Okay, to start off: I’ve been using Windows for as long as I can remember using computers. As a little kid, I used my father’s Windows XP laptop to watch YouTube and play Pinball. Later on, my parents digged up a Windows 3.11 beast, on which I mainly played the few games it had and toyed around with various settings. I spoke no English at the time, which made it even more fun.
So we’ve established I grew up with Windows and I should probably like it. And I do like it: it’s a great productivity tool once you get used to it and things just work. But sometimes, they don’t. And what infuriates me is that the things that don’t work are either the most obscure, forgotten features in the world, or the most commonly used interactions in the entire system.
Have you ever tried to update and shut down a Windows PC? It’s been an option for several years now, but every single time I’ve tried to click on “Update & Shut down”, the PC has instead updated and restarted, which is endlessly annoying, since I usually shut down before bed, so now I have to walk over and shut it down again from the lockscreen. Why?! How is it possible that this has been happening to me on at least 2 different PCs for as long as the feature has existed and still hasn’t been fixed? This isn’t happening to just me either… So annoying!
I actually tried to update and shutdown again a few days ago when it popped up in the Start menu. I’ll let you guess what actually happened:
- It worked;
- It updated, but restarted.
Drumrolls please… neither! Windows decided not to update and then restarted! Because why would it do any of the two things it said it’s going to do?
Today was the absolute cherry on top. I was in bed reading a book and got quite annoyed at the humming from my PC, so I lazily decided to connect to it via Remote Desktop on my phone, and shut it down – this has worked numerous times before. I did click the button and even saw the screen saying “Shutting down”. I thought to myself – “Great!” Alas, two hours later I realised my PC was still making noise. So what happened? Windows had single-handledly decided to abort shutting down for whatever reason (the only app running was Discord, which doesn’t prevent it). I have no idea what happened, but what I do know is that I had to channel my annoyance somewhere, which somehow led you to reading this. Honestly, if you’ve stuck around after so much of my whining, you deserve an award.
I have a couple of devices – an iPhone, an Amazon Fire tablet running Android (which I’m using to write this article right now), my Windows PC and a laptop running Arch Linux. No other device has trouble shutting down. In fact, Linux takes the prize on this: writing shutdown -h now fully stops the thing within 5-6 seconds. Amazing! Maybe Microsoft could look into hiring those awesome engineers from OpenAI to work on the shutdown feature of Windows. Surely if they can create AI video successfully, they could maybe fix shutdown? What do I know, I’m not the company that has been developing operating systems for the most of its existence… :/
i use arch btw