Couple years ago I bought me a fancy SONY Vaio laptop with all its bells and whistles. I wasn't planning to be using it for my daily tasks, though. I only needed it to run Microsoft Money 2007, since I was used to that app, and it addressed all my "personal finance" requirements. I did use the Vaio for a couple of months like this, and it proved quite a burden, I am afraid to admit, mainly in terms or response times and continuous Windows updates for newly discovered security holes. I was no more used in handling Windows tasks (I was spoiled in the meantime by the Mac OSX, you see), so I abandoned the Vaio in some corner in the loft. I went to install Parallels on my iMac instead, and thus moved Money into a Windows sandbox running under parallels. Case closed. Proven fact, Windows running under Parallels on a Mac is way faster and more responsive than on any big dog Wintel configuration you can think of.
One thing is certain. The Vaio was still there, shut down and patiently collecting dust, almost untouched for 2 years. No special drivers, not even printers, no fancy configurations or customisations, almost all of it in its original factory settings. It was supposed to be 64 bit Windows 8 Home edition. Didn't need more than that anyway. So, when I heard the news on the radio yesterday morning (amazing how the Media are hooked to play MSFT's marketing game all along), I said to myself, let's see what the buggers did this time. Old wine in new bottles all over again, or did they clone Apple or Google instead?
So, after dusting the Vaio, I humbly started the route to my software Golgotha (much I knew then of what was to come), hopeful to be able to upgrade to 10 in, say, a couple of hours. From my Mac experience of moving into a new OSX version, I never had to wait longer than half hour from start to finish, so I reckoned, since MSFT is far less efficient, probably it'll take me four times that, couple of hours max. Much I knew then and hopeful I was. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was like staying in a $2K a night luxury suite at the Four Seasons in Paris, compared to what I had to go through. Like I suggested in the post's title above, I went from denial, to anger, to depression and finally acceptance in less than 10 hours. After that I kept taking anything MSFT had to throw into my face with a bitter smile.
I started the process at 11 am on Wednesday the 29th of July, official day of the V10 launch. My "factory settings" Vaio in its V8 64 bit installed version took until 4 am the next morning (!!!!!!) to complete updating 2.5 year long fixes (last applied dated back to Jan 2013) and its subsequent upgrade to 8.1. When I opened the laptop at 8 am this morning it still claimed there were even new arrivals of updates from 4 am to that moment and I was subsequently obliged to do them. I categorically refused this time. I rebelled! "F you", I shouted! It was obviously a bitter joke. I never installed anything special on that laptop, ever, and it took 18 hours to do the updates and upgrade to 8.1 !!! 18 hours of my precious and shortening life! On my deathbed I'll think of this experience again, I promise you. I just let it do its own thing by using defaults all the way. Like I said, no personal customisations were ever performed and it was in plain English that the OS was installed.
Eventually, by this morning the Vaio was able to run V8.1 after all. Not that it was any intuitive at all to go confirm the version of Windows I was running. What in Apple OSX takes two bare clicks to find out (the OS version you are running), in Windows proved a desperate search of computer settings, some place somewhere out there but not knowing where exactly!
I next rushed on my monitor to spot the little windows symbol on the right side of the balk, but to no avail. I read that you had to do this in order to get invited to upgrade to 10; another weird idea of Microsoft's to contain /span>downloads queueing in the billions by their users out there. Unfortunately, no icon was to be seen anywhere among the megapixels of my laptop monitor, anywhere at all. I dug into the net next, and spotted some horror stories about how to fix that problem, some suggesting it was extremely complex to achieve that without any guarantees of success, up to someone proposing to recreate the reservation app itself via code he offered to copy paste into a Notepad document, rename it into some form of command file and run it. No way I'd do that. The times I had to do witch magic to get MSFT operating systems incl. MS-DOS in the eighties and early nineties to do the things they were supposed to do has loooong gone and will never come back, I bet you. In my age, every minute of precious life counts. I'm not gonna waste it, not a single second, in MSFT OS workarounds because they decided to become one garbage can of technicians knowing about OS development as much as I know about Mandarin Chinese! No way!
Thankfully, and about the moment I was ready to throw the entire Vaio into the bin, with its brick and all, I found this Godsent CNET article claiming there was a way to download the V10 ISO files directly from Microsoft's site, without having to wait for their Highnesses in Seattle to respond to my humble reservation request via an impossible to find app icon, and then download the V10 installation files into my laptop, when it pleases them. I said to myself, why not? Let's see if it works this way. CNET is way more rational than MSFT, anyways...
