Good bye Windows 10

I had a wonderful trip through hell on my first encounter with Windows 10, but the bad thing is that the problems just kept on coming. And they still are. I’m currently writing this post on a Windows 10 PC and who knows what could happen as I’m doing so.

>Ethernet Driver Issues

Let’s start with something I thought wasn’t Windows’ fault, but turned out to be one — Ethernet. Although I initially thought my ISP was to blame for my poor connection and frequent cut offs, but that’s not the case at all. Apparently my Ethernet driver randomly fails for no reasons at all. It’s absolutely unpredictable – sometimes I can play a three hour intense game of Grand Theft Auto Online without any hiccups, but other times my driver would fail even when just casually browsing the web.

>GPU Driver Issues

Even though I thought I’ve fully dealt with my share of Adobe-related issues, but I was beyond wrong. It wasn’t long before each and every time I opened Photoshop I was greeted with this message

And this completely baffles me. All my games run just as good as they did on Windows 8.1 (if not better), but something as simple as Photoshop fails to befriend the new GPU drivers. And trust me, I keep checking the NVIDIA app for updates every single day. To be fair, I feel like some of these updates only made matters worse, as I encountered this issue right after updating to the latest version of my driver.

On a side note, a friend of mine with a 17″ Alienware laptop experienced problems even worse than mine. His laptop has a 980M GPU which is an absolute beast, but his latest driver update prevents him from even starting his games, and his laptop crashes as soon as he launches any game. Although he easily solved his issue by installing an older driver, the whole experience of installing a driver that downgrades the performance of your system is something I’ve never really seen before.

But we’re not done with the issues I experienced just yet.

And it happens more often than you might think. If I had a dollar every time that I saw the message shown below, I would have a stable enough money to hire my own software development team and make my own OS.

At first I was mad at the driver developers over at NVIDIA for not fully testing their drivers before releasing them to the public, but later on I found out that this issue isn’t exclusive to NVIDIA graphics cards. My cousin’s Lenovo laptop with an AMD R5 M230 also bumps into the same problems, even when he’s not using a multi-monitor setup. Talk about issues.

>Audio Problems

Even though it’s been quite a long time since I shared my audio driver issues with Windows 10, there is still no official fix for this problem. Forums, discussions, driver updates, and supposed fixes have brought me nowhere. And the problem is insanely annoying. Even at just level 20 on the system volume, the audio comes out over-amplified and distorted. It doesn’t matter if I’m listening through the laptop speakers, headphones, or external speakers. It’s all the same.

How?!
To be fair, this hasn’t bugged me too much since I own an external audio card. Luckily, that works just fine and I didn’t have to do anything. Of course this solution only works if you primarily use your laptop at home, where you’ve got plenty of desk space to work with. But what if you’re on an airplane and want to watch a movie with proper sound? Should you lug around an external audio card? Obviously not. So, please, Microsoft and Realtek, get it together and fix this once and for all.

>Freezing Up

Changing the picture on your lock screen was once considered dangerous and geeky. Windows 8.1 changed that by adding the option for users to select their own image as a lock screen. And people loved it. But with Windows 10, there’s a new graphical element that everyone’s trying to change — the login screen.

Fiddle around in the settings as much as you want, but you won’t find an option to get rid of the Windows 10 hero image that appears on your login screen. Sure, it looks quite nice, but sooner or later it will be a bore.

I thought I had found the solution though. Multiple developers out there have made third-party apps to change this screen to whatever you please — either an image or a solid color. At least that’s what I thought when I started researching if changing the login screen is even possible. Here’s an example of the two apps I tried that claim they can change your login screen look

I was completely unable to login afterwards

TLDR:

Do NOT fall fo the botnet 10 meme