Day 2 With Windows 10, One Strange Glitch After Another

Day 2 With Windows 10, One Strange Glitch After Another

I've made 2 posts on Windows in the last couple of weeks and people seem to think that I'm a Windows hater. I'm not. All of my computers are Windows machines. Every computer in the Fstoppers office is a Windows machine. But I'm not some fan boy who is going to lie about my experience either and Windows 10 so far has not been a good experience. 

Yesterday I wrote a post about how to upgrade to Windows 10. I followed my own instructions and my fairly new and very expensive Alienware 13 laptop and Windows 10 didn't get along. The first attempt to upgrade to Windows 10 gave me this error.

 

Every attempt after that gave me the error: "Something happened"

Nothing infuriates me more than a computer that won't work and I decided to quit before I threw my laptop against a wall. Later that night I decided to try again on my personal laptop at home, a fairly cheap HP Folio 13. Windows 10 installed fine but actually using Windows 10 hasn't been so smooth. 

 

Initial problems with Windows 10

At first my laptop's resolution was way out of whack. After 30 minutes of looking for a display driver my screen snapped back into its correct resolution. I don't know how this happened but I like to believe that Windows 10 was smart enough to find a fix behind the scenes. 

Next, I realized that 2 finger scrolling on my touchpad was working in Google Chrome but wasn't working anywhere else in Windows including Microsoft's new Edge browser. To my surprise, when I woke up this morning 2 finger scrolling began to work. Once again I have no clue what happened but Windows appeared to be healing itself. 

 

The start menu went crazy

Today I decided to spend a bit of time navigating around the operating system. I started with the new start menu which in theory is supposed to be better than the insane tile menu in Windows 8. Sadly the start menu wouldn't work. It's hard to explain what it was doing but I recorded a clip on my cell phone of it's tantrum. Basically as I moved my mouse around tiles and programs began to appear and flicker.

 

After a restart the start menu appeared to be working properly and I must admit, when it actually works, it's great. Way better than Windows 8. 

 

Cortana doesn't work

One of the most praised features of Windows 10 is the search feature which can search your computer and the internet at once. It also includes Cortana, a personal voice assistant who is there to help you with a variety of tasks. To make Cortana work you have to log into your Microsoft account. I'm honestly not exactly sure what my Microsoft account is, what it does, or why I need it, but I had to set one up with Windows 8. This means that every single person in our office who uses a Windows 8 computer has to log in to their computer with MY email and MY password. I'm sure that there is a way for them to get their own Microsoft account but I don't want to deal with multiple user accounts on our office computers as we are always jumping from one machine to another. 

So basically, I don't want to have a Microsoft account to turn on my computer but it seems like I have to now and Cortana was asking me to log in to my account before she could work. Surprisingly I was able to remember my MS account login info but it still didn't work. It kept telling me that I wasn't connected to the internet even though I was. 

 

The error screen telling me I needed to be connected to the internet didn't even properly fit on my screen. Even error screens have errors. So although I would love to give you a glowing review of the new Cortana assistant feature, I can't even figure out how to make it work. 

 

The computer won't "sleep"

I then closed my laptop in frustration and started writing this post on my desktop (Windows 7). As I was writing I noticed that my laptop never went to sleep. It wasn't plugged in and the lid was closed but I could still hear the fan. I opened it back up and checked the battery settings. Sure enough the computer was set to "sleep when lid is closed." When I closed it a second time the computer did go to sleep. I then tried it a third time and the computer stayed on once again. At this point I have no faith that my computer is actually off when I close it and the only way to know is the listen for the fan noise. I've now opened and closed the lid 5 times and the computer will not go to sleep. 

 

Conclusion 

I've always liked Windows because I basically never had to worry about it. It was simply there to load all of the important applications on a daily basis. Windows 7 never bothered me, it just disappeared into the background and allowed me to work. It never made me sign up for accounts, login to unwanted features, or force to "sync" anything. I can imagine a day where Windows 10 works perfectly and it gives me a few extra really powerful features to make my computer experience easier but so far, nothing has been easier. The UI of Windows 10 is beautiful and I've already found a few features that I'm really excited about but at this point I'm still dealing with broken basic functions. 

We can't all use Windows XP and 7 forever. Eventually we'll all have to upgrade. You better believe I will be waiting a long time to upgrade my main office computers to Windows 10 though, it's simply not worth the risk. 

