the image. You could navigate to other images in the same folder with the arrow keys, and maybe do a few basic things, including delete or simple modifications like rotating in 90 degree increments or tagging. In the ProcessExplorer it would show up as a single “windowsphotos.exe” process or similarly, using a memory amount commensurate with “a relatively lightweight executable plus an image of the size of the one you’d opened” and little CPU, disappearing promptly when closed.
W10 has a MicrosoftPhotos.exe, which mysteriously renamed itself to PhotosApp.exe in between authorized runs of Windoze Update (indicating that on at least one of the unauthorized runs it succeeded in making changes to my system before I caught and killed it, though not in forcing an unwanted reboot at least). This doesn’t simply run by itself, but brings along a PhotosService and a BackgroundTaskHost, or a RuntimeBroker, or some similar thing when it is launched. And, more often than not, FileCoAuth, aka The OneDrive Component That Would Not Die. Combined these tend to take up several hundred megabytes of Private Bytes, even if I’ve opened a 16×16 1.3Kb JPEG file in a folder by itself. It is noticeably slow to open and likes to spin for a bit before displaying the actual image. Navigation sometimes gets balky or outright seizes up. The toolbar at the top migrated to the bottom one day, perhaps from some inadvertent drag or click, and I’ve yet to figure out how to undo this. The thing will often outright fail to launch, citing “the app failed to start in the required time” or “filesystem error #whatever”, the latter despite SMART and chkdsk giving the drive(s) involved a clean bill of health (both where the app resides and where the photo being viewed resides, if separate). Once in a while it gets into a snit and even dozens of close-and-relaunches won’t get it to operate properly. The first time this happened I had to hunt down where and uninstall and reinstall it, which for some reason is not done via the traditional “add/remove components” control panel, but via something called “Microsoft Store” instead. That fixed it. Then it happened again a month or so later and this time even reinstalling it didn’t work. Nor did sfc and dism both being used to perform system repairs. It didn’t work again until the next time I enabled and ran Windoze Update.
There’s a famous saying: The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
Clearly, with the W10 photo viewer, M$ overthought the plumbing. Let’s see. It a) uses a bunch of processes under the hood and not just one, for a very simple function that never needed this before; b) appears to have dependencies that can fail even after the app itself is, nominally, up and running (has a window displayed, is visible in task manager) (probably related to a); c) is significantly more resource hungry, both memory and time, when performing the same task as W7’s did much faster; d) uses a separate, special install method from normal Windoze components that didn’t even exist in W7; and e) it can either randomly scrog operating system components beyond the ability of dism and sfc to fix, or else it persists some state where x) the sysadmin can’t easily find it, y) it can sometimes survive an uninstall and reinstall of the app, and z) that state can become corrupted, whereupon it won’t reset it to default (its function doesn’t need to persist any data beyond preferences like window size/position, toolbar position (whose unintentional and unwanted change, by the way, survived both reinstalls and that Windoze Update), and perhaps a cache) but will just refuse to run until it’s fixed by outside intervention.
Oh, and did I mention that when the second incident occurred and a reinstall via the Windoze Store didn’t fix it, I found it unnecessarily difficult to perform a clean reinstall? It wasn’t easy to even find the PhotosApp.exe file; when I did, it was not in Program Files or Program Files (x86) as expected but instead in another directory, one that can’t be viewed even as Administrator without doing a takeown on it first — TrustedInstaller strikes again; and even after a recursive takeown, it isn’t straightforward to delete the PhotosApp subdirectories — of which there were five, not just one. And which did still exist and contain files after a supposed uninstall. I expected the corruption preventing it from working was in one of those persisting files, and jumped through inordinate hoops to, eventually, delete them, after which the Windoze Store application would not function until I also used icacls to undo the takeown of that directory mentioned earlier. After that, I reinstalled PhotosApp — clean, without a trace of it apparently remaining in my system from before — AND IT STILL DIDN’T FUCKING WORK! So it was persisting state somewhere outside where it kept its binaries, AND outside Program Data, AND outside my user directory, etc., and had corrupted that, and had no inbuilt mechanism to fix said corruption, and the Windoze Store installer was 50/50 on being able to fix said corruption with a reinstall, and the only sure way to fix the corruption (if even that) is to let Windoze Update off the leash (dism and sfc being insufficient) and, of course, that necessitates a goddamn reboot, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s capable of needing a repair install of the OS sometimes after that experience …
Oh, and in case anyone is wondering what advantage PhotosApp has over windowsphotos, it’s this: PhotosApp supports webp, and will animate animated gifs rather than only showing their first frames.
