SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Microsoft has been criticised over its Windows 10 software by consumer rights group Which?.
The body said it had received hundreds of complaints about the upgrade, including lost files, emails no longer syncing and broken wi-fi and printing.
In some cases, it said, users had had to pay for their computer to be repaired.
Microsoft defended its software and highlighted that it provided help online and by phone.
"The Windows 10 upgrade is a choice designed to help people take advantage of the most secure and most productive Windows," said a spokesman.
"Customers have distinct options. Should a customer need help with the upgrade experience, we have numerous options including free customer support."
Which? surveyed more than 5,500 of its members in June, and said that 12% of the 2,500 who had upgraded to Windows 10 had later reverted to an earlier version.
It's not a surprise to anyone on Soylent, but this is the sort of thing that causes conventional wisdom to shift.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Friday September 23 2016, @05:57AM
You have backups, right?
What backups?
Tears all around.
I don't understand why an OS upgrade should be touching any files on a user's Desktop or Documents or really any User folder. Once again, Microsoft continues to fail to learn from Unix to everyone's detriment. And that's on top of not only allowing running executable code from User folders, but explicitly making that the preferred way now. Yet it will prevent me from right-clicking my own Cookies text files to open them all in Npp because they're "from the Internet". Gods help us all.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 23 2016, @06:17AM
No upgrade should ever touch user data at all. The install procedure should be:
1. Deploy alternative boot and new system filed in C:\foobar.
2. Set bootloader to C:\foobar\bootimage.
3. Reboot.
4. Move everything not in C:\foobar into C:\backup.
5. Deploy system.
Any migration of user data should start with a desktop shortcut to C:\backup and optionally end with an auto-started migrate_my_old_crap.exe application.
This is also true for linux: An upgrade image should never touch a previous /home/user even if the same name is opted. The installer should simply rename the old directory and optionally leave a symbolic link or a .desktop folder shortcut to the old user account.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedGreen on Friday September 23 2016, @07:40AM
"No upgrade should ever touch user data at all."
That is how Apple does it if you want figured that out by accident. This past weekend I upgraded to El Capitan from Mavericks did the install on external drive. One that I had a bootable copy of Mavericks on forgot to erase the partition so it installed overtop of it. When it got to the point in the install where I would have the choice of using Migration Assistant to migrate my stuff from the in machine drive it never appeared just a setting up User account screen. Now I am thinking what the hell is this thing doing I never setup any of that but up pops a login screen and all my settings and everything is still there when I logged in. On Linux system a /home partition is what that is called/needed a simple edit of the /etc/fstab to change the location of /home to the correct partition and then reboot to have it take effect. During install some have the option of where to mount the /home choose no format option as well for that and it is the same thing as the fstab edit later after install without this option present.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @08:25AM
The problem with that is that Joe Average doesn't create multiple partitions or has multiple internal disks, so when the upgrade fucks up the system partition their data goes with it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by blackhawk on Friday September 23 2016, @08:53AM
The problem is even worse than this. Have you ever tried to move your user account onto another drive using Windows 10? The system fights you every step of the way. Under Windows 7 I had moved my user folder to a separate partition, because it was loaded with GBs of data and the SSD was groaning under the weight. When I upgraded to Windows 10 it had taken all that data and moved it back onto the SSD on C:\Users\xxx
I figured I could just copy it over to the other drive and use a file junction to move the whole users folder. That flat out didn't work. IIRC it wouldn't recognise the folder for users and I might not even have been able to log on.
I tried again, this time moving just my user folder and again it didn't work for some reason (can't recall).
In the end I had to settle for moving the location of the documents, downloads, etc folders using the shell extension command. While this works you then get ghost folders created on c:\users\xxx\documents from various software. Some programs default to always trying to save to C:, so you end up with some files where you want, ghost folders, and some files somewhere stupid.
