And I know this one has been done to death, but the privacy issue really is a major one - it seems to have expanded so much since the Win 7 days. There are several pages of scary privacy things to untick when installing Win 10, and then some optional ones are still enabled after you untick everything, so you've then got 16 (sixteen!) pages of privacy options in the control panel to check after install.

Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system.

Do it all at once, they'll complain bitterly. Do it gradually, they'll complain bitterly. Don't do it at all, they'll complain bitterly. Which complaint would you like to make today> ;-)

On the good side, ordinary users have few problems with the Settings app, and it seems to do all they need -- or at least it comes close.

And the people who are resistant to change and are already familiar with the Control Panel can still use it.

That's true, but it's probably a lot harder when you've proven to be untrustworthy in what you include under "modernisation" or "updates".

Plenty of techie people warned that user-hostile behaviour like the GWX campaign or including non-security things in updates advertised as security patches would damage that trust and come back to bite them later. I think a lot of people didn't really believe that would be the case at the time, but as the article here notes, the adoption rates suggest otherwise.

The only people who actually suffered were the OEMs, who didn't get to sell new PCs to all those people whose old PCs got a new lease of life.

I am one of those holdouts, however I would have upgraded a long time ago if Windows 10 had allowed me control over upgrades/updates and had better privacy. After the tricks that Microsoft pulled, trying to force me to upgrade to Windows 10, I do not trust Windows 10 and you cannot feel that about an OS and install it.

There's also a billion and one "one click privacy fix" tools like TRONscript, etc.

The future is more-or-less-continuous updates based on telemetry. That's how Google and Facebook work as well. Microsoft will never go back to a 3-year upgrade cycle, and no business should want to do that either.

Apparently Misrosoft has said that they do want to drop the old-style control panel eventually. I realise it's a huge job, but it feels very like a half-finished feature right now.

back in 2002 I went around bumping everyone's screen resolution from vga in college because it hurt my sole. at least 20% of people got pissed at me for "fucking up their settings". Almost all eventually came back and said "I can't read my whole doc, show me that thing again."

Point being they didn't even know it was broke or that they could change it. Thus you have iOS where apple's defaults are the whole OS and literally millions upon millions of people are completely happy with it.

(disabling "enhanced pointer precision" is preferable, but optional)

If your cursor is too fast you need a mouse with a lower DPI, and vice versa.

I can only guess how many proprietary extensions have been built to rely on the old Control Panel interfaces, and how few of them will ever be updated to Windows 10.

MS's roadmap is to migrate everything out of Control Panel into Settings at some point, so there are not two.

For total control, activate 'GodeMode'...

Create a folder and rename it to this:

  GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

First I found that ngentask was repeatedly running 32-bit ngen and it's practically impossible to debug what's gone wrong so I've replace the ngen with a dummy exe.

But it still does it, now instead of ngen it's simply "System" constantly burning 20% cpu for whatever utterly pointless maintenance task it's decided on that's obviously broken.

It's just really frustrating, I swear that the "idle" mode of win 10 costs me far more money than actively using the laptop. And it's so hard to debug because as soon as the computer activates it stops whatever bullshit it was doing.

On my desktop I tried ripping out all the privacy invasive stuff and have somehow managed to break the start menu search.

I do like it more than Win 7, the startup time's great, but it's still really frustrating at times.

Start menu search seems slower and the returned results are worse than in Windows 7, Unity, XFCE, or any alternative I've experienced. Searching "irefox" doesn't find Firefox. Maybe it's because I've disabled a number of privacy-sensitive features in Windows 10, but Windows 7 managed to make this work without spying on me.

The lengths they go through to push Edge irk me quite a bit: tagging it "Microsoft Recommended Browser", adding an extra scare prompt when you switch away from it in the control panel, resetting it to default status as part of automatic updates. I've seen screenshots of a popup appearing on the task bar begging the user to switch to edge, but haven't experienced this myself.

It's super frustrating. When I search for "vlc", it gives me search results for VLC and instructions on how to install VLC, but it doesn't actually return the vlc.exe program that I already have installed damnit.

or http://alternativeto.net/software/everything/ or https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/ or http://colibri.leetspeak.org/ or http://alternativeto.net/software/listary/?platform=windows or http://www.candylabs.com/approcket or http://www.launchy.net/download.php#windows

This was a popular thing ~10 years ago, not surprising that Windows didn't get it right. FWIW, MacOS also fails at this regularly with Spotlight, but Alfred is sometimes better. Wox seems to be the closest thing for Windows, and Launchy used to be the one the cool kids used.