[sc:windows-category ]So I’ve had Windows 10 installed for over a month as my primary OS, so what’s the verdict?
The pros and cons I spoke of in the previous articles are all still true, however there have been a few more items that have cropped up:
Long term stability is an issue
My main machine and table are always on. They never shutdown except for patches. That’s exposed Windows 10’s biggest single weakness at this point. The new app architecture has a lot of memory leaks and after 12-24 hours pretty much makes the system unusable.
The biggest culprit seems to be RuntimeBroker.exe, it often consumes all memory and CPU after running for a full day.
On my desktop I’ve actually setup a nightly job to terminate the process and that’s returned the bulk of the stability to my system. On the tablet it’s much worse.
My Surface 3 can be completely hung after just leaving it overnight. The Surface has also hung in mid use a few times with a hard reboot required.
Clearly Microsoft will be working on this, but it does show that more testing should have been done before it was released.
Tablet mode and domain logins
I, of course, run a domain at home and I long ago setup the group policy to allow me to login without a Ctl-Alt-Delete. It’s pretty much required if you’re using Windows with a tablet as otherwise holding the Windows+Power button is a two-handed affair.
I’ve had two issues with the Surface 3 for this. First, probably 70% of the time Windows still requires me to do a Windows+Power press to get to the login screen. Randomly it will switch between this and the expected behaviour of just a swipe.
When you have to hit the Windows+Power combo, it also ignores your lock screen wallpaper setting and displays the default one.
To make things worse, the soft Windows key often seems to be disabled when needed. It doesn’t even give a haptic feedback when pressed.
This makes logging in to the tablet very frustrating sometimes.
This does not appear to be an issue on my laptop or desktop.
Default login wallpaper ‘glitch’
This isn’t a bug so much as an observation. The default login wallpaper is a nice scene of a beach with the waves crashing in as you look through a stone arch. It looks great in landscape mode.
In portrait mode the stone arch get’s cut out so you just have the waves, which look exactly like a glitched screen if you just take a quick look at your tablet.
Calendar account settings
On my laptop I often use a WiFi HotSpot to get connected to the Internet when I’m on the road. Once in a while it loses signal but remains connected.
The Calendar app seems a little sensitive to this and will sometimes come up and tell me my account details are out of date, even though it’s really just a lack of connectivity when it went to check for updates.
Verdict
Overall I’m still in favour of Windows 10, but I think Microsoft could have spent a few more months testing it before release.
