Which things annoy you about your laptop or desktop PC?

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For anybody who has addressed PC maintenance problems that come-up from time to time:

Familiar with troubleshooting those infinite loops? How about the (from time to time pesky) infinite loop of the troubleshooting process itself?

me 2 x10^100

I'm no fan of fans.

I absolutely abhor the trend of turning general-purpose computers into walled gardens. I will fight tooth and nail to keep computing free.

When I watch a DVD on my laptop, not a movie DVD but a DVD with episodes, when I select "play all" the first episode plays with sound but when it goes on to the next episode the sound disappears but it is not muted. Very strange.

I can't even find any results on Google.

For me the most annoying thing is easily not knowing what is going on that causes disruption, whether it is something I can fix myself or beyond my control.

eg last night was a computer hassle bigtime - kept getting all sorts of problems trying to do some important international correspondence, (super slow loading, constant error messages from the company I was trying to send info to saying there was an error at their end, etc).

This morning I discover that the cause of this was some nitwit in Australia with a digger who dug up a main cable which affected all NZ internet services at the time (though not enough to cut them off completely). Fortunately I gave up last night instead of trying to fix the unknown issues, run administrator checks and all of that. Finding out 12 hours later is a relief but very inconvenient. All back to normal now.

Naturally, Murphy's Law being what it is, for me this occurred at the most inconvenient of times...

If the legacy boot option becomes too rare a beast (and it seems to be going that way), and Mr.Hiren doesn't update his splendid free Mini-Windows Boot Disc to UEFI (which it doesn't look like he will), I don't see any way I could do a complete system restore, not without investing research and money. Microsoft system restore has let me down several times, either by not restoring everything or by deleting all my standalone .exe files from my data partition (!), so I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

But I don't own a modern computer. My current laptop's most annoying quirk was that Samsung had rigged it to open an aggressive nag screen that made it impossible to work, if I was using a 3rd party battery. The claims on the nag screen added insult to injury:
"Battery Life Time in current state is not longer. Because you may lose your data during using, please replace to new battery (honest goods). Tip: Battery Pack is Cunsumerable device. This pack is not working correctly or lifetime is not longer, please use to replace to new battery (honest goods)."
I don't take kindly to being lectured in broken English on honesty by anybody who would pull such a fast one. I found the culprit file, but zapping it lost me some of the function keys, they seem to have meshed the two things into the same routine. So I traded off instant control of screen brightness for the right to use my own choice of batteries.

The touchpad was also infuriating - impossible to use without it clicking stuff I'd not wanted clicking, which I see is a thing that annoys a lot of folks. Somewhere buried in the mouse properties dialogue box I found a checkbox to disable tapping. That did a lot of good. There's also a button to disable the touchpad completely, which is probably the best thing for it, as long as my real mouse works. It's worth looking around for controls like that.

A pet peeve here is the way Windows occasionally decides to disregard my preferences. I prefer Windows XP to be in "classic mode" which avoids the gumball graphics and so gives it a generally more grown-up, businesslike look. But every so often it'll just gaily boot up in gumball mode. File associations have a tendency to be similarly not quite sticky enough, and the official method for assigning them doesn't always work, I had to find a 3rd-party utility to do that properly.

Windows updates: I usually shut down with a couple of keypresses, but when they wanted me to install an update, the same keypresses would accept the update. That made me late home from work a couple of times. Those updates took ages and showed no forecast of how long they'd take. Then there was the update for DirectX that rendered a very good music program useless, and couldn't be uninstalled "because it's not a program." I saw it off by restoring to a previous Ghost system image, which of course would never work on a new Windows 10 computer.

I use Ubuntu Linux as my only operating system and I love it for various different reasons. The only downside(which might be an upside in descise): you are pretty much your own tech support if something goes wrong or doesn't work like it is intended to...

My daily annoyance is Bing hijacking my Firefox browser I have tried to disable Bing in various ways but it is like the bad penny that always turns up again.

I've given up on Dell computers. I no longer buy them and I no longer recommend them.

They may have good customer service, but that doesn't make up for the fact that they won't actually fix their computers that make it very difficult or impossible to install some open source operating systems such as OpenBSD on some models.

I have two Dell Optiplex computers that I need to run OpenBSD on, but the last version that works at all on them is version 6.1. Since the current version is 6.3, Dell Optiplex computers are already obsolete.

What annoys me about my laptop or PC? Uhmmm. Probably that I don't have a laptop or PC? Not that I want one..

Glad to see this thread still appears to have some life left in it, even if it was revived by someone who doesn't own a laptop or desktop machine!

My laptop collection has expanded to 25 over the past year, many of them being 10-20 year old Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes. Although these are far easier to open up and mess around with than most of their modern equivalents, one thing that has annoyed me on quite a few occasions has been the very poor quality of the screws that need to be removed for access. This may sound rather petty, but because of the soft metal of which they're made, the heads deform really easily and they can be difficult or impossible to remove. This happens too frequently for it to be put down to bad luck, and I tend to agree with the conspiratorial view that this was a deliberate policy by the manufacturers to deter people from repairing or modifying the machines, and to 'persuade' them to buy a new one instead.

Still, if you can get inside these laptops, it's fairly easy to change the hard drives, upgrade the RAM, renew the clock battery and all the rest of it. In many modern slimline laptops these components are apparently soldered into place, and can't be removed. I briefly owned an Asus laptop where even the main battery was sealed up and inaccessible- presumably you would have to send it back to the factory to get a (very expensive) replacement.

That I uninstalled a game on my Windows 7 laptop to clear the unfinished saved games I had clogging up the game (because for some reason they can't be deleted any other way), and now when I try and reinstall the game on the same Windows 7 laptop it won't let me. I type in the name of the particular game into the laptop search bar to look for any data left from the game and there seems to be no trace of the game anywhere, so I don't see why the laptop doesn't want to reinstall the game.
I've even tried the system recovery thing to recover the laptop to a date just before I uninstalled the game, but the laptop won't even do that.

Computers and laptops can be so obstinate and they don't even explain WHY they won't do something. It just comes up with a useless "error 000045, cannot complete" message (I made that number up BTW).

Windows Media just up and vanished from my computer. Which is Dell desktop that runs on Windows 10.

That's weird. I always uninstall using Revo Uninstaller - there's a feature on that which scans various difficult to access parts of the operating system for remnants of the program and deletes them, after the main removal process has been completed. Not saying it would've worked in your case, but it's worth bearing in mind for the future.

For sheer uselessness, that message 'Windows is checking for a solution to the problem' takes some beating in my view. Can't recall a single occasion when it's come up with any 'solution'.

Currently I'm using Windows 7 (32-bit). Mostly I'm quite pleased with it, but:

It annoys me that when I run certain programs it warns me that this User Account Control gets in the way and asks me if I really want to run a program from an "unknown publisher." I can turn the stupid thing off completely but I can't tell it to stop bothering me about a particular program I trust. Apparently it's not wise to turn it off entirely because it's a good line of defense in case I get infected by malware that tries to run a malicious executable in the background.

^ Aren't you concerned about the fact that Win 7 is no longer getting security updates from Microsoft, now that it's out of support? I'm assuming that Microsoft Security Essentials is now redundant, but maybe third-party antivirus and antimalware utilities are sufficient at present?