After several weeks with loads of issues with this unfinished OS that Microsoft shoved out the door prematurely I decided to reinstall Windows 10 on my tablets from the start to get a clean install. What I had installed on my tablets before was the (recommended) update from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I had come to the conclusion that not only is this operating system unfinished with a lot of omissions, bugs and various issues but in addition that the update process actually screwed things up from the start. It was simply as buggy as the rest of Windows 10.
For example on two of my tablets (as well as on my Desktop PC) it created a new user account with the same id as the one I had before. Unfortunately this one did not replace the old account but they existed side by side. The old account was of course not accessible any more but guess what? A lot of my bloody files where still owned by the second account. As a consequence I got told that I needed “administrators rights” to manipulate a lot of stuff on the tablet. On my PC (that one is still being a Windows 8 to Windows 10 updated version) I had to manually go in and change the rights of a whole bunch of files before Visual Studio stopped telling me that it could not create or write to it’s settings files. I also could not get it to display my name on the login screen instead of the email adress associated with he account. It is unbelievable what a mess this is!
Anyway, I did a fresh reinstall on my three tablets. Some might argue that I should have downgraded to Windows 8.1 again but, in my opinion, that would just postpone the pain. Microsoft is going to drop support for Windows 8 (which actually worked and worked well on a tablet unlike Windows 10) like a hot potato so I can just as well suck it up and try to make the best of this mess.
On Windows 8.1 the reinstall process was fairly simple and painless. As you can guess by now, on Windows 10 it is not so. On Windows 8.1 you told the system to reinstall itself and during the reinstallation process you where asked which of your registered systems that you wanted to take your settings and app suite from (or of course if you wanted a truly virgin install you could have that as well). This was working excellently. You got a fresh Windows installation but you did not have to go through and reinstall all your apps and settings manually.
However, with Windows 10 Microsoft seems to have made a concerted effort to throw out everything that actually worked so this option is gone. Once your reinstall is done you have to go through every setting and redo them (especially the crap like using your bandwidth for delivering updates to other systems that some asshole thought it was a good idea to enable by default). You also have to manually reinstall all your apps. The way to do this is of course to open up the Windows Store and go to the list of apps that you own. Surprisingly enough Microsoft do actually supply such a list so you do not have to search around for each app by name. Given that the store search is still broken that would have been a pain. Unfortunately said list shows all apps that you have ever touched and there is no way to hide apps that are obsolete or apps that you simply do not want any more.
Even the dumbest of the dumb ought to be able to figure out that a regular user will eventually end up with a list of hundreds of apps where he actually only uses a few. So not only did I have to manually reinstall my apps but sift through a ridiculously huge list at the same time. It does not help of course that some apps are in there twice since sometimes the free version and the paid version is actually two apps. More than once did I install the wrong one just to have to uninstall it and reinstall the right one later.
I am amazed at how the people at Microsoft seems to have lost touch with real living users who actually use their devices for more than just play around on YouTube and are shoving both unfinished and poorly designed crapware out the door
I still have my desktop PC to reinstall but there I have tons of software as well as data so it will probably take me a little longer before I get around to unfuck that one.
PG's Ramblings 