This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.
Bill gates does not know basic windows usage lol
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
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My windows "start" menu takes at least a full minute to open. Then, when I select, say, Control Panel, it takes another full minute, totally blank with no options
I'm not a programmer or even smart, but isn't that absolute shite? I've used Commodores, Apple II, Macs, 386, 486, have used windows since first job (I don't remember my first Windows version, but it played Tetris in color. Three? haha 3)
Menus have always worked before.
My next laptop will be linux Mint because I like mint ice cream. Does it have menus that open? I am super excited.
I apologize but it made me really mad and now i feel better.
Don't wait for the next laptop, just install Linux now.
It sounds like your laptop is completely unusable anyway, and you can dual boot while you're figuring out if everything works
it's good to do it on a new laptop. It makes migration easier to have the old system alive next to it
it's good to do it on a new laptop. It makes migration easier to have the old system alive next to it
that's why they recommended "dual boot"
that's not "alive next to it". you can't see both at the same time
I have a laptop from work that runs Windows 11 and have the same experience with the unusable start menu. I wasn't allowed to install Linux on the machine. I run Linux on every other machine I have and have used Linux since the 90s.
However after complaining and begging with IT I was allowed to try running Linux on it. It's a managed machine, so I had to do a dual boot from a second drive IT installed for me. If it worked out and IT was happy, I could run Linux.
Unfortunately it was a total failure. The big issue is the CPU is AMD and has on-board graphics that are normally used for everything. However there is also a Nvidia GPU, I think an RTX Pro, which is used for acceleration stuff. In Windows this works well enough, the AMD handles most of the regular display stuff and is plenty powerful for that. The Nvidia gets used to offload certain workloads, to make sure the laptop is usable for certain kinds of software. On Linux this is a configuration that simply isn't supported or working at all. Either it just won't boot or do graphics at all or it's extremely slow and/or unstable or with some effort the Nvidia chip can be completely disabled and just the AMD is used. Basically turning a $2500 laptop into a $1000 one and unable to run certain workloads. Now getting some of that software to run would be hard anyways, as it's not typical software and only supported on certain versions of Windows. But I hadn't even gotten to that stage.
The whole experience reminded me of getting Linux to run on my laptop back in 2002. An unstable mess with half the features missing. Back then I loved the challenge and when I finally got the thing to ping over the PCMCIA wifi card I was super happy. Never did get the sound working on that laptop tho.
Obviously I aborted the experiment and have just accepted Windows 11. It's fucking awful and I bitch about it every time I need to use that machine. But for now, there doesn't seem to be a better option.
I'm surprised they let you dual boot a managed machine, since the Linux installation likely isn't running any of their management software. At my work, we're not allowed to dual-boot, but at least they support Fedora. (their production servers use CentOS and Fedora is close enough that they can reuse a lot of management infrastructure like Chef recipes across both)
See if there's a setting in the BIOS to always use the Nvidia graphics. It'll use more power but should be more reliable.
Hybrid graphics is notoriously buggy on Linux, especially reverse PRIME. Reverse PRIME is used when the video output port on the laptop (DisplayPort, HDMI, whatever) is physically wired to the discrete GPU, but the system is the integrated GPU. There's a well-known bug with reverse PRIME where the screen only updates at 1fps when only using an external monitor (laptop screen is disabled).
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That's because Windows 11 now uses React Native for a lot of things, including parts of the Start Menu. So something that shouldn't be, is extremely resource intensive.
But don't turn on the "display seconds" in the clock option. That would be an energy and resource waste, as the clock widget would have to be redrawn every second instead of every minute! Also, here's copilot. Talk to it, we need you to use it to justify all the resources we've wasted on it's development.
Mint runs like a scalded dog on my hand-me-down Dell laptop. Yes, the menus work. I'd bet it runs amazing on newer hardware.
That's a high-voltage simile right there, goddamn
Edit: and yes, on my high end custom rig it goes like greased shit through a... Lightning... Pig?
It's one I picked up from one of my very country uncles when I was young. It just stuck.
It's marginally better than "runs like a raped ape", as another , more city uncle used to say. Thankfully this boomer ass gem did not stick in my speech patterns.
Edit: damn yakko, that is the first time I have seen you lose your way with words.
Awoken at 4 will do that. I'm beyond coffee.
Sometimes I prefer a malaphor though (or possibly it's malaprop when it's a simile?)
Fair enough, but oof, I hope your day becomes more agreeable.
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Yeah I only use windows at work now, ditched it at home. The start menu takes over a minute to open, and then when it does it ignores clicks for another minute.
Then whenever I want to run outlook I have to search because the start menu doesnt let me set favourites. And I have to wait when I type in Outlook because the first search brings the crappy built in version of outlook (which I have clicked on more than once to be immensely frustrated to see it open) and then wait until "Outlook (classic)" appears and click that.