Lee Morris's picture

Lee Morris is a professional photographer based in Charleston SC, and is the co-owner of Fstoppers.com

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Does 10 have all the right drivers for your Aienware system? That's some pretty high end hardware so I would check to make sure they have drivers to support Win10. Behavioral issues can often time be linked to improper drivers.

6 months minimum on any major release. Does not matter which vendor. Any dot.0 release has the potential to be a dot.UhOh!! Never be the first to upgrade. especially with your business computers.

I actually just had the opposite experience of the author. I updated today from Windows 7 on my Dell Precision M3800. No problems. It actually runs way better now. I went through Windows Update and did not do a clean install. All my files and programs stayed, and it didn't even mess with anything like my desktop background picture. I had previously experienced an issue when I tried to enable graphics acceleration in Lightroom CC on Windows 7. What would happen was it would only detect the Intel on board graphics and would ignore the Nvidia GPU. So, I had updated drivers and tried everything to make it work with only getting the result of having it run really slow and glitchy with Lightroom trying to use the Intel graphics (leading me to disable the feature since LR ran way better with it off). After installing Windows 10, I saw several posts with people mentioning problems with video drivers on the new OS. So, I was thinking that it must be handling graphics differently. I opened up LR and went into the settings to discover that it was now finally listing my Nvidia card as the GPU. I enabled graphics acceleration was very happy to see that it actually works correctly (instead of causing a major loss in performance). Photoshop also had the same problem before of only recognizing the Intel on board graphics, but now it recognizes the Nvidia GPU as well. Maybe my Adobe problem would have could have already been solved with Windows 8 or maybe Windows 10 only works perfectly for me because I had already updated every driver on my system when trying to troubleshoot previous problems. Whatever the case, my computer is working faster and better than ever now, so I'm more than happy with my free Windows 10 upgrade (and I like the new interface, too).

The studio I work for runs 15 Windows workstation, no problems whatsoever while upgrading. I remember the "good ol' days" when I studied photography and every workstation except for the Hasselblad tether was a Mac: very regularly encountered the Apple sad face and the "The computer will now shut down to prevent further damage to the system." ... FURTHER damage?!

The errors were mostly followed by shouts through the classrooms: "Damn you mister Rockwell"

Also looking back on Lee's article "Dammit Windows....." and the exploit where Windows could be accessed through a font.... My iPhone was recently made unusable by getting a fudging text message. Yes, a text message.

Clearly you've mistaken a Chinese knock-off for a real iPhone, and your phone is running Android:

950 million Android phones can be hijacked by malicious text messages | Ars Technica

New vulnerability can put Android phones into permanent vegetative state | Ars Technica

After nearly 30 years of Windows releases it boggles the mind that there are people dumb enough to try and install the new version upon release. You wait at least 6mos, preferably a year before dropping those bombs onto your computer.

I agree. Windows 10 is not as good as they promote it with the help of thousands of paid commenters all over the tech blogs.
It's one tiny step from being a disaster.
It took me 5 hours to start using it. Drivers wouldn't work and then they made us firstly upgrade windows and only then they let us install it clean. It took extra time...
Microsoft somehow manages to show paid customers how much it hates us. Like users are the worst enemies or something. There's no easy way to make things work on Windows 10. And it's terribly slow. Much slower than Windows 7. Some apps don't work correctly anymore. Like Faststone viewer has problems in W10.
The most utterly unacceptable annoyance is that Microsoft denies me of activating my Windows 10, although my Windows 7 was genuine.
After hours of installations and formatting, I completely lost my Windows 7 from my PC and I don't have product keys on me. So Microsoft screwed me big time in a crazy early 00s kind of fashion.
I hate myself for upgrading. Nobody should voluntarily experience this crap for our own money.

I don't get it. I really don't. Made the update like 2 days ago. I haven't made a fresh install and the Windows 8.1 folder is still there chopping some 20GB on the boot SSD. Untill now, not a single error message was displayed, and the behaviour is somewhat awesome. Very stable, all software opens like a charm.
I've updated the GPU Driver, only thing to do was to update the GTX 970 gpu driver.
I've worked till 2AM yesterday night to update my portfolio (and deliver it to model agencies), it all went smooth.

