This blog posting represents the views of the author, David Fosberry. Those opinions may change over time. They do not constitute an expert legal or financial opinion.

If you have comments on this blog posting, please email me .

The Opinion Blog is organised by threads, so each post is identified by a thread number ("Major" index) and a post number ("Minor" index). If you want to view the index of blogs, click here to download it as an Excel spreadsheet.

Click here to see the whole Opinion Blog.

To view, save, share or refer to a particular blog post, use the link in that post (below/right, where it says "Show only this post").

Microsoft: Bad Engineering Or Bad Business Ethics?

Posted on 12th March 2023

Show only this post
Show all posts in this thread (Software).

Sheryl's laptop, an ASUS built for Windows 8 and since upgraded to Windows 10, is old and underpowered, and has been getting gradually slower due to software bloat. Last year I decided to do something about it, which involved:

  1. Removing non-essential applications,
  2. Deleting unneeded files (cache, downloaded files, etc.),
  3. Defragmenting and optimising the C: drive.

This made the machine significantly faster, and lasted about a week, after which the laptop became so slow as to be unusable:

  • Taking 5 minutes to shutdown and even longer to boot up,
  • Taking 2 hours to open a simple spreadsheet,
  • Taking too long to open any application, or even to open system menus,
  • Being unable to maintain connection to the network drives (data stored on my server) - once the connection is lost, only a reboot will restore it (if you are lucky),
  • Taking hours to do operating system updates.

I recently found out what the problem is. Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade to Windows 11, even users like Sheryl whose hardware is not capable of running Windows 11.

What happens is that the update service tries to perform the upgrade. Once the software is downloaded, the operating system tries to perform the upgrade, and it fails because the computer doesn't meet the hardware requirements. It then tries again, and again, and again, ad infinitum. The attempts to upgrade grab all the system resources (Internet bandwidth, a large amount of disc space, RAM and CPU capacity), effectively disabling other, user initiated tasks (which run at lower priority).

This is effecting millions of users around the world, and begs the question: is this bad engineering or bad business ethics on the part of Microsoft? There are relatively simple ways to avoid this disruption, by better engineering, so why didn't Microsoft employ them? The fact that they didn't bother, and rolled out badly engineered software (again!) suggests bad business ethics, so the answer seems to be that this is both bad engineering and bad business ethics.

Luckily, there is a solution. It is possible to manually disable the update service, but only temporarily; the operating system will restart it after a while (10 to 30 days). There is, however, a piece of free software that you can download to disable updates long-term (you can re-enable the later, if you choose).

I became fed up with Microsoft's arrogance, poor security, expensive software licences, bad performance and lack of user control a long time ago, and use Linux for nearly everything. I use a Windows 7 (which you can still buy on Amazon) virtual machine for access to Outlook and MS-Office, and Linux for everything else. My Linux laptop runs:

  • Thunderbird (for email, if I don't need the features of Outlook),
  • GIMP (the best graphical editor),
  • Bluefish (a context-sensitive text editor that understands HTML, SQL, CSS, C/C++, Perl, PHP, Python, etc., and suggest auto-completion in most of those languages),
  • 4 different web-browsers,
  • Skype,
  • A MySql database client,
  • A media player (VLC),
  • An audio player (RhythmBox),
  • LibreOffice,
  • ProjectLibre,
  • A photo manager application,
  • virtual manager, for running and providing access to virtual machines,
  • and much more.

All of the above are free. Updates are only performed with user approval, at a time that suits me.

Some of of you might want to consider a change from Windoze to Linux (I use Ubuntu Linux), especially if you are suffering from system slowdown caused by Microsoft and their upgrade policy.