Seems Microsoft (who have long been winning back my respect) are slowly tipping over sideways…
I have the (genuine) pleasure of owning a Microsoft Surface. I updated it with Windows 10 Creators Update.
I then experienced horrifically (unusable) slow applications, including Explorer, which lethargically drew their windows in almost line by line it seemed. I checked Task Manager, and saw it was hitting 50% + with the System Services, and high internet download bandwidth. I ‘presumed’ (because Windows was not telling me) that it was downloading even more updates in the background still. No doubt to fix other as yet unseen W10CU problems.
So I left it. For four hours.
After it had dropped to 0% CPU, I ventured to restart the laptop, and it did indeed seem a little better. But not much. I then noticed that certain operations (like doing a search in Visual Studio) resulted in the full screen window ‘resizing’ to be almost square, distorting the pixel aspect ratio within the window, and leaving a wide black strip down the right hand side of this new ‘internal’ window. Ultimately, it froze the application, forcing me to ‘End Task’. This happened on numerous other applications as well, so I’m guessing it’s a windows display driver issue, or the internal window framework getting itself in a twist.
I chose to resolve this.
Start / Settings / Updates & Security / Recovery / Go back to a Previous Version of Windows – Yes, please.
Fortunately, it seems Microsoft did get the roll back system right, as now I’m back to Pre W10CU, and amazingly, everything works just fine and dandy.
Frankly, I’m astonished their ‘highly promoted and awaited’ CU updated doesn’t work on their own hardware.
But, the journey does not stop there, dear me no.
Being a sado-masochist (apparently) I also updated my desktop PC (a custom built workhorse).
After updating, I was amazed to find the display at half brightness, and all colours desaturated to the point of greyness. I tried in vain to adjust my nVidia settings, and then discovered that the ‘Brightness’ option in Windows has been removed. After much googling which provided no answer I was happy with, I then chose to resolve the problem myself.
Start / Settings / Updates & Security / Recovery / Go back to a Previous Version of Windows – Yes, please.
Phew. Everything back to normal.
So, +1 for a robust and reliable version rollback!
But about -100 for a crappy version release.
Frankly, shocking. Ok, so apart from the crappy performance, none of the above are major issues. But, they are major usability issues, and frankly, I’m amazed Microsoft let this one out of the box.
Are the days of Windows Vista about to return to plague us all?