Want to Feel Better About Windows 10? Go Back in Time (Premium)

A few weeks of new experiences with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 has provided a healthy reminder that Windows 10, for all its issues, is still the far better experience.

I know. That sounds rather obvious. The newest version of anything should always be better than older versions. But that’s not always the case, and with products as complex as Windows, there is a creeping expansion of functionality—of just “stuff,” really—that can work against our fundamental usage, efficiency, and performance expectations.

Put another way, Windows 10 is really starting to piss me off.

I weigh in on what I perceive to be Windows 10’s biggest problems so much, I’m sure I’ve long surpassed “broken record” and have edged neatly into “Chinese water torture.” Sorry. My aim is never to irritate. And there is no need here to repeat the laundry list of crapware, advertising, and nonsense features that have bloated and compromised this once-great system almost beyond recognition. I think we all recognize the problem.

But Windows is so core to my professional life over the past 20+ years—and, thus, to my life generally—that I just feel this stuff so deeply. It hurts to watch, helplessly, as something you respect and even love is bungled so badly. There have been lesser defeats that I felt quite personally, Windows phone being the most obvious and recent scar tissue. But Windows. “Big” Windows. That’s the toughest one of all.

You can feel the foundations creaking. Stressing. Can almost see the cracks that are forming, that threaten to bring the whole thing toppling down. And I lash out, as a human, because I’m helpless to stop it.

But in this age in which the best advice or tips that one can provide for Windows is always about what you should turn off, disable, or remove and why, it is of some small comfort to remember that it could be worse.

That it was, in fact, worse.

And still is worse, For those not using Windows 10.

As noted, for the past two weeks I’ve become reacquainted with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. I can’t really claim to have “used” Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 per se, and I certainly wasn’t engaging in one of those cute blogger subterfuges where I pretend to do so and you are not going to believe what happened next. No, you’ll believe what happened next.

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 are each terrible in their own unique ways. An each provides a demonstrably worse user experience than Windows 10. It’s not even close.

Before getting to why, let me explain what I’ve been doing. As you may know, I write a (not-so) little e-book called the Windows 10 Field Guide: It’s available for as little as $9.99 at Leanpub, and if you care about me at all, buying a copy is the best way to show it. My goal with this book is to help people of all experience levels master Windows 10. And because Microsoft updates Windows 10 so often—in-box apps can be updated with new features at any time, literally, and the OS itself is updated with a major new release twice per year—keeping the book up-to-date is time-consuming and difficult.

But I try. And among the tasks that I need to document with each passing version are the chapters about “getting from here to there,” or “moving from one version of Windows to another.” In Windows 10, this takes many forms, since we now have an excellent suite of backup and recovery tools, too, and it’s easier than ever to blow away a balky Windows install and get back and running quickly.

I wrote about my frustrations with the quietly evolving backup and recovery tools in Windows 10 a few weeks ago. Long story short, I was surprised to discover how much these tools had evolved between Windows 10 version 1703 and 1709, and it took weeks rather than an afternoon to update that particular chapter of the book.

More traditionally, you can also clean install Windows 10 on a new or existing PC. And you can upgrade a previous version of Windows—both 7 and 8.1 are supported—to Windows 10 as well. So I have chapters in the book for both tasks, though I feel like we’re almost to the point where documenting these things is no longer necessary. In fact, this set of book updates may be the last time I bother.

But I did bother. After completing my backup and recovery work for the book, I wrote about clean installing Windows 10 and published that newly updated chapter. And then I turned my attention to upgrading from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. So here we are.

Both of these previous Windows versions are train wrecks. Windows 7, of course, has become almost comically outdated from a user experience standpoint, and I find it hard to return to its faux glass windows after having experienced the flat and modern look of its successors. Windows 8.1 has completely different problems, but the most glaring is that it was designed for a “touch-first” world that never materialized on the PC, and its Store/app platform is forever stuck in time as a useless vestigial reminder of that disaster.

But Windows 7 and 8.1 have an even bigger issue than those. In fact, they have the same issue. Updating them—getting them completely up-to-date—is a mindbogglingly painful and manual process that one must babysit and prod along. I literally spent three days—-three days—babysitting the Windows 7 update process, and I started with Service Pack 1 preinstalled and jumped to the Convenience Rollup as quickly as I could. No matter. The process requires multiple reboots, many recheckings, and lots of work.

Windows 8.1 is, if possible, even worse, possibly because there isn’t a Convenience Rollup of any kind for that system, unless you consider “just upgrade to Windows 10 already” as being the more convenient. (It is, actually.) It took less time—just two days, in my case, but I wasn’t being as watchful this time out of sheer boredom—but installed many hundreds of updates over several reboots. Shameful.

I’m not going to applaud Microsoft for fixing a problem of its own making. But it is fair to say that the process for updating Windows 10 is on a different plane of existence than that of its predecessors. At most, you’re looking at a single cumulative update (there’s a new one each month) and a small handful of additional updates. Maybe two reboots. That’s it: You can go from scratch to fully updated in under an hour. It’s actually very easy. Even if you factor in the time it takes to update the built-in apps.

(Could Microsoft improve the updating situation on Windows 7 and 8.1? Almost certainly, and the talk about it all the time. But they clearly have a very real incentive to drive customers to Windows 10, so that work will never really happen.)

I’ve complained a lot about Windows as a Service (Waas), Microsoft’s fictional claim that Windows, somehow, is a service, so it can be updated like one. Windows is not a service. But Microsoft is, in fact, updating it like one. And my misgivings notwithstanding, it’s working. The stats prove it, too: The latest version update, the Fall Creators Update (which is what I’m updating the book for now), has rolled out faster and to more PCs—literally, and by percentage—than any previous Windows 10 version.

Anyway, just experiencing Windows 7 and 8.1 again was eye-opening. I won’t stop criticizing the issues I have with Windows 10, for sure. And I’ll keep examining alternatives, and perhaps even do one of those goony blogger series on using at least one of those alternatives over some period of time. But Windows 10 is still the champ in my book. For all its problems—and there are many—I still prefer it, and by a wide margin, over anything else.