6 ms·

The Windows Incident – Day 0

176 points by viclou 12y ago

Too 12y ago
Consider yourself lucky you even got windows 8 installed. My lenovo laptop, with a big fat windows 8 sticker on it and win 8 screaming all over the purchase page, came with windows 7 preinstalled. Win 8 came with a bunch of dvds inside the packaging, the laptop does not even have a dvd-player.
- yuhong 12y ago
  I think this is because a lot of people didn't like Win8.
  - toupeira 12y ago
    If that was the reason they wouldn't try so hard to give the impression that it is indeed running Windows 8.
    - mahouse 12y ago
      They probably manufactured all the computers with the W8 stickers on them and then hastily dumped a W7 disk image on the hard disk of each one of them to stop users from complaining. But yes, the fact that the computer has no DVD drive to upgrade to W8 from the DVDs is a bit wrong.
- nly 12y ago
  http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/create-reset-re...
- bluedino 12y ago
  We have to pay an extra $50 to have 7 instead of 8 on our Lenovos
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  They did you a solid.
- gamblor956 12y ago
  You can download Windows 8 free online, and enter into the serial on the CDs when it comes time to register. (Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that was fully installable from a downloaded or USB-stick copy.)
  - Too 12y ago
    The serial is not written on the CD, it's a lenovo recovery CD, not a pure windows CD. Nor have i found it anywhere else. I guess i could easily get a key from lenovos support but i really don't care much anyway, win 7 works great. I just find the whole experience a great example of how badly pc manufacturers consider the "whole package" experience of their products.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
Yikes - if Microsoft would just focus on what they are doing right, and perfecting that (Windows, MSDN, etc) they might have a chance at avoiding these constant and public "fails." I understand every enterprise level business needs to try new things, but it really just seems as thought they need to leave mobile / tablets alone as hard as it may be for them to hear until they have an MVP that murders it and people can't wait for.
- ivraatiems 12y ago
  In fairness, it sounds like this was Asus, not Microsoft's fault.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    Microsoft's fault here is that they haven't tested products that they are selling in the own Store. Or they have, they saw the issues and they decided to go with the selling anyways. It's a logistical/delivery issue on the Store end, but it does reflect badly on Microsoft as a whole.
  - msh 12y ago
    Microsoft sold it as a signature device, so it's just as much their fault.
    - wfjackson 12y ago
      Again, all it means is that it's OEM crapware free.
      - Brian-Puccio 12y ago
        So if the OEM didn't install anything aside from a completely standard (albeit old) Windows 8 install, then this is Microsoft's intended behavior of Windows? What else would cause any issues with the OS out-of-the-box aside from OS problems if the OEM didn't add anything?
rtpg 12y ago
I wonder what the Surface experience is like, I can only hope it's better. This also reminds me of when I got world of warcraft CDs and had to spend almost 48 hours just to patch up to the most recent version.
- chamakits 12y ago
  I have Surface Pro 3, and I absolutely love it ... but it's not without issues. For starters, the price. Although having had it for a while now, and feeling that this is the best tech I've bought in a while, it is pricey. Between the tablet itself, plus warranty, plus the keyboard cover (a must. I love pen and touch, but too many things I use the keyboard for still), it gets pricey quickly. Usability issues, there is this nasty driver bug with it's wifi card, where you get BSOD after waking up from sleep. Don't know if it happens to everyone, but when it happened to me, I searched and found PLENTY people with the issue. The fix is 'easy enough'. Turn off a setting to not keep wifi on while sleeping. This however means, when waking up, I have disconnect and reconnect to my wifi. The fix was very easy to google for too, but not sure if someone non-tech savy would even know what to google for. Also, my first surface had it's touch screen die out on the top half within a month. Apparently also common, but one support ticket to Microsoft and I got a brand new one. Having said that, I will never buy any other laptop other than surface laptops. I am extremely happy with it. I am usually a Linux user, but haven't really missed it much (although I still have it on my desktop for any Linux specific stuff). I use it for developing, occasional drawings, writing notes, diagrams, reading ebooks, browsing in bed. It really is an all in one device, and worth every penny.
  - tbrock 12y ago
    Let me get this straight. You bought a tablet you love but every time you want to use it you have to turn the wifi off and back on? How the heck is Microsoft still in business selling garbage like that in their own store which is supposed to curate the "Microsoft experience"?
    - chton 12y ago
      For what it's worth: people with those kinds of issues are rare. Not rare enough, of course, but it's not as if everybody has them. In a way, chamakits's problems demonstrate why Microsoft is still selling them: even if they show serious issues, the rest of the tablet is so good that people will still love it. As an aside, my own Surface displayed a very minor issue with the pen tap location being off by about a millimeter at the top edge of the screen when I first got it. Windows Update fixed it right away. It hasn't shown any issues since then, at all. From what I hear from people I know that also own one, this is more typical than situations with serious problems.
