Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

So-called upgrades that ruin good programs

<< < (3/5) > >>

Darwin:
Windows 8.1...

Joe Hone:
Adobe Audition 5.5 was so bad that in some ways it reverted back to before the final version of Cool Edit Pro, which was the platform Adobe bought and renamed Audition. It has taken two full revisions since to get it caught back up, but Adobe is catching some heat for the subscription model and Creative Cloud only work environment.

40hz:
Windows 8.1...
-Darwin (October 22, 2013, 08:10 PM)
--- End quote ---

This.

tomos:
Windows 8.1...
-Darwin (October 22, 2013, 08:10 PM)
--- End quote ---

This.-40hz (October 22, 2013, 09:05 PM)
--- End quote ---

either of you care to expand a little :)
Was it to do with How to avoid creating/using a Microsoft Account when upgrading to Win 8.1 - or does it get even worse...

Darwin:
Hi Tomos - I'm keeping a list by my computer and it's a work in progress, but I'll share. Background - my 5 year old Gateway notebook came with Vista Home 32 bit preinstalled and I loved it. I upgraded to Vista Professional 64bit so that I could access 4GB of DDR2 RAM (I upgraded from 3). Vista was great as I had it configured and I was ostracized in my community for saying good things about it. Upgraded the HDD to 320GB 7200 rpm and the CPU to a T9300 Core 2 Duo running at 2.5Ghz. Life was good. Upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit for free because I hosted a party pre-launch. Liked it (given how smooth Vista was for me, 7 wasn't much of a change) but grew to love it. Upgraded to Windows 8 Professional when it was released. Loved it - never missed the start menu/windows button. Upgraded to a 240GB SSD and achieved computing nirvana. Incredible boot times, instantaneous Office 2013 program launches, instantaneous searches - if I wanted to launch a program, I just hit the windows key and started typing the name. A list of matches appeared as I typed. I clicked on the title I wanted a "Bam!" it opened. My only gripe was that for some reason it wouldn't sleep (it always rebooted when I tried to wake it). Windows 8.1 looked poised to fix that issue. On Black Friday, I went to the Windows Store and there it was, a free update to 8.1. Throwing caution and good sense to the wind, I upgraded without performing a backup...

The update downloaded and installed very quickly and for the first 24 hours or so all was well. Then, disaster...

Here's my list of issues:

1 My wifi connection randomly drops to "limited connectivity". I try to disconnect/reconnect and then am entirely unable to connect to my network without rebooting the computer
2 The system takes a good 2 minutes to boot (up from about 30 seconds). The bulk of the extra time occurs after typing in my Password. I just watch the circle going round and round and wait for the desktop to load. Before 8.1 as soon as I hit ENTER the Metro start page appeared.
3 When I use the search feature now, my CPU usage spikes to 99% and explorer.exe freezes for minutes. For example, if I hit the windows key and type "Word" 66% of the time no drop down list of choices appears and everything freezes. After a minute or more the Word popup appears letting me know that it's loading. This takes another 20 to 30 seconds. bizarrely, if I hit the windows key and then use the mouse to find and select the Word tile, it loads instantly, as under 8.
4 Until I used Perfect Updater to update all the drivers on my system yesterday afternoon, my computer was throwing up BSOD pages and shutting down in the middle of innocuous operations like typing a posting to a forum. I averaged about 3 BSOD a day until then. Fingers crossed, but this doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.
5 as mentioned above, explorer.exe freezes or crashes altogether. The crashing seems to have sorted itself out, but it still freezes for periods of time. I just hit the windows key to check this and it only froze for about 10 seconds. However, I've been looking at Excel's loading windows for about a minute. There, it just loaded (my son came in to talk to me as it loaded, so I didn't get to time it exactly).

That's it for now. Some of these issues have evened out for one reason or another - explorer.exe is more stable and the freeze that occurs when I use windows key/search/launch is about 50% shorter than before. Still very present and annoying, though. My internet connectivity seems to be more stable. However, this computer is FAR from the machine it was a little over a week ago. I was pretty smug - had a five year old notebook running the latest OS and Office Suite and it was quicker than far newer machines with HDDs and the most stable computer I've ever had.

What have I tried over the past four days? Well, disabling services, uninstalling redundant software, updating drivers, trawling the internet reading lots of stories about other people's issues and hoping for solutions. There aren't many... This Microsoft forum is pretty informative: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/performance?tab=QnA I'll keep working at it... Given the choice, I'd go back to Windows 8 but I can't stomach having to reinstall everything from scratch. This is the first time I've ever had a Windows update almost cripple a system, and I've been using Windows for over 20 years (and DOS before that).

Heed the cautionary notes to backup your system before updating (what kills me that is that usually I do!)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page