I finally caved and let the Windows 10 Anniversary Update install last night. It's been nagging me since it dropped on August 2nd, and for about a week and a half I kept hitting "remind me tomorrow" because I had actual deadlines and zero interest in babysitting a reboot cycle. Turns out putting it off that long was its own mistake, though I'm honestly not sure what the correct amount of procrastination would have been instead.
I started it around 9:40pm, figured I'd watch something while it churned. Big miscalculation. My machine rebooted three times over the next forty minutes, and when it finally came back up, Cortana greeted me with a Start menu that had quietly un-pinned about half my tiles like it was doing me a favor. My Trello shortcut, gone. The weather tile, gone. A folder of client files I'd pinned specifically so I wouldn't lose it again, also gone. I don't know who at Microsoft decided that was an acceptable default behavior for an update nobody asked to be this invasive, but I'd like a word.
To be fair, some of it's genuinely nice. The new Action Center with the expanded quick actions is less annoying to use than the old one, and I'll admit dark mode in a few more apps is a small win I didn't know I wanted. Edge got extension support finally too, though I still haven't found a reason to use Edge for more than five minutes at a stretch. Old habits.
Anyway I gave up untangling my Start menu around 11pm and just put the Olympics on instead. I'd DVR'd the opening ceremony from Friday and hadn't gotten around to it, so I watched about ninety minutes of it with one eye while poking at settings menus with the other. The drone formation stuff during the ceremony was genuinely cool, I'll give Rio that much, even with everything going on down there that made the run-up to these games feel shakier than usual. Whatever you think about the logistics, somebody clearly worked very hard on the visuals.
Small tangent, since I'm already off topic: I uninstalled Pokemon Go two days ago. Not out of any grand statement about the app, I just noticed I hadn't opened it in four days and my phone's battery life had mysteriously improved, so I took the hint. It had a genuinely wild July, the kind of thing where you'd walk past a park at 10pm on a Tuesday and there'd be forty people standing around staring at their screens like it was completely normal, because for about three weeks it was. I don't think it's going anywhere, but the version of it that felt like a citywide event seems to be settling into something quieter now, at least around here.
Back to the update complaint, because I'm not done being annoyed about it: the thing that actually gets me isn't losing the tiles, it's that there's no changelog anywhere on the machine itself telling you what changed. You have to go dig up a support article to find out your own computer is different now. I get that most people don't care, but I do this stuff for a living and even I had to search around to confirm the Start menu behavior wasn't a bug specific to my install. It wasn't. It's just how it works now, apparently, whether you like it or not.
I re-pinned everything by hand before bed, which took maybe six minutes and felt disproportionately satisfying once it was done. There's something almost meditative about rebuilding a Start menu tile by tile at midnight, dragging the weather app back into the exact corner it used to live in. Small victories. I also turned off the "suggested apps" nonsense that update apparently re-enabled on its own, because I did not ask for game recommendations wedged between my actual shortcuts.
No real conclusion here, just a Thursday night that went sideways because of an update I should've installed on day one instead of dragging my feet for a week and a half. If you haven't done yours yet, back up your pinned stuff first. Don't be like me.