chatman 12y ago
Just get the tablet replaced or call Microsoft support.
- cr3ative 12y ago
  Yeah, it clearly has hardware issues or a terrible power supply (which can cause some screens to register touches poorly)
  - atomicrat2552 12y ago
    Having updated the drivers and OS, it seems that the issues are all fixed by this point (which I'm putting in the Day 1 entry tomorrow). Was a really disconcerting out-of-box experience, though.
- mmphosis 12y ago
  Yes, take it back to the store for a refund. We took back a Win8 HP and got the money back. Now we have a Win8 Dell. And every-time I hear about a problem, I've repeatedly said "Take it back, and get the money back." Too late now. Too bad, stop telling me about your problems with Windows. I am done with this years ago after going through the process of performing clean installs at least every six months. If I really need to run Windows, and I don't, I use Wine. If Wine doesn't work I fire up Win7 in VirtualBox, get it in, do what I need to do and get out. I hear that Win10 is going to be better. I certainly hope so.
- EZ-E 12y ago
  Agreed, having to tinker around on a fresh, new device to get it working partially isn't acceptable : take it back. It blows my mind such devices are sold, excepting the consumer to finish the installation and polishing that should have been the manufacturer's job in the first place. Most people won't be able to because it's not their hobby. It's a huge problem, and Windows reputation is really bad because of this, people get awful experiences because of buggy drivers and manufacturers not finishing their jobs.
wvenable 12y ago
I had a similar experience with my Asus Zenbook Prime ultrabook. I noticed that the very loud fan was running a lot faster and more frequently than it should. I checked the power settings and minimum processor state was 100%. I changed it to a more reasonable number and all was good. But 10-15 minutes later the fan would come back on full blast because that setting has been reverted back to 100%! Every time I reset it, some time later it go back to 100%. I'm not one to leave something like that alone and after a lot of searching the internet and applying updates I found that someone else had discovered the cause. The stock trackpad driver was responsible for constantly changing that power setting!! I found a different version for another laptop and that fixed it. But just imagine how many people that own this exact laptop and it's always hot and gets terrible battery life. All that power management technology and passive cooling completely wasted because of one driver.
- cnvogel 12y ago
  "our driver has a race condition which makes the track pad lock up sometimes, but it only happens when the computer is in powersave. We either need 5 man years to put proper locking of data structures in our horrible spaghetti code , or let Bob's nephew copy and paste this code from the Internet that overrides the windows power profile every 5 minutes "
- nikanj 12y ago
  I should start an online collection of stories like this, so I could refer people to it when they complain about Apple hardware being overpriced and/or only bought by idiots.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    Yeah, an also note awesome laptops like an Acer I got for $400 5 years ago and despite many many hard hits against the floor it still works and has the same battery life length. This is true, but the problem with anecdotal experience is that you can "prove" anything with it.
    - gmac 12y ago
cabirum 12y ago
What did you expect from a $250 device? Or, what did you expect from an 8″ 1200x800 tablet with just 2gb ram and 32gb ssd which comes with a full Windows OS, instead of Win RT? Some phones have more powerful hardware than that. It's not Microsoft's fault that Asus decided to sell a cheap, untested, poorly-built device. It's your fault, as a tech-savvy customer, to buy it.
- dingdingdang 12y ago
  OP explicitly states that the machine was part of Microsoft's "Signature Device" program and as such MS certainly has a responsibility for allowing these hardware specs onto the street. Nonetheless, I totally agree with notion that I would personally never have been caught in that situation due to being able to read tech specs and having internalized rough idea of Windows performance in relation to hardware setup...
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    OP is mistaken. The signature designation only implies that it's free of pre-installed crapware and junkware. If one wants a real Nexus like device(branded Google), then Surface is their friend(made by MS). >as such MS certainly has a responsibility for allowing these hardware specs onto the street And then get sued by the DoJ and split up by a court. Thanks to the antitrust ruling, MS cannot force anything on the OEMs. If you can install Windows on a 512MB RAM machine and sell it, MS can't do shit to stop you.
    - mcintyre1994 12y ago
      Surely Microsoft can choose which devices they put some signature branding on, and which ones they choose to stock in their own retail stores though? They can't control the hardware running Windows but they absolutely should control be aware of what their 'signature' on an OEM device implies.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- 12y ago
letney 12y ago
While the submission title matches the article, it screams linkbait to me. I clicked fully expecting to read about a new 0 day exploit...
- asadlionpk 12y ago
  me too but the story is interesting anyway.
- Blahah 12y ago
  I got a different impression from the title: that this is a report of the first day of the (dramatically named) Microsoft Incident. In this interpretation, which is confirmed by OP's comment [0], the title matches the content. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546229
