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For experienced IT veterans—and PC enthusiasts—there is a common wisdom about the latency between when a version of Windows is released, and when those releases become reliable. Windows XP is the primary example of this, as the original release of XP lacked a variety of important security protections—a rebuilt firewall enabled by default, support for NX bit, and finally disabling the Windows Messenger service abused by spammers, were added in Service Pack 2, three years and a day after XP was first released.
And so, that leaves us with our present circumstances with Windows 10. Roughly seven weeks ago—on May 21—Version 1903 (or 19H1), otherwise known as the May 2019 Update, was released. This marks three years, nine months, and 22 days since the initial release of Windows 10. Reception has been politely positive, though problems with the launch have prompted Microsoft to require users to remove USB storage devices or SD cards before upgrading; likewise, the update was blocked on the Surface Book 2 because a driver problem renders it incapable of seeing the NVIDIA GPU in the base of the high-end model.
Given the positioning of Windows 10 as being essentially the last version of Windows (similar to the way Mac OS X has been around since 2001), it is potentially unwise to declare this exact point in time "as good as it gets." Microsoft's track record is likely to back up this claim, though—at best, Microsoft can deliver iterative changes on top of Windows 10, but the biannual release cadence does not lend itself to massive changes, and further iterative changes are not going to convince the skeptics. If you don't like Windows 10 now, you're not going to like it in the future.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-10-three-years-later-why-this-is-as-good-as-it-gets/
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @12:56AM (13 children)
I support many, many Win 10 machines, and because I know how to make Win 10 work, and usually how to fix when it breaks I am OK with that.
Win 10 is not really what people want to use, I would argue it is Outlook, connected to Exchange which is the big selling point, and in fact what every one of my users has open all day every day.
If Linux could do what Outlook and Exchange do, we would switch tomorrow.
In fact I have just finished fixing a naughty printer which was holding up about 12 users, but they were pretty relaxed about it. The one guy whose Outlook threw up an error nearly burnt the office down.
Apparently we are switching to Office 365 at some point maybe next year.
I wonder how people will react when it stops working and I shrug and tell them I can't help? A friend who does IT support in a company using o 365 calls it Office 363, because it fails for 2 days every year.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:23AM (9 children)
I use Outlook 365, almost exclusively from Chrome, hosted 30% on Win10, 50% on Ubuntu, and 20% on Android. I haven't fired up my native Outlook client in years.
I've noticed about 2 hours of downtime in a single event in 365 over the last ~3 years, meh.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:49AM (8 children)
Last year Office 365 was out for 48 hours straight in our region.
If our mail server ever stopped working, my users would come and yell at me until I fixed it. If the box it runs on is hosted by someone else and I have no access to fix it (AKA The Cloud) then who do they yell at?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:16AM (5 children)
Depending on your level of actual job security, this might be a very good thing for you.
I agree a 48 hour outage is an outrage, the 2 hours I noticed were at the tail end of a longer maybe 12 hour outage in our region. There may have been others but I was not personally impacted. As a developer, I can wait to get most mail most of the time. And... most of us also have each other's gmail addresses and even phone numbers for SMS, though we're pretty restrained about using them except in times of real need.
The years that I was in some way responsible for an e-mail system, I tended to have to do something every few months to keep it running... if your shop actually needs (not perceived need, actual) 99.99% uptime, a) they should have an alternate channel (like gmail) for emergencies, and b) maybe Outlook 365 isn't for them.
If the need for ultra-reliability is more perceived than actual, Outlook 365 is pretty reliable, and certainly less hassle overall for the local admins.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:27AM (4 children)
The "shop" I work at is part of a Fortune 200 company. Something along the lines of $30 million in sales per month I think.
Pretty reliable sounds terrible. Yes, 99.99% uptime is what we need.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:28PM (3 children)
$360M in annual sales makes the Fortune 200? My "shop" has $30B in annual revenue and we barely made the Fortune 100, but the sales are more long term negotiations that spur of the moment closings. When I ran the e-mail it was, of course, for much smaller places, 5-10 employees.
So, if your "shop" is that Type A about e-mail, hopefully they've got a rotating team of 24-7 responsible/capable engineers doing pro-active maintenance, at least 4 shifts?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:20PM (2 children)
Um... no that's sales for this one rather insignificant site at the bottom of the world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:41PM (1 child)
Ah, makes sense...
Still, our $30B/yr org runs completely on Office 365 (wonder what that contract costs...)
I'm not sure how that interacts with the direct connect MS Office clients, I'm not that bothered to use straight MS Office anymore. Maybe that is a fail-over that can cover for when "Cloud Office is feeling rainy..." not that your $30M in monthly sales guys wouldn't go ballistic when the mail client they normally use starts acting even a little bit different.
One "killer app" for me is accessing Office 365 from Chrome on Android... I think IT didn't want this to happen at first, but they couldn't really block it since Chrome on the phone can masquerade as Chrome on a desktop. I think after a year or two of everybody end-running them and getting e-mail on their phones without installing the death from above wipe-your-phone company app, they probably figured out that Chrome doesn't cache enough of the e-mail content locally on the phone to worry about.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @10:06PM
I had not thought of the death from above wipe-your-phone company app, but we have one too.
I wonder if the Office 365 guys have thought of it? That might be fun.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:41PM (1 child)
They still yell at you!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @08:25PM
True. I am really looking forward to that.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday July 17 2019, @03:16AM (2 children)
All I want is Windows XP, its all I have ever wanted.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 17 2019, @03:25AM (1 child)
Win XP SP 3 was peak Windows, in my view.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:41PM
XP3 was the last version of windows I spent serious time on.
If there had been an XP X64 Retail release, I likely would have migrated to that, but since it was only available OEM during a narrow window where memory capacities wouldn't have warranted it, I didn't.
That said, XP X64 runs pretty nice on a Nehalem or Opteron with 48-128GB of RAM if you have it available. Unfortunately, it also has some flaws that can result in the need to reboot to work around memory fragmentation issues, like various versions of windows before it.
For people who aren't aware: Windows XP X64 was a Desktop version of Windows Server 2003 64 Bit with DirectX support and the XP desktop. Very nice for its time, and ran most 32bit windows apps acceptably. Sadly 64 bit is mostly broken due to Vista+ Assumptions made in 2008/2010 and later compilers.