Here my system specs:

Windows 10 Pro - Updated from Windows 8.1 Pro.

mainboard: MSI 970a-g43
cpu: AMD FX-8320 x64 Eight-Core Processor @ 3.7GHz Turbo 4GHz
memory: 2x Corsair Vengeance DDR3 8GB @ 1833MHz
GPU: ASUS GTX 970 4GB GDDR5

1 SSD 128GB Kingston for Windows boot
1 SSD 128GB (forgot the brand) for photoshop scratchdisk.
1 HDD 1.5TB Samsung (used for storage, idle for most of the time)
1 HDD 250GB Samsung (used for swap, live work and games)

PSU: Tacens Radix VII 600W

The case is a NZXT H2 with 5 12cm coolers.

Isn't it common knowledge that you wait for the first couple of OS (Windows, OSX or Linux) updates before upgrading? Of course there are going to be issues.

And for the Apple fanboys with short memories, Yosemite wasn't exactly a smooth release either.
http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/the-worst-bugs-in-os-x-yosemite-and-how-to...

Moral of the story, it's been 2 days since release to the public and you're basing everything off of one man's experience.

I've been using W10 all day without almost no issues. Funny enough, there was some problems in W7 when I ran SFC but now in W10 they seem to have been corrected.

The only issues I've had is with my audio driver. It doesn't seem to work too well with W10 and I'm unable to change the equalizer. This of course isn't Windows fault, I blame VIA for not updating it for years now. The main issues a lot of people are having a driver related.

I personally find this version of Windows to be amazing. I was a bit worried installing it that I had over hyped myself but it certainly lives up to my expectations.

I plan to do a clean install tomorrow since I'm really happy with it.

I found your two articles on Google News. I have the same "Something Happened" error when trying to install on my 6 year old HP HDX18 1200T system, which despite being 6 years old, is still a formidable machine. It's quad core Q9000 2GHz, Nvidia 130M, 8GB RAM, and I've upgraded the system drive to a Crucial SSD. It came with Vista and I've upgraded it to WIndows 7 through HP's program that shipped with the PC when I bought it. I was an employee of HP back then and got it under the employee purchase plan just before getting laid off.

This machine should be able to be upgraded fine, but of course this error is happening. None of the so called fixes out there have worked for me. I have tried installing from the installer via online download as well as straight from the ISO burned to DVD.

This weekend I am going to try to install the 32 bit Home version onto an eMachines netbook.

I'll tell ya, it really makes me appreciate my Linux and Mac OSX installations...

I used to work as a sort of in house IT guy for a small enterprise software developer, and I had early access to MS OS's for years. I've never seen an installation go this bad except for way back on Windows NT service pack 2, which nuked systems into BSOD land.

Windows 7 SP1 is very stable, but like you said, you can't stay on an old platform forever. I just wanted to play with this thing now and am very frustrated that it can't even be installed.

Hopefully with all of the publicity, Microsoft will refresh the ISO's and get this fixed, whatever it is.

Most likely your Windows 10 issue is specific to some. I was able to download the ISO from India, without any problem. Also I did a clean install without any product key. We can just skip the product key during installation. I also activated using a torrent activator. So no problems at all for me for download. But Windows 10 screens are pure white. that looks odd. if it was not that bright, it'd be great.

Seriously I don't get it. You seem very unlucky Lee ! I made the update and everything works like a charm on my workstation ! Very nice update (if it works ^^) !

A Microsoft Account is formerly known as a Live Account or Live ID. If you have a Hotmail or Outlook.com e-mail address, or an XBox Live ID, this is your Microsoft Account. If you've signed up for Office 365, this ID is likely a MSA as well.

Otherwise, you can create a new account at account.microsoft.com with any e-mail address. It functions like a Google Account or Apple ID.

Required disclaimer - I work at Microsoft in a vendor role.

LOL, maybe it's too early for a unified OS or "One OS for All." I guess Microsoft's dream of having a unified OS across multiple platforms is not going without some trauma. As for Microsoft's plan, well what do they say about announcing your plans "Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh."

Kinda reminds smea of the physicists and their dream of a Unified Field Theory (UFT, usually thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field --WiKi) that doesn't (yet) exist and may not be even possible {insert Einstein's giggle here}

Fortunately, these issues seem to have been addressed before I installed Windows 10.