easytiger 12y ago
There is so much stuff in Windows 8 that I have no idea how it got out of the building. Really incomprehensible. Clearly a cancerous culture in Microsoft ala BlackBerry letting small but insane design choices out the door
- glennos 12y ago
  I used a Windows 8 machine the other day. I've used OSX the last few years, but used Windows for a couple of decades prior. I was so confused. It was difficult to work out how to open apps. I also got stuck in the full screen start menu replacement (whatever that's called) and I had to ask for help to get back to the desktop. Give me XP over 8 any day. Security issues aside, that was a gem of an OS. Seems like the Microsoft OS team hit the panic button soon after iOS & Android gained traction and have been clawing for innovation without considering actual use cases
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    >Give me XP over 8 any day. Security issues aside, that was a gem of an OS. Yeah, security issues aside... Windows 7 is when Microsoft finally got a consumer OS really 'right'.
    - easytiger 12y ago
      No. its still shit. having to reboot constantly is not device grade platform
  - userbinator 12y ago
    I think the security issues are exaggerated (MS certainly has a motivation to get people to buy their latest OS), especially for advanced users and developers who have a good idea of what their system is doing. A lot of the exploits being patched now are based on "user is tricked into doing X", and OSs are increasingly designed to be secure against their users. XP is more hackable (in both senses of the word), but it also gives more freedom.to the user.
- nogridbag 12y ago
raverbashing 12y ago
And then MS will form a committee to investigate why this is not selling, and will conclude that tablets needs a "clippy" helper for the user. Clippy crashes 5 min into power-up. Really. I would've taken into the store and returned it. MS costs a lot in wasted productivity.
- atomicrat2552 12y ago
  Unfortunately, I need it for work and for some other Windows Store dev work I'm doing. So, I'm suffering through it and leaving my impressions in the hope that MS can smooth over this experience later.
chton 12y ago
This may be a stupid question, but is it possible the blog author was given a refurbished device? These all sound like exactly the kind of problems you'd expect from a device that was pre-owned and sloppily reinstalled. Either way, the proper course of action would be to return it to the store right away, especially when it refuses touch input.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  Honestly, I've bought some ASUS gear before, like the EEE PC netbooks as loaners at events and classes. They often have ghost in the machine problems like this. One has, for years, frozen for 1 second ever 15 seconds, no matter what software updates and drivers are applied. I mentioned the issues to some other OEMs in the same country and they just said it is well known ASUS build quality and consistency is generally terrible. I suppose that is why they manage such low prices.
naranha 12y ago
Everybody knows Windows is a pile of garbage. What did you expect ;)?
- macspoofing 12y ago
  I don't know that. I think Windows is the best consumer OS out there.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
gbl08ma 12y ago
The funny thing is, a week ago I bought a 7.5"" 1200x800 tablet with just 2GB of RAM and 32 GB flash (see the similarity?), the difference is that mine is a even cheaper device (~$150) from an unknown Chinese brand, has an apparently slightly weaker Bay Trail CPU, and comes with Windows 8.1 - properly licensed as now Microsoft does it for free for small tablets, but it's by no means a "signature" device. The out-of-the-box experience was much, much, much better than the one from the article. The touchscreen not only worked, it still works fine, even for hitting small menu items or quickly typing on-screen. Sleep/resume (actually, InstantGo) doesn't have any problems, except you can't turn off the screen without desktop apps being suspended, which is annoying in the case of music players - but this is actually a problem with all devices supporting InstantGo. There have been updates to fix early problems, which were already pre-installed on mine. I'm so happy with it, I don't think I'm buying an Android tablet so soon (having great multitasking alone is worth it). Another thing that surprised me, was that there wasn't any OEM bloatware. Say what you will about Microsoft (and I usually say very bad things, and will keep saying), but it seems they really got Windows 8.1 right on tablets (the problem is desktops). If an unknown brand can make a device with the same specs as the mentioned Asus, for a lower price, and still have the device work much, much better, why can't Asus? The "underpowered"/"underpriced" justification some people give here in the comments doesn't quite make it... I have had Windows 8 running on single-core 512 MB RAM VMs just fine, and these devices have four times the RAM and cores.
- lost_my_pwd 12y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, what tablet did you buy and from where?
  - gbl08ma 12y ago
    I didn't say the model and maker of the thing on purpose, because I wasn't advertising/advocating for it, and also because when it comes to cheap devices like this, all you can get is pretty much anecdotal evidence (e.g., the touchscreen on mine works fine, but a few have come out with broken digitizers/too noisy power adapters). The general opinion on the tablet seems good, though, and the thing in question is a Voyo A1 Mini. Mine is the newer, slightly cheaper/less powerful 5V-powered Z3735F variant (vs. 9V Z3735D), bought on Amazon.de - but you can get it cheaper from Chinese-device-focused sites, just watch out for import taxes and the like.
