Comments on: Debates & Undebatable

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 02:53:29 +0000

Thank you for pointing that out. If I am forced to make the change, I will seek out that sucker and install it. Amazing that M$ is so bad at a GUI that there is a cottage industry making it usable.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 15:51:57 +0000

In more news, the free ClassicShell tool suite on Windows 10 gave me back a Windows 7 style Start menu, which put everything I had to ask Cortana to find back into the Start menu like God and Bill Gates intended rather than scattered to the four winds. Windows 10 has its own Start menu of course, but it’s deranged. It has live tiles to the right of the menu where Windows 7 puts the helpful stuff like the link to the control panel. ClassicShell not only put the link to control panel over there, but put the link to the new Settings program and to the Admin Tools too, so at least you have links to all three places to configure the system right there together again, instead of scattered to the four winds.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 18:11:18 +0000

Drivers are the curse of computing. I hated it when computers stopped supporting parallel printer connections and I had to get a new printer.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 07:54:54 +0000

No bloat on my gaming box! But it will run Windows 10 only after I can no longer find hardware supported by Windows 7 drivers. Which will happen, but not for a while yet.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 03:41:11 +0000

Toshiba also adds a lot of things that you have to delete, which I found really annoying. If you don’t build your own, you end up with not just bloat, but sides of bloat that you don’t want, because you will never use any of it.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 01:58:18 +0000

I took 200 gigs of that 500 gigs and gave them over to a Fedora 22 dual boot partition, so now I have about the same disk space for Windows as you have. The problem of bloatware is, alas, a time-honored tradition in Windows-land. I remember having to de-bloat my Windows 7 laptop back in the day too. SIGH.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 20:25:50 +0000

Well, Badtux, after this debacle VW will probably be gone, so they may as well leave their former customers laughing before joining Yugo. 😉

You have the same machine I bought [Toshiba Satellite] except you got twice the memory and disk space for $10 more than I spent for the Win 7 version. Now you spend your time and bandwidth to ‘fix’ a new computer before you can use it. The yappy dog, Clippy, and now Cortana – really, truly annoying people in the bowels of M$.

Yes, Steve, having to stay fluent in multiple dialects of Windows is definitely not a lot fun.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 18:34:11 +0000

For many years now, I’ve regretted being retired. In one fell swoop, Micro$oft has made me regret that fact a lot less. Whatever else I lament, I don’t lament being able to ignore Windows altogether… well, until Stella has a question, and she only uses ancient versions.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 18:02:24 +0000

On the Windows 10 front, I finally bought that Windows 10 laptop for the awe-inspiring price of $259, then spent yesterday installing Windows updates and removing all the bloatware then making a rescue flash (the rescue image is too big to fit on a DVD anymore, you need a 16gb USB flash drive to make one). My take on it: Meh. It's usable, unlike Windows 8, but still the typical mess that Windows has always been, with Metro apps and the Metro-based configuration tools still side by side with the old Windows stuff that's been around since Windows XP. At least they finally retired the hoary old Performance Monitor for something better, it actually works pretty well, but they need to merge the old Control Panel and the new Settings because finding where you configure stuff is a mess. I imagine it's even a bigger mess on the server versions, where there's *three* possible places to go to configure stuff (presuming the Server Management control panel hasn't gone away). Oh, and Cortana is Clippy for the 2010's. Heh.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 17:51:05 +0000

The Joe Isuzu commercials worked so well that Isuzu no longer sells vehicles in the United States. Just sayin ;).