
Ask HN: Is Microsoft sabotaging older versions of Windows? - _Understated_
This is a genuine question, not a clickbait title.<p>I am a Windows dev and I use a desktop with Windows 8.1 Ent + Stardock menu and also a laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate. Both are fully patched.<p>I have got to the point where I need to ask if anyone else is experiencing the same things as me and the tinfoil-hat-wearer in me then makes me ask if Microsoft are doing something deliberately to annoy me just enough to &quot;upgrade&quot; to Windows 10.<p>Now, I am well aware of their &quot;upgrade to Windows 10&quot; tactics with the popups and whatnot but I have a batch file I run after every Windows update to get rid of the spyware stuff so that isn&#x27;t an issue.<p>What is an issue is that over the last several months, OneDrive has failed to sync more and more frequently and file copy dialogs end up in the background as soon as you copy&#x2F;paste. This copy&#x2F;paste thing never used to happen... I know it didn&#x27;t!<p>The OneDrive thing is really annoying as I can be programming something in Visual Studio on my desktop and then an hour later I decide to use my laptop and it hasn&#x27;t syncd so I have to go to my desktop to force a sync (even though it says everything is up to date)... it never used to be like that.<p>Also, I have had to reset OneDrive on Windows 8.1 twice and once on my Windows 7 machine in the last 2 weeks alone.<p>Am I imagining this?<p>I haven&#x27;t looked into whether this is a setting or something but I haven&#x27;t changed anything over the years and it used to work perfectly well. Same with the file copy dialogs: I haven&#x27;t changed anything.<p>Should I be buying thicker foil for my new hat?
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teh_klev
> but I have a batch file I run after every Windows update to get rid of the
> spyware stuff so that isn't an issue.

Could be that over time whatever your batch script is doing is possibly
interfering with the correct operation of OneDrive. You might need to review
whatever it's disabling/hacking and make some adjustments. I doubt Microsoft
are deliberately trying to sabotage your machine. I suspect whatever your
script does is probably not documented well, or is doing "not-recommended"
things that may be trampling over incremental updates to OneDrive and
unexpectedly and subtly clobbering the way it functions and/or the things it
expects to be there. There can be some surprising dependencies in Windows, and
Windows does evolve over time due to patches and fixes.

edited: to fix my english

~~~
_Understated_
Edit: I posted the batch file here originally but it looked crap so I have
removed it.

Here is an example of what it removes:

echo Uninstalling KB2976987 (description not available)

start /w wusa.exe /uninstall /kb:2976987 /quiet /norestart

It's all the updates that enable "telemetry".

You could be right that there is some genuine functionality I have removed by
not having a particular update in which case I will need to look at
alternatives to OneDrive.

~~~
teh_klev
> This is all it does.

Looks non-trivial to me. That's removing 18 patches/fixes, four of which don't
have a description.

If I were you I'd re-install, get OneDrive back into working order (if indeed
one or more of these uninstalls is the cause), then re-apply these hacks one
at a time until OneDrive starts misbehaving....then put it back.

Blindly running a script like this based on "advice" from the internet,
without knowing the consequences each time some wave of new patches/fixes
arrives on Patch Tuesday, is a wee bit scary. Especially if it's your primary
work/wage generating machine.

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nhemsley
Who knows, but at the end of the day, they are only going to have so much
resources to deal with older versions of Windows.

They seem to be operating with an attitude that if they can get as many people
as possible to use their newest version of windows, that they will save money
by not having to deal with such a diverse environment of versions.

Something tells me they looked at the way companies like google release their
updates often, and by default. Release numbers are becoming less important,
more of a tool for developers to use (which is what version numbers were
invented for, before marketroids don't got a hold of them). Perhaps a light
went on when they saw that chrome just quietly updated, without any fanfare
about 'upgrading' to new whole numbers, large features just got included when
they were ready, from whichever version they were releasing at the time.

This approach makes alot of sense ongoing, and in the long term. Developers in
the past got used to having various versions of their desktop software being
in the wild, and it was a part of life. Then people started going, hey with
the web, I only need to be supporing one version of our codebase, which is
actually pretty awesome. Google came along with chrome and decided that it
made sense to have as few versions in the wild as possible. It seems Microsoft
is playing catchup with this, but they still have large releases of windows,
with interface changes between large versions, which causes folks like you to
want to hold onto older versions. Seems they are still working on fine tuning
their social engineering.

------
WorldMaker
«I can be programming something in Visual Studio on my desktop and then an
hour later I decide to use my laptop and it hasn't syncd»

It sounds like you are looking for an almost live real-time sync. It's not
really a use case I think OneDrive has ever prioritized. Certainly it tries
its best, but I remember having a lot of issues with the timeliness of
OneDrive sync in Windows 8. (It feels like sync has gotten better in 10's
client, even with the two steps back in usability.)

I don't think they are intentionally sabotaging it; I would suspect it's more
that you've found edge cases in the sync platform.

That said, you may want to consider a different sync platform intended for
closer to real-time sync. BitTorrent Sync has been useful to me in that
category.

~~~
_Understated_
It used to work in almost real-time but the time isn't really the issue: I
could leave it forever and it won't sync without manual intervention sometimes

~~~
WorldMaker
That too has been a complaint I've had somewhat consistently with OneDrive
over the years. Every now and then it seemed like OneDrive's file watcher
would stop catching file updates and I'd have to restart OneDrive on my
machine.

Some of that has also always been OneDrive's natural attempt at throttling
usage until the machine is certain levels idle CPU and/or bandwidth. It can be
nice knowing that OneDrive will try to avoid major operations while you are
busy, but it can also cause strangely long pauses between syncs because your
machine is busy with a lot of other background downloads.