po 12y ago
To me the age of the software sounds a bit like channel-stuffing. Often manufacturers will report on devices as being sold once they've left the factory for the retail store, not when they are in a consumer's hands. Because there is great incentive to report good sales, manufacturers will often negotiate around inventory so that a warehouse somewhere gets filled with devices. These devices then sometimes sit in the channel waiting to be sold (sometimes for quite some time, depreciating in value) but if the device flops then the seller writes it off as a loss and they go to the clearance rack. That's why you can have amazing numbers for 'sales' and then 3 months later the thing is a well-known dud. Device manufacturers that sell directly to consumers tend to report sales when it's been shipped to the final buyer.
freshflowers 12y ago
Year after year I keep reading pretty much the same complaints from the Windows ecosystem I've been hearing since the 90's. It comes with the territory: OS and hardware may not always play nice, and how well they play nice out-of-the-box or after upgrade depends on a lot of factors. This is not an incident, this is business as usual. You like Windows, you should be prepared to deal with. You don't want to deal with this kind of thing, don't use Windows. The only way to avoid this is to use "official" devices. Nexus for Android, Surface for Windows, everything Apple for OSX. Some niche products for certain Linux distro's even. Everything else is rolling the dice, if not at your initial purchase then definitely when you want to upgrade. After so many decades, bitching about it is like bitching about the weather.
nfriedly 12y ago
This is really more of an Ausu issue than a Windows one. Asus makes great motherboards and video cards but the rest of their hardware is rubbish as far as quality control goes.
- icefox 12y ago
  Asus is giving users a bad Windows experience so it very much is a problem for Microsoft to address. This is no different than Google going around and trying as much as it can to force the many companies releasing android devices to put out less junk and keep them up to date. In both cases all we the users know is we picked up a Windows or Android device and it was a horrible experience and so I will probably not do that again.
  - nfriedly 12y ago
    That's a fair point here. But every single time I've bought Asus stuff like this, its had problems out of the box. Even things like monitors, that you would think they could get right, still have issues where it crashes - literally crashes - and you have to unplug it to reboot it. So my general rule of thumb with Asus is: stay the hell away unless you can take the time to return/exchange it 2 or 3 times to get one that works. And never let Asus repair it because they break other things in the process, and they take so long that you can't even return it by the time you get it back.
bane 12y ago
I both buy laptops like this and build my own machines. It's always befuddled me that, when I'm building my own computers and once the hardware is all assembled, the clean OS install usually goes really smoothly and on first boot there's usually no problems and the machines run great. Get the latest updates and now the computer is running like a Swiss watch. But whenever I buy a laptop, there's always something wrong with the way the OS was installed. Weird stuff like the wifi adapter drops every 10 minutes, or the left side of the trackpad doesn't work. Sure enough, I'll just nuke whatever the system came with and install the OS from scratch and it'll work like a charm. It's almost like the manufacturers are trying to fuck up the out of the box experience. It would be better for them 95% of the time just to put together the hardware and install the shipped OS and put it out the door.
Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
Nothing new unfortunately. Sluggish operation, Windows updates take forever. Updates fail, reverting changes, installing ~150 updates more after 8.1 upgrade. Random SDBUS BSOD, reboots, WiFi / 3G connectivity issues. It seems that everything is working badly and update installation failures and blue screens are quite random and common. Eventually after tens of reboots and installing all kind of stuff you'll get everything installed. If you're lucky. Then you'll install upgrades by the device manufacturer, which take long time and require multiple reboots etc. Luckily I'm able to install these in volume as well as tasks are rarely urgent. So I can put tens of tables on table and run updates, after a few hours I'll revisit those, see what the situation is and continue. Yes, it's not consistent, some tables and laptops in the batch can be much slower to install and other faster, others fail and some won't etc. It's just basically absolutely horrible experience. I feel and know very well the feeling you described. Suddenly touch screen is totally unresponsive, or doesn't work at all. You'll need to use USB-keyboard and so on. As well as the sleep mode (aka connected standby) sucks life out of the battery really quickly. Properly hibernating device automatically is made quite hard, but is doable after all.
ksk 12y ago
I rarely have any problems with Windows but this is exactly the reason I root for Microsoft to "lose" in the desktop space. They'll only improve when they're facing some real market pressure. Also, I think having so many manufacturers makes things worse. Other than hardware specs, there really is veryt little to differentiate feature-wise between different PCs. Android is starting to run into this problem as well. The "customizations" and "improvements" aka bloated buggy shit layered on top of the vanilla OS completely messes up the user experience.

