[Afforess]

For all the improvements to Windows that have come from Microsoft thanks Nadella & co., it is still rather shocking to realize Windows has no public bug tracker, and no real way to report these issues besides screaming loudly and hoping someone in Redmond hears you. It's even worse customer service than Google, which is quite an achievement.

[ThoAppelsin]

Rather unconventional, but Windows 10 on desktop and mobile do have a Feedback Hub [1] where Windows 10 users are able to provide all sorts of feedback, either as a suggestion or a problem. All the feedbacks are public and users can freely vote them up to draw more attention on them. The more vote they have, the more likely they receive a response from the developers and also get the priority in the queue of issues to be resolved.

I use it every so often when I notice something peculiar. None of my feedbacks actually became so popular. Even then I know one of them has been fixed. The fix probably didn't come because I have pointed it out, but I was happy about it regardless.

I couldn't find a web-link to the Hub, so I think it is not entirely public, but surely available to the Windows 10 users.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4021566/windows-10-...

[oldmanhorton]

As a Microsoft employee, I can say that that feedback is taken pretty seriously in most teams, especially if the description is good or if the problem recorder/screenshot tool is used. It's not all based on up votes.

[metalliqaz]

Well then I'll report something about how my PC refuses to stay asleep after I tell it to sleep.

[MLR]

This happens to mine if I have an update pending, worth checking if it's an intermittent issue.

[metalliqaz]

I've dug into it several times. First it was network adapter, which for some reason had a default setting to wake on any received packet (lol, wut?). Then it was waking because there was some setting deep in the system about waking up for scheduled operations. (not scheduled tasks, but timers within individual processes... why???) Now it started again but this time the power management tools report no reason for the wake.

[hfdgiutdryg]

Do you have a Display port monitor, by any chance?

After adding one, I found out that when the display goes to sleep, Windows sees it as a disconnection, and 'helpfully' wakes up to reorganize all the windows onto one display. That wakes up the Display port monitor, which triggers another reorganization, and the cycle begins again.

[Splines]

> Now it started again but this time the power management tools report no reason for the wake.

I ran into this after building a system and it was very frustrating. IIRC my problems were related to my network card and having virtualbox installed. Also turning off wake for my mouse helped (bumping the desk would turn on the computer).

[libso]

An independently powered external HDD connected to your PC can also wake it up. I had this problem as well but haven't found a solution that doesn't stop me from using my current setup.

[vardump]

I had same issue, no reason for wakeups at all.

Wasn't any device, like network adapter and power diagnostics returned nothing.

Solution: reset motherboard NVRAM. No more mystery wakeups!

[abandonliberty]

My screen keeps on coming back on rather than turning off. Got any leads on that?

[lostmsu]

Did you enable Windows Hello?

[egeozcan]

This doesn't look like a bug tracker, this looks more like a forum overrun by an angry mob.

https://i.imgur.com/mUkcQh5.png

[MikusR]

So a typical large bug tracker.

[egeozcan]

A typical unmaintained bug tracker.

An opposite case: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Heh, yeah, I'm not buying it. How long has the "Windows 10 Start Menu stopped working" bug been around now? And the most consistent fix is still to just do an in-place reinstall?

[setquk]

Yep. This shoots me in the face at least once a week. Also two other problems:

1. The start menu latency is now so bad you have to forcibly wait 2-3 seconds before typing your search after hitting the start button. This is on a stacked E5 Xeon workstation class machine.

2. Search is crap. I can type "visual" and visual studio doesn't come up!?!?

[olyjohn]

Classic Shell. There is literally zero usable improvement in the new Start Menu. With how buggy it is, it's literally only worse than it ever has been.

[setquk]

I was using that but apparently development is now dead http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8147

[snailmailman]

I noticed recently that typing “eclipse” or any variant thereof won’t find eclipse. (On my machine, anyway) I have to do “java eclipse” or something.

Some of the problems I understand; “regedit” has to match exactly because it’s basically doing the “run” dialog box. But no idea why other stuff can’t be searched for.

[jve]

Yeah, Windows 10 search is garbage. Sometimes it even wont find anything at all. Sometimes, searching for control panel items you may find not so helpful results.

[nasredin]

"Everything" from VoidTools is a good alternative. Very fast too.

[dboreham]

Hmm...excited to hear that I can stop devoting time to figuring out why my wife's laptop constantly runs its fan due to service processes that constantly burn CPU!

[Bjartr]

This drives me nuts. I wouldn't even mind all of this stuff going on in the background (since it ostensibly improves stability in the long run) but for God's sake Microsoft, keep it in the background! More and more over the years cats background tasks related to updates and security are hogging my cpu or saturating my disk or internet I/O while I'm in the middle of using my computer. I'm away from my computer most of the day, but no, go ahead and run all that stuff during the three hours I want to use it, certainly don't respect the preferences I set saying that exactly that time isn't okay.

[nasredin]

You can hear the fan from another room on my laptop!

Thanks svchost.exe!

I disabled updates, but it still does... something while I am sleeping.

[dboreham]

It seems these days you need 8 cores because 5-6 of them will be kept busy running someone's CPU-spinning bug.

[marsrover]

I've been pretty descriptive about my desire to have Programmer Dvorak added to the list of available keyboard mappings.