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davismwfl
I'd say you are seeing development tradeoff's that they are having to make.
Likely code bases, like the one for OneDrive sync, is shared across multiple
versions of Windows. That comes with tradeoffs though as newer versions of
Windows might have features which are utilized to gain functionality, security
or reliability. Then to support the older OS's the team tries to implement
similar limited functionality but it isn't as thoroughly tested as the OS
likely. Not to mention, think of it this way, if say 70% of your clients are
on Windows 10, you'll probably optimize testing and features around that, not
anything prior.

I highly doubt this is done specifically to force people to upgrade, or to
screw their older versions of Windows. And I am sure more then once a
developer or product manage has said, well if they don't like that they can
upgrade Windows. If you have ever written a client deployed application you
have likely said it too.

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herbst
They may are just shitty devs as always, maybe thats their tactic. Who knows.
Just upgrade to Windows 10, thats what Microsoft wants you to do, and you know
yourself you want all that Spyware stuff, else you would not title yourself
windows dev.

~~~
_Understated_
Did you forget the /s at the end of your post? :)

I don't want the spyware stuff: I have been a dev on Windows for 13 years or
so... long before all this forced telemetry stuff and I am running a business
based on it so switching to Linux or Mac isn't an option at this point
unfortunately.

Windows 7 and 8.1 work fine for the most part and I will be sticking with them
but it just seems like there have been subtle changes over the last year or so
that are designed to annoy me rather than fundamentaly change or break the way
I work.

~~~
pdkl95
> I am running a business based on [Windows]

That's the problem; you created a business that depends on a single point of
failure that is entirely outs0ide your control. Without a second source[1] or
a reliable alternative strategy, your business isn't really under you control.

This is why _free_ [2] software is important. You need the right to maintain
the things your business depends on.

> switching to Linux or Mac isn't an option

It's always an option, you simply see the cost of switching to be too high.
That's for you to judge, but you might want to consider the long-term
direction of MS's goal for Windows. Paying the cost of leaving _now_ might be
cheaper than paying it at some point in the future after MS does something
else that disrupts your business.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source)

[2] Not "open source"; having the source code doesn't do you any good if you
don[t have the freedom to use it.

~~~
_Understated_
> you created a business that depends on a single point of failure that is
> entirely outs0ide your control

I never really thought of it that way before but you are right... I still
can't switch to Linux or Mac at this point though so for the short term it's
out.

Long term I will have to keep a close eye on Microsoft and see if it's
something I have to move away from.

I was always a pay-your-money-get-your-thing kind of guy but this move towards
continuous upgrades and possible subscription-based / "free" operating systems
isn't a shift I like... I like to "own" my stuff (I know I never "owned"
Windows but I had a disk and I paid for it and I got to choose how long I kept
it for and I could disable telemetry and so on).

Maybe this IT stuff is a young mans game because the thought of ditching
Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server etc for Linux equivalents and having to re-
learn it all doesn't fill me with hope, however, now that I read this sentence
back I amd sure someone will correct me and show me that you can run all that
stuff, including Active Directory in a 512MB instance of Puppy Linux or
something :)

~~~
bigmanwalter
I've been on the Linux journey for about 3 years now and loving all of it. The
unix philosophy of small, composable programs just makes sense. Linux/Unix is
a system where programmers are the target demographic. No more feeling like a
second class citizen in Windows land :)

~~~
herbst
Not only programmers! My grandmum likes how easy it is to make everything huge
and high contrast when needed. My mum is a fan of unity, because everything is
just reachable even with limited space. She recently even started to use a
tiling plugin. My little sister spends hours customizing her desktop and tried
pretty much any window manager. My dad uses linux and wine to play windows
games that do not properly run with windows 7 and upwards.

I would classify them all as at best average computer users, but there was not
much hand holding involved in the transition at all. And way less work for me
now! (Like my mum did open Locky (the crypto trojan) twice!!)

~~~
bigmanwalter
My mom recently tried figuring out video transcoding and editing on her own
with her Windows machine. I'm still waiting to see what kinds of crazy malware
she picked up in the process.

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Spooky23
It's not a conspiracy. They just suck.

Try supporting a large O365 environment. Whenever there's a major product
release that uses Azure Active Directory, you end up getting redirected to new
end points for auth.

Since they also suck at publishing their IP ranges, your users get screwed
with random fail until you update your proxy and firewalls.

Office ProPlus is joy too. Try running that on a distributed network where
bandwidth is at a premium. Fun UX.

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HappyFunGuy
I know they're sabotaging their newer versions :(

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AdmiralAsshat
FWIW, I didn't bother uninstalling KB updates on my Windows 7 laptop. I let
them all install, then used a utility called Spybot Anti-Beacon to disable the
Telemetry services:

[https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/](https://www.safer-
networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/)

You might try giving that a shot.

------
brudgers
I'm curious about the reasons for not upgrading to Windows 10 since it's free
and likely to be better supported.

~~~
_Understated_
It's not free... I need to have paid for a valid Win7 or Win8 license to
qualify for "free".

~~~
pathy
As someone who makes a living off Windows software, surely you have paid for
your license? Else you got absolutely no right to complain about anything
breaking.

~~~
_Understated_
So you are implying I stole Windows? That's your contribution to this?

~~~
dragonwriter
> So you are implying I stole Windows?

Actually, when you claim that it is not a free upgrade because you need to
have paid for a valid license for the software you claim to be using, _you_
are implying that you stole Windows.

The other poster appeared to be presuming that that implication was
unintentional and inaccurate, and that the upgrade was indeed free for you.

~~~
JdeBP
No, xe was merely pointing out a cost that isn't factored into "free upgrade".
You're probably not realizing that to people with long experience of Microsoft
marketing, upgrading to Windows hasn't necessarily meant _from_ Windows.