176 points by viclou 12y ago

Too 12y ago

Consider yourself lucky you even got windows 8 installed. My lenovo laptop, with a big fat windows 8 sticker on it and win 8 screaming all over the purchase page, came with windows 7 preinstalled. Win 8 came with a bunch of dvds inside the packaging, the laptop does not even have a dvd-player.

yuhong 12y ago
I think this is because a lot of people didn't like Win8.
- toupeira 12y ago
  If that was the reason they wouldn't try so hard to give the impression that it is indeed running Windows 8.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    They probably manufactured all the computers with the W8 stickers on them and then hastily dumped a W7 disk image on the hard disk of each one of them to stop users from complaining. But yes, the fact that the computer has no DVD drive to upgrade to W8 from the DVDs is a bit wrong.
nly 12y ago
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-8/create-reset-re...
bluedino 12y ago
We have to pay an extra $50 to have 7 instead of 8 on our Lenovos
ANTSANTS 12y ago
They did you a solid.
gamblor956 12y ago
You can download Windows 8 free online, and enter into the serial on the CDs when it comes time to register. (Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that was fully installable from a downloaded or USB-stick copy.)
- Too 12y ago
  The serial is not written on the CD, it's a lenovo recovery CD, not a pure windows CD. Nor have i found it anywhere else. I guess i could easily get a key from lenovos support but i really don't care much anyway, win 7 works great. I just find the whole experience a great example of how badly pc manufacturers consider the "whole package" experience of their products.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Yikes - if Microsoft would just focus on what they are doing right, and perfecting that (Windows, MSDN, etc) they might have a chance at avoiding these constant and public "fails." I understand every enterprise level business needs to try new things, but it really just seems as thought they need to leave mobile / tablets alone as hard as it may be for them to hear until they have an MVP that murders it and people can't wait for.

ivraatiems 12y ago
In fairness, it sounds like this was Asus, not Microsoft's fault.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  Microsoft's fault here is that they haven't tested products that they are selling in the own Store. Or they have, they saw the issues and they decided to go with the selling anyways. It's a logistical/delivery issue on the Store end, but it does reflect badly on Microsoft as a whole.
- msh 12y ago
  Microsoft sold it as a signature device, so it's just as much their fault.
  - wfjackson 12y ago
    Again, all it means is that it's OEM crapware free.
    - Brian-Puccio 12y ago
      So if the OEM didn't install anything aside from a completely standard (albeit old) Windows 8 install, then this is Microsoft's intended behavior of Windows? What else would cause any issues with the OS out-of-the-box aside from OS problems if the OEM didn't add anything?

rtpg 12y ago

I wonder what the Surface experience is like, I can only hope it's better. This also reminds me of when I got world of warcraft CDs and had to spend almost 48 hours just to patch up to the most recent version.

chamakits 12y ago
I have Surface Pro 3, and I absolutely love it ... but it's not without issues. For starters, the price. Although having had it for a while now, and feeling that this is the best tech I've bought in a while, it is pricey. Between the tablet itself, plus warranty, plus the keyboard cover (a must. I love pen and touch, but too many things I use the keyboard for still), it gets pricey quickly. Usability issues, there is this nasty driver bug with it's wifi card, where you get BSOD after waking up from sleep. Don't know if it happens to everyone, but when it happened to me, I searched and found PLENTY people with the issue. The fix is 'easy enough'. Turn off a setting to not keep wifi on while sleeping. This however means, when waking up, I have disconnect and reconnect to my wifi. The fix was very easy to google for too, but not sure if someone non-tech savy would even know what to google for. Also, my first surface had it's touch screen die out on the top half within a month. Apparently also common, but one support ticket to Microsoft and I got a brand new one. Having said that, I will never buy any other laptop other than surface laptops. I am extremely happy with it. I am usually a Linux user, but haven't really missed it much (although I still have it on my desktop for any Linux specific stuff). I use it for developing, occasional drawings, writing notes, diagrams, reading ebooks, browsing in bed. It really is an all in one device, and worth every penny.
- tbrock 12y ago
  Let me get this straight. You bought a tablet you love but every time you want to use it you have to turn the wifi off and back on? How the heck is Microsoft still in business selling garbage like that in their own store which is supposed to curate the "Microsoft experience"?
  - chton 12y ago
    For what it's worth: people with those kinds of issues are rare. Not rare enough, of course, but it's not as if everybody has them. In a way, chamakits's problems demonstrate why Microsoft is still selling them: even if they show serious issues, the rest of the tablet is so good that people will still love it. As an aside, my own Surface displayed a very minor issue with the pen tap location being off by about a millimeter at the top edge of the screen when I first got it. Windows Update fixed it right away. It hasn't shown any issues since then, at all. From what I hear from people I know that also own one, this is more typical than situations with serious problems.

