November 27, 2017

Welcome to the Microsoft S..t…o….r…..e……!

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

No, it’s not just me. It’s not just my fancy new Dell laptop (which I’m glad I have despite paying through the nose for it). It’s the Microsoft Store. It’s slow. Not just “wait for the spinning cursor” slow but glacially slow, geological time slow.

The Microsoft Store app is preset as one of the programs on the Windows 10 Taskbar, what was once called the Quick Launch toolbar. It’s one of those app icons next to the Cortana search thing that no one uses.

When I obtained my new Dell laptop, it came with a host of program teasers — “bloatware.” I tried them all, but some needed updates. To get the update, you must visit the Microsoft Store, which I’d never been to before, so I figured what-the-heck.

What-the-heck, indeed.

Microsoft is trying to ape Apple’s App Store. The App Store is available for both iOS devices, which Apple loves, and their Macintosh computers, which Apple doesn’t love as much because, well, it’s from that first marriage. The App Store works. It provides downloads, suggestions, updates, and it’s relatively peppy.

Google’s own app store, Google Play, also works well. I have no complaints.

Microsoft’s Store, however, appears to enjoy most of its time being offline. Worse, when you go to update programs, you do a lot of waiting. A lot. Of. Waiting.

The progress meter spins so much that I find myself checking the network status to ensure that I suddenly haven’t slipped offline. No, I’m still online. Look! On the web, I can still conjure Facebook or Reddit. So I have a network connection, but somehow the Microsoft Store is moving at a snail’s pace.

No, that would be an insult to snails. A snail can cross the sidewalk in front of my house in one overnight trek. Even that distance can’t be covered by the Microsoft Store in a day.

Figure 1 shows the update screen in the Microsoft Store for my Dell laptop. It’s looked like that for weeks now. Free software I could download, such as Minecraft, is stuck in an endless loop. Actually, it might just be stuck; it would be pretentious of me to assume that the program has the capability to loop.

Figure 1. The Store has looked like this for weeks.

I searched online to see whether I could find a solution. I tried some of the smarter ones, including cleaning out the cache and restarting some services. Nothing helped.

As I dug deeper, I discovered a slew of complaints about how Microsoft throttles software delivery through the Store. I see the truth in it. There’s no other explanation, other than Microsoft just doesn’t have its shit together to the degree that it can competently deliver programs through its online store: It can’t.

I have issues with OneDrive and its sluggishness as well, so I can completely accept that Microsoft is simply incompetent, but I can’t see how? They have new leadership and they must be hiring smart people.

What the hell, Microsoft?

2 Comments

  1. I must admit, I have looked at the Windows store and thought ‘its Windows Mobile again’ trying to compete in an area in which they have had little success in the past users will look at it and go ‘oh their trying, isn’t that cute’ and carry on using the play store. M$ need to realise they do desktop machines and they should be happy with that trying to get one solution that works for everything only, Apple could do by keeping rigorous control. M$ came to a hardware platform that was open source and were kings of the platform but they didn’t try to lock it down quick enough.

    Comment by glennp — December 10, 2017 @ 1:46 am

  2. Still, can you figure why it’s so slow? Not even “slow,” it’s “stop.” And their OneDrive is all screwed up as well. It’s also sluggish and slow to respond. It took me an hour last night to get files one one system to sync with another. That’s unacceptable.

    Comment by admin — December 10, 2017 @ 7:42 am

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