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Windows 10 breaks computers

Why I use Linux, part 3,332,468: A consumer organization is calling for Microsoft to compensate people for the hardware damage caused by upgrades to Windows 10.

Microsoft needs to pay compensation to customers who have suffered after upgrading to its latest operating system, consumer watchdog Which? has urged. Since the US technology firm pushed out the new software last year, it has been flooded with complaints. Customers who moved to Windows 10 experienced a slew of issues, including printers, webcams, wifi cards and speakers no longer working with their PC. Instances of lost files and email accounts no longer syncing, and, most significantly, computer encountering such significant issues customers had to pay someone to repair it were not uncommon, Which? has reported.

The consumer group surveyed views on the upgrade from over 5,500 members in June this year. Of the 2,500 users who had been upgraded to Windows 10 from an older version of Windows, more than one in ten ended up rolling back to their previous version of the operating system.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

5 comments

  • James Stephens

    And I am one of those people who is hired to fix problems after this so-called upgrade, often a time consuming process with a bill to match. My preferred fix is Linux. About a half hour to install update and configure nicely as opposed to a half day or more to fix Windows.

    Now to be fair, if you plan and go on the Internet and get all the needed drivers beforehand and have them available on removable media and in the machine at the time of upgrade things go relatively smoothly. Who does that. Certainly not those who had this upgrade foisted upon them.

    I’ve never, not once had a problem with a Linux update.

  • t-dub

    I also fix computers but only for friends. Well one of them upgraded to a new Windoze 10 machine from 7. The person they paid to do the migration left the printer and e-mail in a non functioning state. HP knows they have compatibility problems but will they fix them? No. I had to hack the registry to regain functionality. It took me 6 hours to clean up all of the problems the so called “professionals” left.

  • James Stephens

    Not unusual. Easily half the problems I deal with are botched attempts. HP and compatibility problems? Say it ain’t so! I think that did more to hurt the company then just about anything else, but that’s another story.

  • Localfluff

    I had to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10 recently because of software I have to use. The upgrade application said that my CPU, a very standard Intel, wasn’t compatible with W10. It turns out it is a well known bug, but without remedy from Microsoft. I had to download a torrent with a cracked W10 that could install from an image disk without that bugged upgrade software. That’s a promising start for a new friendship! :-)

  • Gealon

    Windows 10 breaking computers is no surprise, especially since Microsoft had to resort to forcing it on everyone… kind of like a certain health care bill… Anyway. They were very sneaky with some of the ways they force it on people, three or four separate updates to Windows 7 contained the W10 updater that if you so much as clicked on the “Find out more” link, it would start downloading W10. This is of course anecdotal, I avoided W10, 8 and Vista like the plague. Windows 98 and XP have always functioned quite well for me and I only tried, and surprisingly liked W7 because it supported the 64bit processor of the computer I was building.

    Needless to say, Microsoft has slid and continues to slide down hill, what with computers trying to be more like dumb phones. So much so have they descended that I’ve had automatic updates turned off almost since I started using W7. It doesn’t do to have your computer turning it’s self off when it wants to, just to install an update while you are in the middle of working on an important project. I wouldn’t go so far as to turn to Linux though, it has it’s own compatibility problems and not everyone wants to spend time configuring this, installing that and getting used to a new beast. We want it to work right out of the box and be something we are familiar and comfortable with. To that end, I will likely never abandon W7/XP/98, at least not until something like them comes along, but I fear in this world of dumb phones and snowflakes, that will never happen again.

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