ARRRGGGHH!!

Windows 10 is not ready for prime time, as far as I am concerned.

I would suggest that you revert to the earlier OS, but there may be problems. I was at first impressed with the ease of going back to Windows 7, but I have since found problems with it. Some of them were a giant pain in the ass. There were items missing from the registry which caused the scheduler to not work, which made some programs not work. If I hadn't had a clone of the system drive from which I ripped the registry entries, I would have had to do a reinstall of the system.

8.1 is so much like 10 that you may not have the same problems if you decide to roll it back. You might want to read a lot from the internet before you roll it back, if that's what you want to do.

If you stay with 10, you can probably find people with the same problem you are having and possibly find  solutions.

Richard,

Does the restart problem you have occur when you reboot after a Windows update?

I didn't notice it then. If I right click the Cortana button and select restart, which seems to be a reasonably fast route from the desktop, that's when it happens. There are other places with a shutdown menu - with no apparent logic as to why they are where they are. I should try them, to see if it's just the one link that's screwed up. Which would logically make no sense to me, but the design of this interface is so wacky that anything's possible.

Out of curiosity - Why would you do a restart other than for a program install or update?

Not often, but sometimes, I'll try to play a game and it won't load up properly (presumably a bug in the game software - it happened on 8.1 as well as 10). A restart clears everything out and lets everything work again. With the later versions of Windows the boot process is fast enough that this isn't a big deal, assuming that the restart works.

I know, I should be outraged that I've become accustomed to living with buggy software. But I used to work in QA. My life was spent looking at buggy software. And Windows (and applications written for Windows) has never been clean, at any point in its history.

Not just Windows.

Apple promises iOS fix “soon” for crashes in Safari and other apps

richard09 wrote:

I didn't notice it then. If I right click the Cortana button and select restart, which seems to be a reasonably fast route from the desktop, that's when it happens. There are other places with a shutdown menu - with no apparent logic as to why they are where they are

They have to be other places for those folks - like me - who disabled cortana on the install.

richard09 wrote:

And Windows (and applications written for Windows) has never been clean, at any point in its history.

It's not just Windows. I was bitching about buggy Microsoft software before there was an IBM PC.

I didn't disable Cortana but I've never used it. Perhaps that's the issue - stuff not initialised properly. Though I can't think why that should affect something that doesn't really involve Cortana.

Windows 10 is a very intrusive OS. You should look on the internet for information about configuring it to minimize the amount of data it sends back to Microsoft.

OK, I tried switching to the desktop that's "active" panels, and restarting from there. No problem. Then I tried putting the machine to sleep, waking it up, and restarting from the lock screen. That's apparently slightly different, because Windows doesn't know I was the user who put the machine to sleep, so it warns you that restarting may cause all users to lose data if they were in the middle of doing something, and the reboot seems to take a little longer. But still, no problem.

It's that stupid Cortana. And now I feel like sending somebody a bill for my testing services.

I don't think it's a matter of Windows not knowing you were the user who put the machine to sleep. If you reboot before waking the machine, you can lose data, just as if you rebooted from the desktop with programs running. So that warning message makes sense.

I can't count the number of times I wanted to send a software company a bill for finding the solution to a problem in their programs.

Glad you found the problem. Now go and kill cortana completely.

_Howard wrote:

Now go and kill cortana completely.

I had to look Cortana up.

Quote :

What is Cortana?

Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.

Cortana will help you find things on your PC, manage your calendar, track packages, find files, chat with you, and tell jokes. The more you use Cortana, the more personalized your experience will be.

To get started, type a question in the search box on the taskbar. Or select the microphone icon and talk to Cortana. (Typing works for all types of PCs, but you need a mic to talk.)

So, Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa,  Android has Andy and now Windows has Cortana.

Sorry, I still miss Clippy and Bob.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Sorry, I still miss Clippy and Bob.  

I still miss CP/M.

and UNIX.

And spats and buggy whips.

Come on.  I'm not that old.

Bosco and Tippy?

I have no idea what those are.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Somebody needs to create a hardware/software platform that DOESNT try to do everything, but is fast and cheap and powerful and inexpensive.  Don't tell me it can't be done.

It has been done. It's called Linux. (or FreeBSD, if you prefer).

Posting from the old XP box now. Installing the latest upgrade for Windows 10 on the other machine.

No, there is no other reason than just fucking around.

Looks like the new install may be at least a two Xanax, one Vicodin job.

Hah. Actually quite painless. No Xanax and just the one Vicodin (but I'll be honest with you; I would have taken it anyway).