12 Reasons to Avoid Upgrading Windows 10

Well, I gave Windows 10 a thorough and honest trial. After 2 months, however, I decided to go back to Windows 8.1.

There were some things that I liked about it … but nothing that I couldn't live without.

And there were so many things that I didn't like. Mostly time-wasters.

Here are all the reasons I made note of (mostly for my own benefit, to remind myself) why NOT to upgrade to Windows 10!

1. Superfetch.
   This hard-drive-hijacking process ONLY seemed to run when I was using my computer INTENSIVELY (like trying to render video).
    
2. Feature-reduced Windows Update.
   Windows Update had been dumbed down way too much, and would no longer allow me to disable the updates I DIDN'T want (for example, updates to various Office 2013 programs that weren't even installed on my computer).
    
3. Title bar color (or lack of).
   Total usability fail. White title bars made rearranging windows really difficult. Windows 10 also overrode the title bars of some of my Adobe programs, wasting screen space.
    
4. Difficult to have more than one Wi-Fi device.
   I travel a lot. Hotels don't always have the strongest Wi-Fi signals, so I often need to use my USB antenna. It was super-easy to enable and disable Wi-Fi devices in Windows 8.1, but I had to hunt through a half-dozen screens to find how to do it in Windows 10.
    
5. Calculator.
   What? Huh? Does it really need to be that big? Does it really need to take so long to load?!
    
6. File associations CONTINUALLY being forgotten.
   Every single time I plugged in my Android, ‘Tap to choose what happens' would appear. Double-clicking MP3s, JPGs, and dozens of other formats in Explorer repeatedly resulted in “which program do you want to open this with?” dialogs. “Really? I've done that 10 times already! Go away!”
    
7. Windows Explorer screwing up file dates.
   I never quite figured out what the “Date” column meant in Windows 10 … it wasn't the same as “Modified” like every other version of Windows.
    
8. Folder view settings would randomly become forgotten.
    
9. The thumbnail database in my big stock image folder (about 1000 JPGs) got rebuilt every time I browsed the folder.
    
10. Too many steps to access screen saver settings.
    For some reason I also kept getting “Windows cannot access the specified device”?!?
     
11. Over-complicated Start Menu. (Not a huge deal, fixed with Classic Shell.)
     
12. No drag-and-drop if you disable UAC.
    This was the #1 killer for me. So much time wasted manually opening files in my programs.
    (Apparently I forgot another article I wrote (also for my own benefit) that talks about how to fix the same issue in Windows 8.1. Oops!)
     

There were a couple other issues I experienced in previous versions of Windows that were NOT fixed in Windows 10:

• Did not fix the bootup problem I was experiencing intermittently with Windows 8, where it would just freeze shortly after loading the desktop.
   
• Double-clicking files would sometimes take 10 seconds to send the command to the appropriate program.

Well, Microsoft, thanks for the free upgrade and stuff, but Windows 8 works much better for me! 🙂