When it comes to Microsoft’s Windows 10 free upgrade program, you get what you pay for. Although the Windows 10 upgrade process is perhaps a hair better than the one to Windows 8, which often didn’t even work at all, Windows 10 certainly isn’t without its share of enormous shortcomings and misses from the woefully clueless Windows team at Microsoft who is seemingly more concerned with coercing users into its flippity-floppity software ecosystem — whoops, I forgot we’re calling them “apps” now — than providing a cohesive and stable user experience.

Let’s give Microsoft at least partial credit for providing free upgrades at all. Getting this upgrade for free is certainly better than paying money for this steaming pile of code, if only just, and from a business standpoint there is plenty of sense to be made of getting all your users on a single platform. All your users if you discount businesses, users without reliable Internet access, and people wary enough of handouts to refuse Microsoft’s Trojan horse: because let’s not mince words here, that’s exactly what this update is.

Google has made a lot of money from the vast stores of data it has been trusted with. It’s helped them to tune their search algorithms, to bolster relevant results to the tops of lists, and to gain real insight into what its 1.17 billion users are willing to spend money on. It’s no surprise then when someone else wants in on the action, especially when they can barely muster a quarter of that user base. So in comes Microsoft who, bless their hearts, has tried so very hard to build a complex network of services and software to compete directly with Capital G. The problem is that they’re not winning them over as Google did; they’re just setting themselves to default because the EU is clearly just a distant memory.

Enter the next iteration of Microsoft’s godforsaken Webpage mangler, Internet Explorer. Most people know by now that Internet Explorer is bad, but they don’t really understand (or care) why. Probably something about security holes. Maybe because it’s slow. If you’re older you may have heard it from your kids, and if you’re younger you just know the big E may as well be for the Elderly. But here’s the thing: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was merely a victim of its own success. After defeating rival Netscape way back in the 90’s and being roughly the only game in town during the major transition to digital, people and companies built services specifically for use with Internet Explorer. In an effort to stay innovative and ahead of the curve, Microsoft began to build its proprietary Internet playground into the greatest browser they could imagine to help enhance these services that they felt would be around for decades. Until they weren’t.

I don’t think anyone could have seen how fast things would move once our digital lives really took hold, or how radically the Internet would truly transform. The problem with Microsoft was that they had built all these tools that users had come to depend on, and needed to maintain support for them into the next millennium. This meant that every iteration of Internet Explorer needed to support all the weird and arcane things its predecessor did; things like “blink” tags and scrolling-text marquees. Things grew out of hand so quickly that Web developers needed to maintain a growing library of ways to override the increasingly bizarre ways that IE would draw things for the user. Meanwhile Mozilla and Opera never tried to cater to Microsoft’s weird vision where they supported an open standard, and eventually Internet Explorer was left entirely behind. The Web moved forward, but because it had to support so many legacy applications Microsoft never could.

So in comes the Edge browser. Still with the big E, but without all the bloat. Microsoft finally gave up on supporting its outdated, proprietary nonsense (at least in a meaningful sense) and created the lean, mean Edge from the ground up to legitimately compete with Google’s Chrome. And clearly they set it as the default browser because, come on, they really tried this time! All you guys are doing is posting to Facebook anyway, right? It works! And while they’re at it, let’s set your defaults to their Bing search service and assorted other Microsoft shops because of course we all have a Hotmail/Live/MSN/Outlook account anyway. See, when following the upgrade path, there’s a “quick set-up” that automatically ticks the boxes for everything Microsoft, where only adventurous users may take the time to “customize” their initial installations to use anything else. All this, of course, after agreeing to a massive license agreement whereby you promise not to sue the pants off of Microsoft like the whole of the European Union did that one time for much the same thing as they’re doing to you now.

On that note let me point out that not once in the entire license agreement was anything mentioned about choice.

So here we are, diving face-first into Microsoft land, completely at their mercy to smooth the waters for that crucial moment we hit the surface. But my god is it a rocky landing. Not only could a relatively clean upgrade on modern hardware take several hours, but the operating system may neglect to port over certain critical aspects like preferred wireless networks, display drivers (for multi-monitor setups), and antivirus. I had read that outdated antivirus software would be lost in the transition, but was disappointed to see a perfectly maintained AV solution dropped during the installation as well. After several hours of black screens and upgrade notices I even had to pull the power cord, after my initial boot into the Shell, to cure the system’s endless unresponsiveness after even the task manager listed as unresponsive. Definitely off to a great start.

After several reboots the system finally began to stabilize and I was able to get in and start cleaning up some of the forced nonsense features. After clicking on the Microsoft Store icon I saw dozens of “apps” attempting to update themselves. Things like Microsoft Money, OneNote, Phone Companion, Skype, Sports, News, etc. Things that I have never, and would never, have elected to install given the choice. The Store didn’t have any option for managing the apps it was downloading, you could just watch helplessly (or pause, which didn’t work) as these apps installed and updated themselves. Further, if you did happen to see something in this store that you wanted you couldn’t download it without first signing in with your Microsoft account. No thanks.

So while I dig around on the system to find where to uninstall these apps the system has forced on me, I may decide to multitask since loading a list of apps apparently takes ten minutes to do. I might decide to change my wallpaper or desktop resolution (the latter of which is now apparently an “advanced” setting) while I wait, only to find that the new settings window overwrites the one I just had open. Want to go back? Try clicking on that little arrow in the top left only to find yourself on the new and incredibly spartan general Settings screen. What just happened to either of the windows I was looking at?

The general usability of Windows 10 is clearly a nightmare and I cannot begin to imagine how Microsoft’s supposed “final” operating system passed through any kind of quality control, not to mention design iterations. Even the login screen with the Windows logo is riddled with embarrassing JPEG artifacts. I actually checked the version number to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently downloaded some kind of alpha version. But no, this is it. This is Windows 10, and unless you’re already an avid user of Microsoft’s services, or are unfortunate enough to be upgrading from Windows 8, you owe it to yourself to roll back to Windows 7 before it’s too late.

“But Windows 7 is so insecure! Remember the security nightmare that was Gadgets?” Gadgets were indeed an enormous security oversight, but how much different are they from the new Live Tiles? Do these tiles not also retrieve arbitrary code from the Internet and execute it? In an effort to make their new operating system feel flashy and, dare I say, Apple-like, Microsoft seems to be blissfully ignorant of so many of the same exact mistakes its made in the past. The only thing that seems missing is Games For Windows Live, although we’re at least halfway there with a mandatory, uninstallable Xbox app because you really need Xbox integration on your work computer. Hard to see where IT guys aren’t going to love this!

The fact is that my current machine fits all of my needs and no amount of DX12 is going to persuade me to use Windows 10 in its current form. There was really no hurry for Microsoft to get its first free major upgrade into users’ hands, especially when I would have been willing to wait for a Windows 10.1 where the rough edges had already been sanded out. They came close to starting fresh with Edge, but need to apply that same principle to the rest of their company. Until they can show a consistent, forward direction I’m not going to trust a Hotmail/Live/MSN/Outlook account to be tied to my personal and professional productivity where stability and reliability are my priorities.