Windows 10 – the travesty

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been a long term fan of Windows and it’s been my operating system of choice since Windows 95, before actually if you include MS-DOS. I’ve got Windows 10 installed on all my machines, separate authentic fully activated copies on this, my main 64 bit PC, my second 32 bit machine and my 64 bit laptop, plus at one time I also offered IT support to mainly small solicitors and accountancy firms running Microsoft networks. So you can hardly describe me as anti-Microsoft and not knowing what I’m talking about, but they do do some damn stupid things.

I have a 64 bit PC with an AMD FX-8350 8-core processor running at 4.25 GHz with 8 GB of fast RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1060 display adaptor with 6GB of videoRAM. This may not be the fastest machine around but it’s certainly pretty capable and no slouch. However, I’ve noticed that for the past few months it seems to have been running much more slowly than usual, especially with internet related tasks like viewing Youtube videos, other graphics heavy web sites, stuff like that, and I’ve always blamed the internet down here in this corner of France which is only very poor at the best of times.

As an indicator, I just ran a quick DSL speed check on my line and the results were download speed 2.1 MBps and upload speed 0.3 MBps, which is pretty primitive. By way of comparison, the average download speed in Montignac is 4.25 MBps, which itself is not brilliant, whereas out to the west where fibre optic cables were recently put in place they’re getting around 27 MBps. So I need all the help that I can get and I especially need my PC operating system to work with, not against me. But that’s not what’s been happening and I fear that I’m far from alone.

One of the things that Microsoft ridiculously trumpets is that Windows 10 ‘gets better with every update’ and as a result, like it or not you, or more accurately your PC, gets updates constantly shoved down its throat day after day, week after week and month after month. And you can’t stop them as with Windows 10, Microsoft has more control over your machine than you have. So when things just got so bad with my own machine a short time ago, I began to look into the update situation, and this is what I found.

He’s a shot showing its recent update history file.

And when I paged back, I found that the system had been trying to download and install the Windows 10 1709 fall update ever since the latter part of last year, without success, probably because of the low download speed that we have here. ‘But so what?’ you might ask and the answer to that is very important because of the crazy, pathetic, stupid way that Microsoft has set the system up to operate.

What happens is that the system starts to download the update, which takes many hours here because of its size. This means that on every occasion that it tries, which the log shows is non-stop three or four times a day, every day, the download is interrupted or fails for some reason or another and when this happens it just stops, resets itself and starts all over again.

So my PC is constantly connected to the internet in order to download this update and has been every day since the update was released at the end of last year, with the result that any other intended internet use has been, and still is being, strangled.

But that’s not all. Microsoft has also installed another program on my and every other Windows 10 PC to ‘assist’ with this update process. The program is called Modern Setup Host (MSH for short) and they’ve installed it without telling anyone, although like everything else, word soon spreads on the Net which is where I got the information from. ‘OK, but this must be a good thing’, you might say, ‘If it’s there to ‘assist’ the update’. Well, that may be the case IF THE UPDATE WORKED PROPERLY, which for me and many millions of others, it doesn’t. For us the update download screws up our internet speed and MSH simultaneously grabs something over 10% of our processor power doing God knows what, we’ll never know.

And the best bit is that when MSH gets confused, which is all the time if you don’t know about this and leave it running, it stops everything and reboots your PC without warning. This is great because anything you might have been working on is then lost if you haven’t saved it and even better, the update download is halted, reset and restarted all over again from zero. So no wonder that it is restarted three or four times a day, every day, day after day.

You have to wonder what kind of demented brain can have come up with such a system and I’ll tell you what kind it is – it’s one that sits on its backside in Silicon Valley, has absolutely no knowledge of how the real world works outside of the four walls and the closed mind that it inhabits and thinks that the whole world is working with an internet speed of 250 MBps or more, just like it is.

So what can you do about this? Not a lot unfortunately, without ultimately moving to a different operating system. The first thing that you can do is delve into the deeper workings of your operating system and try to switch this ungodly process off. I went into Control Panel and did a search for Administrative Tools which aren’t readily available (wonder why?) but come up by doing this. Then I went into Services and found Windows Update, which I first turned off and then disabled totally.

Then I rebooted my machine and afterwards found that I could view Youtube videos in HD without constant buffering at a time of the evening when my system would normally be running at a snail’s pace. Bliss, and I thought that this would be the end of it. But in the best Microsoft traditions, this was not to be so. You, client, are a dullard and stupid and only they know what’s best for you and your system, so suck it up.

This morning I started up my machine as usual and found that it seemed to be running more slowly again. And I was right, because during the morning the following message popped up on its screen.

Further investigation revealed that without telling me, the system had restarted the update service and had once again been trying to do the huge 1709 download behind my back. It failed yet again, of course so I was left again with the only option of turning the service back off once more. And from now on, that will have to be part of my boot up process every day, which won’t be too onerous as it only takes a minute or two.

So a big THANK YOU to Microsoft for supplying me with an operating system (three copies actually) that I’ve bought and paid for but which, instead of making my machine fast and efficient has crippled it. And I know I’m not alone – there are millions more like me all over the world and so long as you have our money, you don’t give a damn.

As usual.