I discovered some of my less technically able colleagues gave up on Outlook because they assumed it wasn't installed and use the web interface instead. And that is just one of numerous daily frustrations I get with Windows.
Honestly, Windows is now a big steaming pile of crap. All my home devices are on Linux, and I only use Windows at work because I have no choice.
Laggy GUIs make me want to scream
Back in the early 2000s someone said "a experienced Windows user doesn't notice a little bit of lagging"
That's not my experience but I'm not trying to run Windows on a 30 year old computer.
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This is from 2003 for those who haven't noticed
23 years later, not much has improved.
It is even much worse now.
And they never did fix any of that shit 🤣
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy.
🤣
So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.
It is not there.
What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1, Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.
Garbage indeed.
I had completely forgotten just how awful microsofts websites were back in the early 00's. Gates saying the site kept timing out or would go down all time is very much true and happened with everyone. Microsoft's website would CONSTANTLY time out. downloading ANYTHING via microsoft was an absolute crap shoot if it would actually download or not.
I remember having a computer in the late 90s that only came with Netscape. In order to play games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter online more easily than direct IP connection to someone you had to use Microsofts Internet Gaming Zone. in order to use that you HAD to have Internet Explorer, it wouldn't work with Netscape. So you'd have to spend an entire day downloading IE and MOST of the time the download would time out or crash so THEN you had to use a download manager to prevent you from losing progress on the download for when Microsofts site would go down which again, was constantly. updating the OS was even more painful as again Microsofts online service would always go down.
If you think Microsoft is bad now, man it was A LOT worse back in the day for reliability.
Omfg, and let us not forget that it was the world's biggest knowledge base containing precisely zero quantifiable knowledge.
yup if something went wrong with Windows you might as well just try to fix it based purely on hopes and dreams or pray to whatever god you believed in that there was someone who knew the answer in some random IRC room. the "troubleshooting" crap on the MS website was absolutely worthless. and chances are the site would just timeout on you before you could actually find anything.
My mom basically found herself as the person who fixed printers at the school at which she worked, and this was before anybody had much of a clue about computers (our family was kind of ahead in tech).
She ended up getting some free "MS tech net" subscription which I used, it was just as worthless as the public facing stuff. I will say though, back when having real ms software actually meant something, having access to infinite license versions of most of their stuff was pretty cool.
They're all just idiots, amazing
Some of the internal emails are interesting. Brutal for poor Dave.
But, if you want nothing revolutionary and want to band-aid (which is fine and understandable) then I agree with your plan to give it to Dave.
Painfully hard to even read. I guess when you are the boss you just write however you want.
I wouldn't mind seeing more. Oh well, the site wants a paid subscription to view more? LOLOLOLOL. No way in hell. The internet has gone to shit.
So many managers
Bill should have just pirated WMM
You wouldn't download a Bill Gates.
The silver lining was that Bill never had to experience movie maker. That would've been a whole extra email.
Win 98 was the last good one. Easy network setup, no spaghetti settings.
And he's correct; installing and removing software via the software tab was comfortable and polluting it with random sub packages is killing its use.
But this shows, there was no canonical way to publish software. A manager oversight from bill himself at the time probably.
Plus this makes me wonder if he was using a different system normally or was not a power user.
Also lol bro owning means you pass the issue to your team and rake in the promotion when they fixed it.
Win98 was trash, which is why Win98SE was a free upgrade. Now you may have meant SE, but those are distinctly different versions, which is required to follow the rule of every other OS release being trash. SE was followed by ME (trash, recommended daily reboot), followed by XP (good, merging of the NT and old windows line, still able to play most games with the compatibility layer, 3 GB Memory addressing, etc.).
You missed Win 2k. I ran that for a long time.
Win2k was the NT line, which was generally more stable than the main Windows line, but couldn't play games well and didn't have any real consumer penetration. WinNT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4, then Win2k (the first server version to not use standard version numbers), then WinXP, which was the version that merged the home and workstation/server lines, but also continued the home version tradition of sucking badly every other version. Vista, 8, and now 11 fall into that list.
I did use 2k back in the day and while it wasn't as good as XP, it was a serviceable work platform. Don't ask me about any issues on the server side, I did very little with that.
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CEOs and CTOs really need to start caring about their products this much again. These days I'd be surprised if any big tech CEOs even go through the new user setup and onboarding experience and provide detailed feedback like this.
It's a symptom of billionaires. The CTO needs to make the CEO happy, and the CEO needs to make a whole board happy. The board needs to make the investors happy.Who are the investors? Greedy billionaires. Sometimes the board too.
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shower thought after reading that email:
i wonder if Bill secretly started using Linux after that
Probably why he does philanthropy.
"God, the company I started has such a reputation as the evil monopolist that we can't even hire talented programmers to make our system decently usable. There's not enough money in the universe that could convince people to work for us. I have to repair the world."
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