The time I lose with Windows is insane ✍️
Yesterday I restarted my laptop. Twice.
When I started working in the morning, it was slow. Programs took a lot of time to open, text didn't show immediately after typing, the task manager froze,... After selecting restart, I was notified that apps were preventing a restart, but not showing which ones. Hitting restart only got me a spinning wheel, so the only thing I could do was a hard shutdown by keeping the power button pressed down.
Afterwards, I was prompted to log in. The first thing I noticed was that my screens were duplicated, instead of the extended setting, which I always use. After fixing this and waiting a long time again for all programs and background processes to load, I got to work.
After lunch, my system felt sluggish again, and another restart was needed. Similar to before, apps were preventing a restart, hitting restart gave a spinning wheel and a hard shutdown was needed.
This time, I waited longer before powering up my laptop again to ensure all caches were cleared. That seems to have worked, as I've been able to work up until now.
So much time lost.
And this is not a standalone event.
Windows has been buggy in my experience, for as long as I can remember.
I bought my first laptop 20 years ago, where I was very unfortunate to get one with Windows Vista installed on it. It had a lot of issues, and only a few months after my purchase, I traded it for an Apple MacBook. I never had issues afterwards, performance was great, and it allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do. Years have gone by, and I’m still using MacBooks, simply replacing one with another when their time was due.
The rest of the family is using our MacBook as well, meaning that users remain logged in, programs remain open, yet all without issues. We almost never restart our device, and it never feels slow.
But man, with Windows, I seem to be unlucky and always have issues.
I'm not a heavy user. I mean, I don't run programs that can bring devices to their knees. Like 3D rendering, photo- or creative editing, local LLMs,...
I rely on the Microsoft stack, browsers and a few extra programs.
Contacting our IT support, they could not figure out what was wrong. To help with performance issues, I got extra RAM memory, which helps. But still, frequent restarts are needed and glitches occur more than I would want.
To list a few:
- Being pushed to run an update, but seeing afterwards that the update was not applied
- Doing a restart and having to reconfigure my screen settings
- Opening a program on a non-existent 3rd screen
- Bluetooth disabled, requiring a restart
- Random restarts when my laptop was in sleep mode
- Slow performance when a Windows update is pending
All of these issues result in a lot of time lost. Getting frustrated. As well as loss of productivity, as I'm pulled out of my flow.
My device is managed by my company, so perhaps it's a combination of the processes they enforce on my device and the programs and actions I'm taking.
And maybe I'm at fault for not shutting down or restarting my device often enough. But who is doing that nowadays? Marge also has a corporate-owned device that she never restarts, yet she never faces the issues that I experience.
I have more than a year to go with this one, after which I'm hopefully free of all issues.
But for now, I need to remain patient and live with the frustrations that come with using Windows.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
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