why I hate Microsoft, reason #472

Or: Why Microsoft Doesn’t Win Friends and Influence People

I have both a desktop and a laptop computer. Both run Windows 10. On my laptop Windows has been telling me that a recent Windows update installation failed. Some research told me that this is a known problem and in most cases the installation succeeded and the failure was being incorrectly reported. However, Windows kept telling me that I had an update ready and I needed to restart my computer. Every time after the restart it told me that the installation failed and Windows Update kept insisting that my Windows installation was out of date and my computer was at risk. It was the same update each time, by the way.

I continued to search answers.microsoft.com for any resolution to this issue. Finally, recently, I saw mention of an April update to Windows 10 and I found a pointer to a manual installation tool. It turns out that this was a major update and took several hours.

When it was all done Windows told me, “Oh, by the way, you no longer have Homegroup.”

Say what? Are you kidding me? I regularly share files between my desktop and laptop using Homegroup. How aggravating. It seems that Microsoft wants everyone using OneDrive. My perspective is that Microsoft knows enough about me as it is and I’m not going to log in with my Microsoft ID to manage files between computers.

I should be able to share files between the two computers with the build-in Windows networking capability even without Homegroup, but right now my laptop can’t see my desktop. grrr…

There are workarounds. I have Dropbox on both systems and will use that. It’s a bit more effort than using Homegroup but not a terrible inconvenience. Still, Microsoft should not be breaking things that worked previously.