You might remember from Windows 7 that it can install updates on the fly and then tell you it wants to restart automatically within a certain timeframe. Usually it gives an option to postpone the restart. Under Windows 8 the system will not let you postpone these restarts indefinitely and will force your system to restart at a certain time, no ifs or buts. You can turn this off, but it rankles that this is actually the default setting for 8. It rankles even more that this is one of two ways when Windows can force your system to restart without asking you to save any work before it shuts down your computer. The other time is if an installation needs your computer to restart. For example I just installed a new version of iTunes, and it put up a restart dialog box. I accidentally clicked the button that said to restart the computer and Windows restarted immediately by terminating all the open windows without bothering to check if anything needed to be saved or not. When it came back, as usual, Excel had recovered files. That is all very well for Excel, but not every application has this capability. There have been enough times I have lost data from open applications because of the forced restart. It is total hypocrisy considering if you click Shutdown yourself, it asks applications if they want to save anything. (As it turned out, I did lose data from QGis because of the forced close. Not much data, but enough to make me really, really mad at Microsoft)
These are more reasons why Windows 8 is becoming a tiresome operating system to have on my home computer. In fact now that I have three computers, I am slowly coming to the point where I am considering wiping Windows 8 off the most expensive one, and reinstalling it on a server edition instead, or maybe Windows 7. The fact that Microsoft considers it acceptable to kill running applications without checking if they need to save first, is one of the reasons I am growing to hate Windows 8. Some of the other reasons have already been canvassed and they tend to go along the same lines. The overall theme of Windows 8 is that Microsoft owns your computer and can behave like they want with it. If you run an application that MS doesn’t approve of, the default smartscreen response is to say the app was blocked. It is only if you click on a non intuitive link for more details that you can get the app to be unblocked. Forcing your computer to be restarted by a certain time and date may be acceptable on a work computer but not on a home one. These are examples of how Microsoft considers that it owns your computer once you install their OS on it. They are all for a certain end. And the idiots at Redmond especially the moron Sinofsky whose head has just rolled and the chief jester Ballmer, should be really really really ashamed of themselves for putting this operating system out and foisting it on an unsuspecting public. And that view is without all the other reasons that people don’t like Windows 8. So far as I can see, Windows 8 is for tablets, not for anything you do any serious work on, and that is how people should treat it.