Saturday, 2 June 2018

Windows 10 Updates - WARNING!

My Windows 10 laptop decided to mandatory self update this afternoon.

As predicted, this immediately led to disaster with the amateur radio equipment.  My external audio interface, which has been working perfectly fine until the update, is now unable to be opened as an input by any digimode software!

The update also led to my computer being very slow, despite my declining all the 'new' fancy  consumerist options people like Microsoft imagine I want, but in fact don't.



Windows does at least offer the option, under settings, to roll back to the earlier version, although it's unclear (to me at least) whether this roll-back is permitted forever. 

Most of the changes in the update had to do with voice recognition (Cortana), and so I presume there is some conflict caused by audio settings somewhere in the depths of Windows.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, this kind of mandatory taking control of my computer and causing it to malfunction is yet another reason to abandon Windows altogether.  I already have a lovely Raspberry Pi running Linux with absolutely none of the idiotic things that Microsoft insists upon, and at a fraction of the cost of a Windows machine.

So, if you see that message asking you to update, do everything you can to avoid updating.  In fact, do everything you can to avoid Microsoft Windows, whose days really must be numbered if they continue on this American-centric view of the world and its control.

3 comments:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

I got the update on my laptop and I was asked if I wanted to install Cortana. However I don't use that computer for anything but processing my log and some private things. If been reading on the internet it has something to do with safety settings of the microphone inside windows. In the map privacy under settings you can control which app is allowed to use the mic or not. 73, Bas

Photon said...

Thanks Bas - very useful, as always. That would seem to make sense. The USB codec device was being properly detected, but software had a 'sound input error'. I had declined (of course) all the wonderful new features, so maybe that did stop microphone access.

PE4BAS, Bas said...

In the newest update the mic access if off by standard. I've read about this before on a radioamateur forum somewhere...73, Bas