That’s it, so far as I have discovered.
I somehow doubt this added functionality necessitated not only enormously increased bloat, but what appears to have been a ground-up redesign that self-evidently caused far more problems than it solved, likely because windowsphotos had had a decade or so to have all its bugs hammered out, and then they threw all that out and started over from scratch for no apparent reason.
A second instance involves the Start Menu. And it’s also an overthought-the-plumbing case.
In W7 and earlier, the Start Menu is simple. There is a corresponding folder on the hard drive. If you put shortcuts in it, they show up in the Start Menu. If you remove them, they disappear from the Start Menu. If the Start Menu’s own built-in interface for removing, arranging, etc. things is flaking on you for any reason, you can simply do the work in that folder using File Explorer.
Not so in W10, as I discovered when Irfanview, installed to deal with certain image-related tasks that windowsphotos (and later PhotosApp) didn’t do but that didn’t warrant something as heavyweight and slow-to-launch as Gimp or Photoshop, decided to not launch one day.
Like many Windoze components that predate W10, the Start Menu seems to have had a complete under-the-hood overhaul and for the worse; like many, that overhaul results in slow and balky startup much of the time, and much added bloat visible in ProcessExplorer (like, instead of just being part of Explorer, there’s a separate StartMenuExperienceHost.exe…) This is a minor nuisance with less often accessed things. I can live with Calculator and Control Panel starting up as just a solid blue window with an icon in the middle (a calculator or a gear, respectively) and no UI functionality, and having to wait ten seconds for this to change to the normal UI for Calculator and Control Panel, respectively. It seems pointless to have added a crude splash screen to each of these apps, but I guess I can live with it. But the Start Menu is accessed frequently. It’s very irritating that, instead of just springing up whenever called upon like in every prior Windoze version since W95, it either does nothing or comes up as a blank charcoal-grey rectangle much of the time, and you need to either wait or hammer on the Start button to get an actual functioning menu. It’s also far more sensitive to system load than on older Windozes: instead of being a bit sluggish to navigate, it gets iffy if you can even get it to display, and clicking things on it can have … bizarre side effects. Like the Irfanview app just disappearing. I’d clicked it; the system seemed to be under some extra stress, perhaps from our old friend HxTsr, or maybe MicrosoftOfficeHub, or something (this was before the heyday of msedgewebview2.exe). It didn’t launch and the menu didn’t close — no indication the click had even registered, let alone that the OS was launching Irfanview but this hadn’t gotten around to displaying its window yet. I clicked again, and poof. Gone. The pinned icon in the right panel was no longer there. Annoyed, I went trawling through the menus in the left panel to find it and drag another pinned copy there, the same way I had put it there originally, except …
Nothing. The uninstaller and help files and stuff were all in there still, but not the executable itself. It was just gone.
So, I did the obvious thing: found the corresponding folder structure, noted the missing Irfanview.exe shortcut there, tracked down the exe itself under Program Files, and right-dragged “create shortcut here” a new shortcut for the Start Menu. Then I clicked open my Start Menu again, navigated to the Irfanview submenu, and …
It still wasn’t there!
I eventually was able to add it to the Start Menu separately (not in its own menu-grouping) by dragging and dropping the executable onto the Start Menu, and thence to recreate the right-pane pinned shortcut, but this was just bizarre. Somehow, the Start Menu no longer automatically picks up shortcuts that are added to the corresponding folder in W10. Not only that, restarting StartMenuExperienceHost, restarting Explorer.exe, and even rebooting the operating system does not suffice to make it see changes there. I still do not know what does, though something must, as installers are as able to add what they’ve installed to the Start Menu as they could under W7 and earlier, even without having been specifically coded for W10. But it no longer seems to be possible for an end-user to manually do so. And, of course, sigh, that’s true even as Administrator.
They broke one of the most basic features, indeed for a long time a major selling point, of their OS. Not only can the Start Menu occasionally fumble one of its items (and it’s happened two or three times now, always when the system was lagging, suggesting it’s probably a race condition bug), but there is no easy way to manually fix it. To properly fix it I’d likely have to uninstall and reinstall Irfanview. All for a Start Menu shortcut, despite the app itself still working perfectly normally.
I shudder to think how much worse W11 will be for this sort of thing. Overwrought, overthought plumbing has bloated up and re-buggified W10 to where it’s scarcely better than WinXP; and that’s leaving aside the more ominous matter of the developing power struggle between M$ and sysadmins over who actually owns the latter’s computers. Between the Orwellianly-named TrustedInstaller having basically morphed into a vendor-supplied rootkit and the gratuitous buggy bottom-up rewrites that are far more bloated and less reliable than their W7 predecessors, without anywhere near enough new and useful features to justify those costs, W10 is simply bad, and W11 is undoubtedly far worse. Windoze peaked at W7. The only way up from that peak … is to blow it away and install Linux.
