Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I got sick of Microsoft pelting me with emails so I downloaded the free upgrade to Windows 10. Naturally, the software developers couldn’t resist “helping” and “improving” by moving things around.
Control Panel still exists, but it’s not called that. It’s in “Settings” and you get there by left-clicking the “Windows” icon in the lower left (formerly the “Start Button”) to bring up the “Life at a Glance” panel of icons that includes the “Cog” which looks like a gear wheel to me. Left-click that to get to another page of groupings and click around those icons until you find the Control Panel feature that you wanted in the first place.
Not an improvement, in my opinion. They’ve made it harder to find, probably intentionally, so that mere users don’t change the default settings approved by the god-like geniuses who set up the new user interface. After all, I don’t own the software, I merely have a license to use it, when it feels like working, which is not all the time.
“Task Manager” doesn’t show up at all and I can’t figure out why not. What – the developers think the apps will never hang up? I’ll never need to crash a program to get out of it? Nonsense, it’s Windows, of course they’ll hang and of course I’ll need to crash them. Already have. But to get that power, you must to right-click the black stripe at the bottom of the screen (the “Task Bar”) to bring up an alternate context menu in which Task Manager is one choice. Nobody tells you that, it’s not in the help menu, I had to find it on YouTube. Windows REALLY doesn’t want the mere operator messing around with useful stuff like how to get the computer working again.
I know, I could spend the money on Apple which would work first time, every time, but I hate how fascist they are (Ve haf made ze settings unt you vill use zem unt you vill like zem and you vill not change zem, verstehen sie?). Or I could learn to use Ubuntu or Red Hat or Linux and spend the rest of my life fighting with incompatible software workarounds. Or buy a Chromebook and give my every thought to the Democrats (technically the federal government bureaucracy, but that’s pretty much the same thing nowadays).
I just want it to work. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.
Joe Doakes
I work in “User Experience Design” for my day job – it’s a fancy term for “making software suck less for real people”. I read stories like this, and hear “permanent job security”.
You can also access the task manager with a “CTL-ALT-DELETE”
Microsoft stops asking you to take Windows 10 after a while. It jammed Windows 10 down my throat back in March.
Rikktor – exactly, like it’s a secret hidden treasure. Reminds me of my kids telling me “Jump right here and bump the box with your head so you get a coin.” What the . . .?
It is so useful (not just for killing processes, but also checking for for memory leakage and resource usage) that it should be one of those “always easily accessible” items. I configure it to be so in Windows, but with that info being a top/ps/free command away in CLI-land, I don’t typically in Linux.
Our Microsofties at work seem oblivious to the havoc caused for casual business users by making gratuitous changes to the GUI. They think it’s cool, and it is, but not everyone wants to learn the current “cool new way to do the same old stuff”.
Now get off my lawn. *shakes cane*
with task manager running click on “More Details” then click on “performance”.
Windows 10 is an interesting combination of OS and keylogger, if you don’t want Win 10 constantly calling home with every keystroke/mouse click check out (or simply install & run) Spybot Anti-Beacon software:
https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
it will also free up your bandwidth for your (rather than Microsoft’s) use
Every Windows update I’ve had since 95 has been a pain. Things I use every day get moved…..I guess they’d tell me it’s a feature, not a bug, or something like that.
Oh, ick. I downloaded Windows 10 a year ago. It’s like navigating Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis. Ctl + Alt + Delete is the best option.
My first computer ran MS DOS. I remeber the first time I ran a Windows computer in college. It was Windows 3.1 or something. My computer had 5.25 floppy drives and the college computer used 3.5 floppy drives. I thought that was the only part that needed to be compatible. I went out to buy a new computer. I told the sales guy that I just wanted to make sure that the computer didn’t have all of those screens that could be popped up everywhere. He said, you mean windows? Then, I learned that I needed the awful Windows in order to make my computer compatible with the work I did at college. For the longest time, however, I continued to use DOS commands for personal work. I don’t think people liked MS DOS much, either, but I kind of miss it.
Our Microsofties at work seem oblivious to the havoc caused for casual business users by making gratuitous changes to the GUI. They think it’s cool, and it is, but not everyone wants to learn the current “cool new way to do the same old stuff”.
User experience is all about learned behavior patterns. A designer uproots those patterns at their own peril.
But as marketing becomes a bigger and bigger part of technology, more User Experience (UX) design groups are being taken over by people from the “agency” side – “creatives” for whom making a zingy impression is more important than a solid, reassuring experience that uses users’ learned behavior to their advantage.
” taken over by people from the “agency” side – “creatives” for whom making a zingy impression is more important”
one team I worked on for a couple years had a member who was profoundly color-blind. Once we found this out we made him an integral part of the QA acceptance process. He was a line item called the ADA Test. If he couldn’t see it (whatever the clever effect was), it didn’t make it to the customer. The “creative” types whinged until we said “sure you just need to indemnify us against any ADA lawsuits”. We also reiterated monthly (due to astonishingly short memories) that “if it annoys, its eschewed and the software will eventually fail to meet the customer’s needs”
part of the problem with bandwidth usage in Win 10 is the QOS Packet Scheduler defaults the “Limit Reservable Bandwidth” setting to 80% which means MS has 80% of you bandwidth reserved to its needs. Prior versions of Windows defaulted to a 20% reserve. You can, depending upon your version of Win 10, use gpedit.msc to modify this setting yourself.
