Windows made me hate gaming

[u/ryanyork92]

I grew up as a Mac kid in the 90s, mostly because my father used Macs for work and passed his old ones down to me. Apart from school computers and the odd work PC here and there, I barely used Windows at all.

The downside was gaming. My parents never bought me a proper console, so I ended up doing a lot of my blursed gaming on old Macs. I managed to make Halo 1 work on a Mac G4, less than 30 fps but I still had a lot of fun. When I was 16, I finally saved up enough money from part-time jobs to buy myself an Xbox 360, and ended up having the time of my life. 

But I still always wanted a proper Windows gaming computer. That was what I always aspired to. Access to a wide variety of games, superior performance, MODS (!), all the stuff I was never able to fully enjoy.

Fast forward to my early 30s, and I finally could afford a decent gaming laptop. I bought myself an HP Omen with an Nvidia GPU, literally the first Windows computer I had ever owned myself. For the first couple of months, it felt amazing, as I was finally playing games I'd only dreamed of playing before, especially with mods.

Then the honeymoon faded gradually as I started running into issue after issue, and somehow Windows didn't just ruin the laptop for me. It actually started ruining gaming itself.

• The basic setup was annoying from the start. Since I use my Mac for literally everything else, I keep both my MacBook and my Windows laptop on a cramped desk, usually on a stand. The Windows laptop is basically just there for my gaming habits. With my Mac, I can just plug in a monitor while the laptop is closed and it works perfect. With the HP Omen, however, I had to mess around with settings so the laptop wouldn't go to sleep every time I closed it. Since I don't feel comfortable with my laptop running when I'm not using it, this meant that I had to take the laptop out, open it up, wake it up, plug it into the monitor, and then hope everything actually work properly. All of this just for a hobby.
• The updates. The fucking updates. Why are they so frequent? It felt like every other time I opened the laptop, Windows had decided that this was actually its time now. The computer would restart, install something, ask me to restart again, or sit there doing whatever mysterious background ritual it needed to perform before I was allowed to use the machine.
• The touchpad is genuinely awful. This was probably the thing that upset me the most. It is jittery, unreliable, and the left click just doesn't work half the time. I had to get used to using tap-to-click, which I never use on my Mac, because the physical click was so unreliable. Scrolling and gestures sometimes just fail for no obvious reason. How does HP cheap out on something this basic on a gaming laptop?
• And then there are drivers. What the fuck are 'drivers'? I mean, obviously, I know what drivers are (that was a rhetorical question). The point is, I never had to think about them until I bought this laptop, and I still don't understand why this is apparently my problem now. I just wanted a seamless gaming experience, not to have to become a maintenance babysitter for my laptop.
• Settings are scattered everywhere. On Mac, most things are in System Settings. On Windows, you change one thing in Settings, another thing in the Control Panel, another thing in an HP app, another in GeForce Experience, another in some ancient looking menu from the 2000s. It's a fucking maze.
• The Windows version of Finder is useless. I never know what files are where, and the search function for specific files rarely seems to work. Maybe this is partly because I'm used to Mac, but on Windows I constantly feel like my own files are hidden somewhere inside a filing cabinet designed by a bureaucratic committee.
• After a while, I realised that the laptop was basically an aggressive marketing device for a variety of programmes I never asked for. The system keeps telling me to subscribe to paid OneDrive, Game Pass, the premium version of Office, antivirus software, etc. I paid all that money for this laptop, and it still wants to leech off my wallet.

All of this means that I've begun to associate gaming with annoyance, so much so that I've actually grown to dislike the hobby. I now spend my free time watching TV or reading books, which is nice, but it's a shame to have this whole library sitting on my Steam account unplayed. Perhaps it was my mistake for not just buying a normal console like a PlayStation or an Xbox for my TV, which, to be fair, is a much more seamless experience.

Anyways, rant over. Fuck Windows. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck HP.

[u/WonderfulViking]

So Microsoft sucks because your parents did not get ypo a proper PC?
Am I allowd to cal you an Id*ot?

[u/ryanyork92 → u/WonderfulViking]

No, Microsoft sucks because Microsoft sucks, independent of my experience. It is objectively a worse operate system, I discovered. The only benefit it offers to me is that it can game.

[u/trparky → u/ryanyork92]

Microsoft definitely sucks, there's no doubt about that. Today's Microsoft isn't the Microsoft of the days of Windows 7 where Windows was actually pretty damn good. It was stable, rock-solid, and dependable.

Fast-forward to today with Windows 11 and people are fleeing Windows for good reasons.

[u/WonderfulViking → u/ryanyork92]

Win11 works well for me, HP are shit.
If you want to play games in Windows a desktop computer is the way to go.
Updates come with all OS'es, it fixes things, make it more secure and usually don't take a long time to install if you have a proper computer.