One thing that W10 doesn’t seem to have overhauled is Notepad. It starts up and functions as snappily as it ever did, and there’s no new “blank blue window with a notepad icon” splash screen to wait through either. PE shows a single plain notepad.exe for each running instance, and no significant increase in process size compared to its W7 predecessor.
I am very thankful for this, since I use it far more often than either Calculator or Control Panel (which did get the bloat-overhaul treatment).
I bet W11 fucks up Notepad too.
>>I bet W11 fucks up Notepad too.
They did, lol. Seems like they’re trying to copy notepad++ with each instance of notepad opening up a new tab in the same window, and ‘saving’ the file if you close notepad without manually saving. I don’t like opening a fresh notepad to see a bunch of scrawled crap I thought I’d already released into the sea.
Oh, did I mention that M$ even managed to fuck up alt-tab??? Yep, the reliable old task switcher ain’t so reliable anymore. It is, like so many things in W10, more sensitive to system load than its W7 counterpart — more likely to be sluggish or unresponsive, etc.; and, it grew a bug. Just one, but a really annoying one: sometimes, a quick alt-tab switches to the wrong window.
For some reason, this is especially common when trying to use Thunderbird. The typical scenario is, I’m using, say, the browser, and in a fairly interruptible state, when ding! New mail chime. I click the taskbar icon for TB to switch to it, and it comes up but non-responsive for some reason (which is far, far more common itself under W10 than W7 — even third-party apps have poorer performance under this execrable so-called “operating system”). So, I hit alt-tab to go quickly back to Firefox and resume reading, intending to try TB again after a few minutes to see if it’s feeling more cooperative.
And instead of Firefox coming back up, it switches to Notepad instead. Or some random Explorer window. Or something.
On W7, if you had Firefox up, switched to Thunderbird, and then hit alt-tab, it would go back to Firefox every single time, without fail.
On W10, it will randomly sometimes go to the third-most-recently accessed top-level window, rather than always, 100% of the time, to the second-most-recently accessed.
And it especially likes to do this with Mozilla apps in the mix — apps that offer rivals to M$’s flagship browser and email products, Edge and Outlook, as it just so happens.
Both of which Mozilla rivals also seem especially to exhibit degraded performance on W10 compared to on W7.
Hmm …
I have had the alt-tab fuckup happen with other apps, though, including purely M$ ones (e.g. juggling three Explorer windows and it up and switches to the third-most-recently-foregrounded one). Every single time it’s not switched to the window I was expecting, it has invariably been the case that it switched to the one in the #3 spot rather than the one in the #2 spot in terms of how-recently-has-this-window-been-frontmost. It’s very narrowly specific in this way, but it otherwise seems to strike essentially at random, except … it does seem to happen more often the more the system feels like it’s under load. So likely yet another race condition bug. The load-dependent likelihood and the nondeterministic behavior, combined, point quite strongly toward that. It’s even possible in this instance to make an educated guess as to what the race condition is: one thread is still updating the “order windows have been accessed in” data structure to pull the new #1 up to the top of the stack and push the old #1 down to 2, and the old 2 to 3, at the same time another, triggered by the user’s alt-tab input, is querying who’s currently in the #2 slot, and it gets the one about to be bumped down to 3 before it has been, all because some gormless twit at M$ couldn’t be arsed to wrap accesses to this shared data structure in a monitor, and some other gormless twit made everything so goddamn bloated and slow that it can take longer for the OS to update this data structure after the user foregrounds a window than it takes for the user to input several keystrokes and attempt to foreground another one. The latter being a minimum of several seconds, so likely 10-20 billion instruction cycles, aka a silicon eternity.
There is no excuse for this.
(I wonder what happens if I close the penultimate open window on a W10 box, while it’s under a heavy strain, and immediately hit alt-tab? Will the alt-tabbing process try to access a #2 slot that’s in the process of being deleted? Will that just crash Explorer, or dwm.exe, or something like that or are we talking BSOD here? Can this be automated and weaponized into a latter-day WinNuke? Race conditions are, and should be treated as, security holes, especially in core operating system functionality. The potential for a DoS, if not worse, is invariably present.)
bekenstein – that’s a helluva lotta writing, bud. value added for my post, as i’ve been mentioning a lot lately. i’ll take it.
joe at 12 – they DID fuck up notepad? i’m dyin here.