Review: Windows 10 Is the Best Version Yet—Once the Bugs Get Fixed
On fresh Windows 10 installs you’ll probably never notice the difference, since it’ll take some time to build up 500 or so entries. On my main PC with a full install of Office 2016, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and many more applications besides, I blew right past this number. The result? The All apps view didn’t show all my programs. This would be tolerable if that’s all that happened. Stupid and annoying, but tolerable, because since Windows Vista, I’ve launched apps from Start in exactly one way: by typing the name of the app to search for it. I don’t really care about All apps at all.
Except that searching breaks, too. For search-to-start apps, Windows appears to use the same database. If that database is incomplete (because you have too many entries) then too bad, so sad; it won’t find your apps and you’ll have no good way of launching them.
Better yet, even if you reduce the number of apps to below 500 or so, it doesn’t fix anything. There’s no easy way to make it re-read all the short cuts in the Start menu directory (that still exists, because it’s where installers expect to put their icons) to regenerate the database. This problem has bitten me and a few others.
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