Today I have upgraded a family member's laptop from Windows 8.1 to
Windows 10. First off the updates on 8.1 are abysmal. The progress bar
jumps in huge leaps and there is no activity sometimes for up to 10
minutes between. You are left wondering if it has crashed. Eventually
once all the updates have completed and you still can't find the missing
'Get Windows 10 app' you realise that it was always there, just not in
the 'lego brick screen' where you would expect it to be.
The upgrade process was seamless, although agonisingly slow. Once
upgraded I turned my attention to the fact that he can not install new
apps. When I first set his machine up it demanded an email address which
could be un-linked after installation but it would not continue without
it. Seems like a terrible design to me and the un-linking is what was
stopping it from installing so I set him up an account and promptly
failed to install the program he desired. The files downloaded, it
claimed to have installed yet it would not run. Returning to the store
it proclaimed 'this is embarrassing' and offered up the error code
0x80070002. Much searching of many forums takes me to a number of
Microsoft 'Fixit' downloads, one of which claims 'Service registration
missing or corrupt' Unable to find out anything meaningful about this I
eventually decided to try to remove the downloaded file and start again.
An educated guess at where the store cache is resulted in something
getting deleted which is essential for any program to launch, now
nothing runs.
When I left the system was restoring to the point of upgrade at the
speed of a snail. Why do their error messages have to be so meaningless?
And why is it so difficult to get any common sense out of the system? A
single upgrade system, app store, seamless upgrades without wiping the
system, all features I found magical and wonderous as a new Linux user
in 2006. They all seem to be embedded so deeply in the workflow of the
system that it is elegant to see in action. What Microsoft have produced
seems to be slow, clunky and doesn't really seem to work. If something
can't install in Ubuntu I'm told something useful about why and can
discover a solution within minutes. Three hours + later and Windows is
still broken.
I haven't used it myself since '06 and haven't missed it. Every chance I
get to go back just reminds me why I left!
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