[cm2187]

For suggestions Windows Server has a uservoice website. Not sure how often the windows team (if there is still such a team since the reorg) looks at it.

But as a non professional developer-windows user, I don't feel like it is my job to spend some time filling a detailed bug report with crash dump and reproducable steps. That's kind of the Micrisoft support/QA team offloading their job on their users.

[antoncohen]

I don't think that is true. I haven't used Windows in years, but in the past I have talked to Microsoft support on the phone, as an individual without a support contract. To check that it is still possible, I went through the IT professional and developer support flow [1] and ended up with a button that said "Contact Microsoft. Have a technical support representative contact you. Start request". So it is at least possible to contact them, though maybe it isn't on the phone anymore.

If you are a paying enterprise customer of Microsoft you can get very good support. I briefly worked for a company that ran their compute infrastructure on Windows (~2000 physical servers), in the month I worked there they had multiple tickets open with Microsoft. If I remember correctly, one was for excess memory usage and Microsoft dug through a memory dump to find the problem.

I hear Google has improved for paying enterprise customers, under Diane Greene's leadership, but they certainly burned some bridges in the past with poor support.

Public bug trackers are super helpful for professionals, but the lack of one isn't necessarily an indication of poor customer service.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/assistedsupportproducts

[larkeith]

The last time I tried to use Microsoft's support, the only way I was able to contact them was via a webchat, which at first dumped me into a long and infuriating "dialogue" with their support AI - it was the chatroom equivalent of an IVR, and just as useless.

At least, after I managed to get past the faux-IVR, the support staff was competent enough.

[mgkimsal]

On the other end of that spectrum, it seems MS have had large teams of QA people doing proactive outreach for security problems. My family members have been contacted 6 times in the past 2 years, each time to let them know that MS had detected a security problem and they needed to help us install a patch immediately.

[michaelmrose]

How would you distinguish between MS personnel and scammers calling your house to have you install malware?

[egeozcan]

That was sarcasm, if I'm not mistaken. Nobody from Microsoft would call you for patching security problems.

[digi_owl]

Not sure if joking, as that sounds like a scam call...

[dboreham]

Probably forgot the <sarcasm> tag.

[setquk]

Microsoft's customer service is non-existent even for paying customers and quality is declining. The development tools are getting less reliable each release. On large projects we're seeing tens of Visual Studio crashes a day. On top of that the ecosystem is a wasteland of abandoned projects and rapid semi-schizophrenic direction changes. It's difficult building a product on a moving target.

In once case we got Scott Hanselman's attention via HN on an issue but the outcome was clearly that a major part of SCVMM's support for Linux was a hack job and mostly abandoned and their own assigned team member didn't understand the problem domain properly.

Chuck it on github for open source lip service then ignore it. Add telemetry on by default. Make it a paid service. Anything to hurt the customer's trust.

And I'm going to keep complaining loudly about this until it changes.

[onion2k]

Some teams at Microsoft have public bug tracking. Edge lets users submit issues from Twitter... https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/08/11/edgebug-twitt...

[nasredin]

If you bug is longer than 140 (or 280 characters) it is a feature!

[nasredin]

Wait, Google has customer service?

The googleproductforum.com (whatever it's called) which is usually the #1 result in Google is absolutely worthless.

I am not joking. It is infuriatingly worthless.

[bubblethink]

Yes, that forum is utterly useless. The trick with google is to use only open source google products. If you find a bug in chromium, AOSP, or any of their other open projects, you can report them on their respective trackers.

[digi_owl]

Reminds me that for some time now the SD reader on a certain model of Intel Atom package has a bad driver. A driver supplied by Microsoft via automatic updates, that can't be rolled back.

This seems to affect a number of models from a number of OEMs that use the same "template".

[bubblethink]

Is it a brand/PR thing that having a bug tracker means admitting that there are bugs ? Microsoft tends to use github issues as a tracker for some projects even though they don't put code on github (WSL for example). So why not do it for windows ?

[vbezhenar]

It's the same for many companies. I'm experiencing (what I believe) Nvidia bug. There's some strange page, I submitted that bug and I know nothing of it, absolutely zero further communication, I'm not even sure that this page works.

[ken]

Why is this shocking? I can't think of any proprietary software, offhand, that has a public bug tracker.

[EliRivers]

Interesting to hear you say that; a couple of days ago someone reposted the link to ITBWTCL ( http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html ) in which Stephenson, twenty years ago, discusses at length the differences in attitude and culture that mean Windows has no public bug tracker and no way to submit bugs.

[binarycrusader]

The Feedback Hub app in Windows 10 is how someone can publicly submit and comment on public issues and suggestions relating to Windows (and various other Microsoft-related/provided components).

[ColinWielga]

This issue is on feedback hub for anyone who wants to upvote it: https://aka.ms/Yxum93

[alexkavon]

Just to highlight supporting bugs from a non-Windows platform... https://s31.postimg.cc/e37910orf/IMG_2425.png

[opencl]

Not only do you have to be on Windows 10 (Anniversary Update or newer), you have to be signed into a Microsoft account in the Feedback Hub to even view anything.

[alexkavon]

Even worse...

https://s31.postimg.cc/7jmudkjob/feedback.png

[egeozcan]

It told me that my account doesn't have access to this feedback.