I've finally relented and moved all the folders back to their default locations, but moved the bulk of my old documents and stuff online - much of it archived off into my Google drive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @02:55PM
What multiple partitions? It's all done on C:\ with folders. No extra drives. No partitioning. To reiterate:
1. The installer mkdir C:\foobar.
2. Sets the boot-loader to reach C:\foobar\bootme.bin.
3. Reboot to bootme.
4. Bootme then moves everything not in C:\foobar (windows, program files, random user folders) to C:\backout.
5. Deploy systems.
...
Honestly, It's so brain-dead simple it shouldn't need repeating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @09:59AM
That's "c:\fubar" you insensitive clod.
As in the time-honored .mil acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday September 23 2016, @02:07PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar [wikipedia.org]
Turn in your geek card on your way out.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 23 2016, @03:20PM
Etymology!
The etymology of foo is obscure. Its use in connection with bar is generally traced to the World War II military slang FUBAR, later bowdlerised to foobar. The word foo on its own was used earlier. Between about 1930 and 1952 it appeared in the comic Smokey Stover by Bill Holman, who stated that he used the word due to having seen it on the bottom of a jade Chinese figurine in Chinatown, San Francisco, purportedly signifying "good luck". This may be related to the Chinese word fu ("福", sometimes transliterated foo), which can mean happiness.
The use of foo in a programming context is generally credited to the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) of MIT from circa 1960. However, the precise relationship of these terms is not known with certainty, and several anecdotal theories have been advanced to identify them.
The first known use of the terms in print in a programming context appears in a 1965 edition of MIT's Tech Engineering News. Foobar may have come about as a result of the pre-existing "Foo" being conjoined with "bar" an addition borrowed from the military's FUBAR.
The Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't have anything outside of the obvious. Huh, apparently prayer wheels are involved:
…An entry in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language went something like this: "FOO: The first syllable of the misquoted sacred chant phrase 'foo mane padme hum.'
The correct chant is Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ [wikipedia.org]. (Om, of course, being the innate sound of creation, at least if you're in India or have a habit of meditating while seated on a lotus flower.)
As far as Bowdlerization:
Expurgation is a form of censorship which involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive, usually from an artistic work.
Bowdlerization is a pejorative term for the practice, particularly the expurgation of lewd material from books. The term derives from Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of William Shakespeare's plays, which he reworked in order to make them more suitable, in his opinion, for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
A fig-leaf edition is such a bowdlerized text, deriving from the practice of covering the genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings with fig leaves.
Now we know the rest… of the story?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday September 23 2016, @03:34PM
See also the Jargon File entry. [catb.org]
Now if you'll excuse me I'll get back to frobbing my Molly guards.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 23 2016, @10:01PM
Damn, I've been defeated!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @09:32AM
Yes, of course. Wait a moment …
half an hour later …
Ah, here it is. A backup of the Windows XP installation CD.
SCNR
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday September 23 2016, @01:08PM
I don't understand why an OS upgrade should be touching any files on a user's Desktop or Documents or really any User folder.
I find it hard to believe that even MS would delete people's files (BBC/Which? report tells of "lost files"). More likely that paths have been broken, or new versions of apps fail to recognise the previous file formats.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Friday September 23 2016, @01:19PM
This happened to one my end lusers who lost her Desktop files. Her User folder was only her first name, so there wasn't anything odd about her pre-upgrade environment in that regard.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday September 24 2016, @04:43AM
This is MS we're talking about. I remember installing Win95 (the first edition, no Explorer) on a system with OS/2. The install went well, didn't even complain when instead of entering the product code, I just hit enter. At the end of the install, Windows announced that a previous operating system was detected and removed. No warning or anything.
Now I was smart enough to fire up fdisk, see that all previous partitions were still there and set Bootmanager as the active partition and reboot into a multiboot environment.
Same when I installed Win98. When I installed Win2k (service pack 2), it was nice enough to tell me how to set Bootmanager as the active partition. Earlier Win2k supposedly overwrote the Bootmanager partition.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday September 23 2016, @02:04PM
As of Windows 8.1 at least, they're still defaulting to hiding all file extensions by default, which is moronic and somewhat dangerous, too.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"