Top 7 things that are very bad in Windows 10 – [En]

Many wonder if Windows 10 is really worth it. Let’s talk about a few bad things in it.

        1. Reports everything (spies you)

The number one bad thing on the list is of course the ‘spy everything’ policy.
This is talked about all over the internet tech communities and has been proved hands down as real so there is no need to go into details.
If you want to counter it, you have a lot of work to do. You will have to adjust most if not all of the following: Telemetry, Biometrics, Handwriting Data Disclosure, Handwriting Error Reporting, Application Telemetry, Inventory Collector, Steps Recorder, Lock Screen Camera Settings, Cortana (you can’t terminate this too easy), Localization, Sensors, Web Search, Windows Media DRM Internet Access, App Notifications, Password Button Ads, Advertising ID, SmartScreen Filter for URLs, Write information, Access to Language List, Acquaintance, Prompts Feedback, Windows Update Distribution, Windows Update for Other Products, WiFi Sense, Windows Defender, Automatic Windows Updates, OneDrive, Automatic Driver Updates.
And then App Access to Localization, Camera, Microphone, User Accounts Info, Calendar, Messages, Wireless Connections, Uncoupled Devices.
If you don’t tweak/disable most of the above, you will be spied and spammed. The only way for Windows 10 to be safe is to have it never go online, which defeats the purpose if its design.

        2. There is no off choice
You have no choice when it comes to what Windows 10 does. Even if you tweaked most of the above, you most likely did it for nothing.
I’ve made a simple test: installed W10, disabled all options that you have a GUI off button for, then just updated the fresh install.
After the update, 1/3 of the turned off settings were back on. So practically, any update can do what it wants to your settings. They are not yours to control anymore.
Also, the default browser seems to re-become Edge every time certain updates are applied. Again, your choice is irrelevant. Edge wants to be the default browsers and it sets itself like that at any time it feels so.
Another related to this absurd thing is that the update system suddenly decides you need to restart the computer. Or even worse, you need to shutdown a notebook to leave somewhere and there’s no such option: you have shutdown and update instead, which can take quite a lot. This system is absolutely retard no matter how you look at it.

        3. The drivers problem
Related a lot to the above is the driver system. Many drivers get updated in a bad manner, with a bad version. This, of course, can cause anything from small glitches to BSODs.
A driver that causes Windows 10 not to start anymore can and will likely be installed at a point and there’s nothing a normal user without tech knowledge can do about it.
Removing a newer driver in favor of an older one is a badly designed process. You just can’t do that directly. You will need to uninstall the current driver, then use a basic one (like in the case of video cards), then install the version you want. Of course, that requires auto update for drivers not to be enabled, an issue that is difficult to actually accomplish (explained above why).

        4. The play-dead ‘skill’
If you manage to turn off enough not to get over-spied, W10 will start playing dead. It will say it’s hurt even if everything is fine. There are many situations when this is encountered and things can go very far.
As a far-end example, after actually disabling the auto-update on a W10 home, after a while USB sticks suddenly stopped being detected with no reason whatsoever. Same sticks, clean, one day they all work, next day they don’t anymore.
No amount of official chipset or USB, USB Root Hub or any kind of related drivers made them work again. But, enabling auto-update and clicking ‘search for updated driver’ on the unrecognized USB devices quickly fixed the issue. So all of the official intel drivers were bad, but Windows Update magically made it work with an ancient driver taken from who knows where ? I find that suspicious at least.

        5. Not recoverable
If previous windows versions were easier to debug, in the case of W10 you don’t even have start-up control. You know … the old F8 menu. You can’t even start in VGA mode in case of trouble.
If you boot your system from a disk to try a recovery, the options there almost certainly do not work. I tried all of them in several systems on several scenarios.
No recovery option worked in any of the cases. Each time, a complete reinstall was necessary.
That was for unencrypted, non-EFI-enabled systems. If you add those to the picture, you practically have a near null change to make an actual successful system recovery. Best thing you can actually do is to spawn a command prompt and try your own fixes when possible.

        6. Bad partitioning
No matter what you do, you can’t make Windows 10 install on a single partition. It always spawns junk partitions. On windows 7, if you had a correctly set available partition, no other trashing of your hard drive was done. Not in Windows 10. It takes at least one chunk of your drive anyway.
For anyone that cares about the content of it’s drive, this is just bad practice. As a general recommendation: never install W10 on the same physical drive where you keep your data. W10 increases a lot the risk of you loosing everything on a drive, even if you have multiple partitions. From my perspective, partitions are obsolete anyway.

        7. Kills classic hard drives
I’m working in IT industry and help friends whenever in need when it comes to IT&C. Relatively recently, a weird thing happened: I had an unusual high number of incoming notebooks with ‘not working anymore’ label.
In all cases, no exception whatsoever in about the last year, they had only one issue: hard-drive with bad sectors in the exact location where Windows 10 resides. The only thing in common for those notebooks was that they had Windows 10 on them.
In most of the cases, it was an upgrade from Windows 7. As you tech guys should know, the amount of files in Windows has always increased exponentially.
A random test count: Fresh Windows XP SP3: 9k files, 300 dirs ; 3-months Windows 7 SP1: 72k files, 13k dirs; Years-old Windows 7 (since SP1 release date): 91k files, 22k dirs ; Fresh Install and Updated Windows 10 112k files, 23k dirs.
This could explain the excessive wear of older HDD. But it does not explain why a new HDD also gets damaged. I had 4 cases when in a very short time new HDDs (4 different models from different manufacturers) were damaged in the exact same W10 area. For one of them, I checked the uptime using the S.M.A.R.T. attributes. It was a little over 600h (that’s 25 days of uptime). That’s really low for a new HDD, don’t you think ?
Considering what I have seen, I’d never let W10 install on a notebook HDD. I’m curious to make a test with SAS server drives, to see what happens. I’ll update this if I manage to do some long term testing. But it’s clear that W10 was designed to be used with SSDs.

There are other inconveniences when using W10, but those are the ones that I find by far to be the worst.

        Do you remember what happened when that failed experiment called Vista arrived ? No-one wanted it. So they enforced it by using 2 tactics: no new Direct X for XP (which practically obliged all gamers and many other graphic-related categories to switch to it) and the OEM deals, where the OEMs were obliged to delivered notebooks with Vista and remove the XP drivers from the availability list on their websites.
After the fix called Windows 7 (actually v6.1), other experiments like 8 and 8.1 failed, so they needed to change tactics. They tweaked some more and made 10, which was free to be upgraded to by anyone with a compatible system and older OS. That still works today even if the offer is officially over.
But since nothing is for free, the data they gather with 10 is millions of times more valuable compared to the actual price of the OS. Are you willing to make the deal ? Does having W10 actually help you with something ? Consider that before upgrading.