chatman 12y ago

Just get the tablet replaced or call Microsoft support.

cr3ative 12y ago
Yeah, it clearly has hardware issues or a terrible power supply (which can cause some screens to register touches poorly)
- atomicrat2552 12y ago
  Having updated the drivers and OS, it seems that the issues are all fixed by this point (which I'm putting in the Day 1 entry tomorrow). Was a really disconcerting out-of-box experience, though.
mmphosis 12y ago
Yes, take it back to the store for a refund. We took back a Win8 HP and got the money back. Now we have a Win8 Dell. And every-time I hear about a problem, I've repeatedly said "Take it back, and get the money back." Too late now. Too bad, stop telling me about your problems with Windows. I am done with this years ago after going through the process of performing clean installs at least every six months. If I really need to run Windows, and I don't, I use Wine. If Wine doesn't work I fire up Win7 in VirtualBox, get it in, do what I need to do and get out. I hear that Win10 is going to be better. I certainly hope so.
EZ-E 12y ago
Agreed, having to tinker around on a fresh, new device to get it working partially isn't acceptable : take it back. It blows my mind such devices are sold, excepting the consumer to finish the installation and polishing that should have been the manufacturer's job in the first place. Most people won't be able to because it's not their hobby. It's a huge problem, and Windows reputation is really bad because of this, people get awful experiences because of buggy drivers and manufacturers not finishing their jobs.

wvenable 12y ago

I had a similar experience with my Asus Zenbook Prime ultrabook. I noticed that the very loud fan was running a lot faster and more frequently than it should. I checked the power settings and minimum processor state was 100%. I changed it to a more reasonable number and all was good. But 10-15 minutes later the fan would come back on full blast because that setting has been reverted back to 100%! Every time I reset it, some time later it go back to 100%. I'm not one to leave something like that alone and after a lot of searching the internet and applying updates I found that someone else had discovered the cause. The stock trackpad driver was responsible for constantly changing that power setting!! I found a different version for another laptop and that fixed it. But just imagine how many people that own this exact laptop and it's always hot and gets terrible battery life. All that power management technology and passive cooling completely wasted because of one driver.

cnvogel 12y ago
"our driver has a race condition which makes the track pad lock up sometimes, but it only happens when the computer is in powersave. We either need 5 man years to put proper locking of data structures in our horrible spaghetti code , or let Bob's nephew copy and paste this code from the Internet that overrides the windows power profile every 5 minutes "
nikanj 12y ago
I should start an online collection of stories like this, so I could refer people to it when they complain about Apple hardware being overpriced and/or only bought by idiots.
- ivanca 12y ago
  Yeah, an also note awesome laptops like an Acer I got for $400 5 years ago and despite many many hard hits against the floor it still works and has the same battery life length. This is true, but the problem with anecdotal experience is that you can "prove" anything with it.
  - gmac 12y ago

cabirum 12y ago

What did you expect from a $250 device? Or, what did you expect from an 8″ 1200x800 tablet with just 2gb ram and 32gb ssd which comes with a full Windows OS, instead of Win RT? Some phones have more powerful hardware than that. It's not Microsoft's fault that Asus decided to sell a cheap, untested, poorly-built device. It's your fault, as a tech-savvy customer, to buy it.

dingdingdang 12y ago
OP explicitly states that the machine was part of Microsoft's "Signature Device" program and as such MS certainly has a responsibility for allowing these hardware specs onto the street. Nonetheless, I totally agree with notion that I would personally never have been caught in that situation due to being able to read tech specs and having internalized rough idea of Windows performance in relation to hardware setup...
- wfjackson 12y ago
  OP is mistaken. The signature designation only implies that it's free of pre-installed crapware and junkware. If one wants a real Nexus like device(branded Google), then Surface is their friend(made by MS). >as such MS certainly has a responsibility for allowing these hardware specs onto the street And then get sued by the DoJ and split up by a court. Thanks to the antitrust ruling, MS cannot force anything on the OEMs. If you can install Windows on a 512MB RAM machine and sell it, MS can't do shit to stop you.
  - mcintyre1994 12y ago
    Surely Microsoft can choose which devices they put some signature branding on, and which ones they choose to stock in their own retail stores though? They can't control the hardware running Windows but they absolutely should control be aware of what their 'signature' on an OEM device implies.
- deleted 12y ago
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12y ago

letney 12y ago

While the submission title matches the article, it screams linkbait to me. I clicked fully expecting to read about a new 0 day exploit...