JD, thoust protest too much. Control Panel is accessible via exactly as many clicks as in all previous versions. Just click on the RIGHT mouse button on the Start button on the left button corner and viola, your ENTIRE old win task directory structure is there, including Control Panel. Microsoft actually LISTENED when users complained and reinstated it. Behaviour much unlike that of fascist Apple developers. And Alt-Ctrl-Del option to access Task Manager has been around since forever. Right clicking on your computer icon on the desktop will let you manage just about every aspect of how your computer behaves. And don’t get me started on the power of regedit. Try that with iOS!
You SnApple fanbots amuse me. You are just like Strumpet supporters – facts and reality do not exist for you in a computer world. Apple has the most stable and secure OS? Really? Their unbreakable last gen iPhone they went to court to prevent FBI from getting backdoored, the one they claimed (and I still content maliciously and fraudulently just to protect their “unbreakable” image, damn the consequence) they themselves could not get into was cracked open like a can on beans once FBI decided they needed help Apple would not provide.
I am sure you are familiar with RTFM term. Every time Win gets an upgrade it comes with a introductory tutorial turned on, which I am willing to bet you turned off at the earliest convenience. And then you complain somebody moved the cheese.
Am I a win fan boy? No. It is not perfect and is getting worse because M$ is trying to do things more like iOS, which is by far a more complicated, intrusive and less user-friendly system. It amazes me how you take the time to complain about how M$ got more intrusive, yet you are willing to live with Apple and Google following your every move. Oh, and last but not least, it is telling that once SnApple fanboys shell out 2 to 3 times more for their underpowered SnApple eye candy than for a Windows computer,the first thing they do is install Parallels so they can run Windows software. Not smart, much like Strumpet supporters.
JPA, W10 is an improvement over W8. But that’s like saying that being shot is an improvement over being drawn and quartered alive. Neither is particularly pleasant. But in general, the design of Windows has always been bad, but the idea of trying to extend a phone UI to a computer desktop was a disaster.
That said, I use Windows for playing games, Linux for general use. At work I still use Windows, but mainly as a light client to access our Linux compute farms. I have yet to have half the pain relearning the UI switching from KDE to Cinnamon to XFCE as compared from switching from W7 to W8 or W10. About the only Linux desktop that’s really annoyed me is Unity, and I’d put that at the level of W10 annoyance, rather than W8 revulsion.
but the idea of trying to extend a phone UI to a computer desktop was a disaster.
Agreed. But the ability to use same interface on your phone as on a desktop, and have two actually talk to each other is priceless. And yes, I do have a windows phone and sync does work as advertised – for what I use it for.
Hold down the Windows Logo key and hit R.
That brings up the run line. Type control and hit enter. That brings up Control Panel.
Yes it’s typing rather than mousing, but unless you have hamhocks for fingers, it’s quicker than MS’s new mouse path.
Add/Remove Programs (Programs and Features): Logo-R, type appwiz.cpl
Minimize all windows and show desktop screen (since they OH SO KINDLY got rid of the show desktop icon in Win7, and removed the show desktop rectangle to the right of the clock in Win10): Logo-D
File manager/Windows Explorer/My Computer: Logo-E
Switch displays (laptop/projector or single/clone displays/extended desktop): Logo-P
Lock Computer (press ctrl-alt-del to unlock): Logo-L
Start menu: Logo key
I saw something humorous shortly before 10 was released that showed how every major Windows version update alternated between good and bad:
Win3.11: pretty good
Win95: pretty bad
Win98: really good
Win2000: not good (maybe not good for home users, but it in my experience, it was pretty good and stable in an office environment where multimedia capabilities were not important)
WinXP good (really good with SP2)
Vista: really bad
Win7: good (really good with SP1)
Win8: vomit-inducingly bad
Thus far I’d say MS broke the rally and Win10 is mixed.
Ha! Sort of like Jethro Tull tours. They also alternated between good and bad.
Bill, MS had that same history with DOS. Everyone avoided even numbered iterations simply because you knew MS would screw it up and then have to come out with a fix. So MS trying to be innovative and screwing it up is a long held corporate tendency.
W2K wasn’t bad, and a slight improvement over NT (although the whole NT line took quite a while to get into shape — XP was when they finally got their act together). But at least it wasn’t NT level stupid. An actual error message from that system: “The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which failed to start because of the following error: ‘The operation completed successfully.'”
You can use something called ‘classic shell’ to bring back the win 7 start menu in win 10. Or so it says here: http://www.howtogeek.com/223728/bring-the-windows-7-start-menu-to-windows-10-with-classic-shell/
BG, that’s what rightclick in Win10 does! Like I said, M$ actually listened to their customers and reinstated it.
“Classic Start” is nice.
I like using Ninite to get it on a macine: https://ninite.com/
Google “godmode.” Choose the link that has your version of Windows in the description.
Create a new folder on your desktop.
Find the suggested string of characters to copy.
Paste that string of characters into the folder name.
Hit enter.
Now, whenever you double click on that folder, every setting you ever looked for in Windows can be found in one place. Godmode for Windows 10 does not have update. You will have to go to settings for that.