Forgot to mention though, that in the meantime, I had spent ages on the MSFT web pages to figure out how to do the upgrade, and I have to say, the feeling was that I was being pushed into the secret pathways of their makeshift labyrinths to make it extra hard, read impossible, for any casual user to ever get this infamous upgrade. I happen to be a seasoned computer user, mind you, starting with Fortran 2 back in 1973! Imagine what a poor soul with only a few years messing around with Windows would do in such a mess. One particular page of theirs kept sending me via a hotlink back to itself. Over and over. Can you figure that? Really? Looping the loop! There is no way to even think comparing them with Apple on this very issue. Apple is miles ahead... what am I saying, lightyears ahead. Things that are of no concern to a user are kept totally out of the users' sight in Cupertino,Ca. In Seattle, every bit they are doing over and over again, from closing down and rebooting to copying files, they'll inform powerless and desperate users in seriously upsetting ways, like "we are taking care of a few things", or "checking to see if you got enough space for upgrades", or shit like that, and keep busy doing that for minutes to hours! How long to you need to check on a 21st century laptop and find out if there's a few miserable gigabytes available to put a new operating system in place? Ten minutes? Half hour, you said???? You gotta be kidding me. Things like that turn you (during your "anger" stage of grieve) into a ranting Lewis Black himself, and this in a matter of secs.
I'm simply curious... what is so technically sophisticated for a simple security loophole fix to take so long to be installed?! And will they ever achieve a moment that their stuff has no more deep security holes like we've seen in the last 25 years? Why do they even pay those gazillion developers, spending billions of dollars, to maintain such a monumental OS mess called Windows ? Why don't they ever do a serious rewrite, like Apple did in OSX fifteen years ago? How come is their system so vulnerable and needs to by fixed every week? And will they ever learn that their OS in the year 2015 should no more use those ugly and old-fashioned configuration windows that their 3.11 version used back in the last decade of the past century? Indeed, will they ever learn? Why should they do that after all? Bill Gates gets richer by the day even to this day, playing a role of the planet's greatest philanthropist and counting his 87 Billion of paper money from holding onto his MSFT stock. In his shoes, anyone can still believe that Windows was and is exactly what billions of users worldwide eventually need and want!
Long story short, and there's still so much I could narrate from my last 24 hours of living the Windows upgrade nightmare, but as I said, I reached the last stage of grieve, which is acceptance of my fate. In any case, I have no issues with the Windows user experiences since, once all installs are done, I'll shut down the darn Vaio and go back to my beloved Mac OSX boxes and laptops, and to the legacy his Sainthood, Steve Jobs, may he RIP, has left us with.
But it would be a spoil to deprive you from my ultimate experiences from the v10 installation itself. Because I eventually managed to get it installed. That's right! Sure did! In its own, it's gotta be the black humor joke of the 21st century. After downloading the infamous ISO image, following CNET's article, with the v10 install files, I started the procedure at 8:20 am this morning and at 10:10 am, almost an hour and 50 minutes later, I can claim I became the proud owner of an upgraded Vaio into Windows 10, 64bit. On a first sight it does look nothing more, nothing less than a somewhat improved look and feel version compared to the disaster 8 or 8.1, for that matter. At least now they stopped displaying those stupid blocks at start-up, full of useless functions, while obscuring simple things like computer settings and File Explorer. As before, the install took multiple reboots and many of the likes of "still a few more things to arrange and install" and more like this. And the best of all, the cherry on the cream indeed, I found myself hardly exploring the new version, and a bunch of new updates were waiting to get implemented. Incroyable mais vrai!
I'll leave you with a few screenshots that I was served with, before the V10 was eventually confirmed. I strongly believe, this must be Satya's idea of humor for sure, and that life should be taken lightly, as it's too short.
Update: After spending about 5 hours on V10 now, 24 hours later, I must admit that this must be their best version ever. Not just a marketing trick. They seem to have in fact rewritten almost everything I tested, had copied Google's and Apple's minimal design in many aspects, transparencies and animations all over, and the OS seemed, how can I say this... seemed humbled. The traditional Microsoft arrogance we are used of seemed to have gone away. For the first time ever I saw their apps centred around the user and his/her concerns. That's a novelty indeed. V10 is also consistent among apps and menus and such. Indeed a redesign. I'd guess, this would please Windows casual users for sure. Good for them. Not that I's consider going back to V10 from Mac OSX any time soon. Apple is still light years ahead in so many aspects, however, I feel good about the billions MSFT users out there who, after 25 years of painful experience, eventually got something along the lines of Google and Apple. Maybe I should hold to my MSFT stock a few more days... see how the market reacts. In any case, Satya Nadella appears a lot more realistic than that jumping monkey boy of Steve Ballmer. I couldn't have imagined a V10 under Ballmer for sure. Never ever. He was too thick and far too arrogant for that.
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