It’s only two weeks until Microsoft’s new OS arrives. Barry Collins isn’t confident
My daughter is 10 years old, going on 16. She wants to hang out in town with her mates, stay at home while we go to the supermarket and not have us peering over her shoulder every time she goes online. Every week brings a new test of how far she can be trusted and whether she’s mature enough to handle these responsibilities. But so far, she’s risen to the challenge.
I wish I could say the same about Windows 10. Operating systems are like kids: you have to work out whether you can trust them to behave before you let them loose on your main PC. For the past six months, I’ve been running the Insider Preview versions of Windows 10 on a test computer, and just a few weeks before launch, I wouldn’t trust it to run a Casio calculator, let alone a PC I rely on for work.
As it stands, Windows 10 is fundamentally broken. After Windows 8 went down about as well as if Nigel Farage joined One Direction, Microsoft has been desperately fiddling with Windows 10, trying to find a design that works. We’ve had several major redesigns of the Start menu, for instance, which have got progressively more clunky with each incarnation.
This nervous twiddling and tweaking has led Microsoft to take its eye off the one thing that matters most: stability. Windows 10 is horribly flaky. Six months before Microsoft released Windows 8 - which was a pretty major overhaul of the operating system itself - it was stable enough to run on my day-to-day work PC. It still had a few rough edges and incomplete features, but it was solid.
Windows 10, on the other hand, is wobblier than a Weeble on a spin dryer. The update before last completely pole-axed my test PC, forcing me to wipe it completely clean and reinstall Windows 10 from scratch. Even now, apps still routinely crash, Wi-Fi randomly drops out and a bewildering error message appears every time you try to reboot the PC.
As for the new features, the Edge browser - which replaces Internet Explorer - is so basic it doesn't even have a password manager yet; the Cortana voice assistant understands my spoken commands perfectly, but when I ask a basic question like, “will it rain tonight?” it delivers a blank response (rather like my 10-year-old, now I think about it); and the latest stab at the Start menu takes three button presses just to shut the ruddy PC down, and scrolls both horizontally and vertically, which makes me feel seasick.
It is, of course, possible that Microsoft will cancel all leave and iron out the dozens of serious bugs that still litter Windows 10 before the end-of-July launch. But the stakes here are enormous. By making Windows 10 a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8 users, the take-up rate is going to go through the roof compared to previous Windows releases, where you had to pay upwards of £80 for the privilege. If Microsoft screws up millions of people’s PCs, it could genuinely be a mistake that it never recovers from.
Normally I’m first in the queue for a new piece of software. This time, I’m happy to let you push in.