I clicked the Start Menu. Fully half of it was made up of flashing animated crap - things moving about, very colourful adverts, the actual things I wanted to do were obscured by it.

I tried a few machines. They did the same thing. Maybe it's a manufacturer default.

Hey, maybe it's customizable. I don't know. It just struck me as being so far from what I think of a computer as being - not a tool to be used, but a flashy, childish entertainment box, like a children's rainbow cake.

My ego betrays me at this point, I suppose. I don't understand how the engineers at Microsoft got to this point.

It reminds me a lot of the Xbox 360 dashboard. That was the point I left 'mainstream' video gaming - it felt like my hackery, fun world had turned into a world of consuming advertising, of subscribing, of being someone else's plaything. Perhaps it was always like that, and I was too young to see?