asadlionpk 12y ago
me too but the story is interesting anyway.
Blahah 12y ago
I got a different impression from the title: that this is a report of the first day of the (dramatically named) Microsoft Incident. In this interpretation, which is confirmed by OP's comment [0], the title matches the content. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8546229

easytiger 12y ago

There is so much stuff in Windows 8 that I have no idea how it got out of the building. Really incomprehensible. Clearly a cancerous culture in Microsoft ala BlackBerry letting small but insane design choices out the door

glennos 12y ago
I used a Windows 8 machine the other day. I've used OSX the last few years, but used Windows for a couple of decades prior. I was so confused. It was difficult to work out how to open apps. I also got stuck in the full screen start menu replacement (whatever that's called) and I had to ask for help to get back to the desktop. Give me XP over 8 any day. Security issues aside, that was a gem of an OS. Seems like the Microsoft OS team hit the panic button soon after iOS & Android gained traction and have been clawing for innovation without considering actual use cases
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >Give me XP over 8 any day. Security issues aside, that was a gem of an OS. Yeah, security issues aside... Windows 7 is when Microsoft finally got a consumer OS really 'right'.
  - easytiger 12y ago
    No. its still shit. having to reboot constantly is not device grade platform
- userbinator 12y ago
  I think the security issues are exaggerated (MS certainly has a motivation to get people to buy their latest OS), especially for advanced users and developers who have a good idea of what their system is doing. A lot of the exploits being patched now are based on "user is tricked into doing X", and OSs are increasingly designed to be secure against their users. XP is more hackable (in both senses of the word), but it also gives more freedom.to the user.
nogridbag 12y ago

raverbashing 12y ago

And then MS will form a committee to investigate why this is not selling, and will conclude that tablets needs a "clippy" helper for the user. Clippy crashes 5 min into power-up. Really. I would've taken into the store and returned it. MS costs a lot in wasted productivity.

atomicrat2552 12y ago
Unfortunately, I need it for work and for some other Windows Store dev work I'm doing. So, I'm suffering through it and leaving my impressions in the hope that MS can smooth over this experience later.

chton 12y ago

This may be a stupid question, but is it possible the blog author was given a refurbished device? These all sound like exactly the kind of problems you'd expect from a device that was pre-owned and sloppily reinstalled. Either way, the proper course of action would be to return it to the store right away, especially when it refuses touch input.

lnanek2 12y ago
Honestly, I've bought some ASUS gear before, like the EEE PC netbooks as loaners at events and classes. They often have ghost in the machine problems like this. One has, for years, frozen for 1 second ever 15 seconds, no matter what software updates and drivers are applied. I mentioned the issues to some other OEMs in the same country and they just said it is well known ASUS build quality and consistency is generally terrible. I suppose that is why they manage such low prices.

naranha 12y ago

Everybody knows Windows is a pile of garbage. What did you expect ;)?

macspoofing 12y ago
I don't know that. I think Windows is the best consumer OS out there.
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gbl08ma 12y ago

The funny thing is, a week ago I bought a 7.5"" 1200x800 tablet with just 2GB of RAM and 32 GB flash (see the similarity?), the difference is that mine is a even cheaper device (~$150) from an unknown Chinese brand, has an apparently slightly weaker Bay Trail CPU, and comes with Windows 8.1 - properly licensed as now Microsoft does it for free for small tablets, but it's by no means a "signature" device. The out-of-the-box experience was much, much, much better than the one from the article. The touchscreen not only worked, it still works fine, even for hitting small menu items or quickly typing on-screen. Sleep/resume (actually, InstantGo) doesn't have any problems, except you can't turn off the screen without desktop apps being suspended, which is annoying in the case of music players - but this is actually a problem with all devices supporting InstantGo. There have been updates to fix early problems, which were already pre-installed on mine. I'm so happy with it, I don't think I'm buying an Android tablet so soon (having great multitasking alone is worth it). Another thing that surprised me, was that there wasn't any OEM bloatware. Say what you will about Microsoft (and I usually say very bad things, and will keep saying), but it seems they really got Windows 8.1 right on tablets (the problem is desktops). If an unknown brand can make a device with the same specs as the mentioned Asus, for a lower price, and still have the device work much, much better, why can't Asus? The "underpowered"/"underpriced" justification some people give here in the comments doesn't quite make it... I have had Windows 8 running on single-core 512 MB RAM VMs just fine, and these devices have four times the RAM and cores.

lost_my_pwd 12y ago
If you don't mind sharing, what tablet did you buy and from where?
- gbl08ma 12y ago
  I didn't say the model and maker of the thing on purpose, because I wasn't advertising/advocating for it, and also because when it comes to cheap devices like this, all you can get is pretty much anecdotal evidence (e.g., the touchscreen on mine works fine, but a few have come out with broken digitizers/too noisy power adapters). The general opinion on the tablet seems good, though, and the thing in question is a Voyo A1 Mini. Mine is the newer, slightly cheaper/less powerful 5V-powered Z3735F variant (vs. 9V Z3735D), bought on Amazon.de - but you can get it cheaper from Chinese-device-focused sites, just watch out for import taxes and the like.

po 12y ago

To me the age of the software sounds a bit like channel-stuffing. Often manufacturers will report on devices as being sold once they've left the factory for the retail store, not when they are in a consumer's hands. Because there is great incentive to report good sales, manufacturers will often negotiate around inventory so that a warehouse somewhere gets filled with devices. These devices then sometimes sit in the channel waiting to be sold (sometimes for quite some time, depreciating in value) but if the device flops then the seller writes it off as a loss and they go to the clearance rack. That's why you can have amazing numbers for 'sales' and then 3 months later the thing is a well-known dud. Device manufacturers that sell directly to consumers tend to report sales when it's been shipped to the final buyer.

freshflowers 12y ago

Year after year I keep reading pretty much the same complaints from the Windows ecosystem I've been hearing since the 90's. It comes with the territory: OS and hardware may not always play nice, and how well they play nice out-of-the-box or after upgrade depends on a lot of factors. This is not an incident, this is business as usual. You like Windows, you should be prepared to deal with. You don't want to deal with this kind of thing, don't use Windows. The only way to avoid this is to use "official" devices. Nexus for Android, Surface for Windows, everything Apple for OSX. Some niche products for certain Linux distro's even. Everything else is rolling the dice, if not at your initial purchase then definitely when you want to upgrade. After so many decades, bitching about it is like bitching about the weather.

nfriedly 12y ago

This is really more of an Ausu issue than a Windows one. Asus makes great motherboards and video cards but the rest of their hardware is rubbish as far as quality control goes.

icefox 12y ago
Asus is giving users a bad Windows experience so it very much is a problem for Microsoft to address. This is no different than Google going around and trying as much as it can to force the many companies releasing android devices to put out less junk and keep them up to date. In both cases all we the users know is we picked up a Windows or Android device and it was a horrible experience and so I will probably not do that again.
- nfriedly 12y ago
  That's a fair point here. But every single time I've bought Asus stuff like this, its had problems out of the box. Even things like monitors, that you would think they could get right, still have issues where it crashes - literally crashes - and you have to unplug it to reboot it. So my general rule of thumb with Asus is: stay the hell away unless you can take the time to return/exchange it 2 or 3 times to get one that works. And never let Asus repair it because they break other things in the process, and they take so long that you can't even return it by the time you get it back.

bane 12y ago

I both buy laptops like this and build my own machines. It's always befuddled me that, when I'm building my own computers and once the hardware is all assembled, the clean OS install usually goes really smoothly and on first boot there's usually no problems and the machines run great. Get the latest updates and now the computer is running like a Swiss watch. But whenever I buy a laptop, there's always something wrong with the way the OS was installed. Weird stuff like the wifi adapter drops every 10 minutes, or the left side of the trackpad doesn't work. Sure enough, I'll just nuke whatever the system came with and install the OS from scratch and it'll work like a charm. It's almost like the manufacturers are trying to fuck up the out of the box experience. It would be better for them 95% of the time just to put together the hardware and install the shipped OS and put it out the door.

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago

Nothing new unfortunately. Sluggish operation, Windows updates take forever. Updates fail, reverting changes, installing ~150 updates more after 8.1 upgrade. Random SDBUS BSOD, reboots, WiFi / 3G connectivity issues. It seems that everything is working badly and update installation failures and blue screens are quite random and common. Eventually after tens of reboots and installing all kind of stuff you'll get everything installed. If you're lucky. Then you'll install upgrades by the device manufacturer, which take long time and require multiple reboots etc. Luckily I'm able to install these in volume as well as tasks are rarely urgent. So I can put tens of tables on table and run updates, after a few hours I'll revisit those, see what the situation is and continue. Yes, it's not consistent, some tables and laptops in the batch can be much slower to install and other faster, others fail and some won't etc. It's just basically absolutely horrible experience. I feel and know very well the feeling you described. Suddenly touch screen is totally unresponsive, or doesn't work at all. You'll need to use USB-keyboard and so on. As well as the sleep mode (aka connected standby) sucks life out of the battery really quickly. Properly hibernating device automatically is made quite hard, but is doable after all.

ksk 12y ago

I rarely have any problems with Windows but this is exactly the reason I root for Microsoft to "lose" in the desktop space. They'll only improve when they're facing some real market pressure. Also, I think having so many manufacturers makes things worse. Other than hardware specs, there really is veryt little to differentiate feature-wise between different PCs. Android is starting to run into this problem as well. The "customizations" and "improvements" aka bloated buggy shit layered on top of the vanilla OS completely messes up the user experience.