Well, the time has arrived. Goodbye Windows.
A little history. I started with PC's back when the Z-80 chip was establishing it's place and well before DOS as we knew it. A small rubber keyboard thing using the TV as a monitor. And loading and saving to a cassette player.
Enter the 286 and 386 chip and the world of DOS and the rise of Microsoft. Microsoft DOS in all it's versions and the first Windows, Windows 3. Then Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME, and then XP. Onwards through Vista, 8, 8.1 and 10. And now Windows 11. Used them all and had them all.
With Windows it seemed that as the world of Operating Systems changed Windows became more dependent on regular "clean up's" and virus, trojan, PUP's, trackers, and other nasties always striking again no matter how strong an Antivirus application was/is.
I do have a genuine install of Windows 10 on a hard disk but that is out of my machine now and put in a bottom drawer. Windows 10 seems to me to be too close to the dystopian world of George Orwell's "1984" in ways that data is fed back to Microsoft even though the correct options have been selected to disable this reverse data feed. This also applies to many sites harvesting personal data. Too much of my time spent chasing and blocking/disabling/killing nasties or fine tuning the Windows "system" to keep things working. Enough. !.
For many years I have been dabbling with Linux and now Linux operating systems have matured significantly to the point where one questions the reason for using Windows as the preferred operating system.
I now have Linux Mint MATE ver 20.2 on an SSD and the speed and stability is tremendous. All of the programs I want or need are there in Linux form and open source, free. The only thing I will miss a little is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and FSX. However for these flight simulators I can use Wine or Virtual Box/Vmware running either XP 32 bit or Vista 64 bit as the "guest" OS. However, there is another way to run these Windows based programs under Linux without Wine or a virtual machine. I am looking at the code to use to make it happen.
Yes, the time has come to simply use my machine for what I want and give away all the tinkering/chasing/fixing up and data "theft", is that too strong a word, with Windows.
So it is goodbye Windows after nearly forty years.
Cheers,
Aunty Jack.
A little history. I started with PC's back when the Z-80 chip was establishing it's place and well before DOS as we knew it. A small rubber keyboard thing using the TV as a monitor. And loading and saving to a cassette player.
Enter the 286 and 386 chip and the world of DOS and the rise of Microsoft. Microsoft DOS in all it's versions and the first Windows, Windows 3. Then Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME, and then XP. Onwards through Vista, 8, 8.1 and 10. And now Windows 11. Used them all and had them all.
With Windows it seemed that as the world of Operating Systems changed Windows became more dependent on regular "clean up's" and virus, trojan, PUP's, trackers, and other nasties always striking again no matter how strong an Antivirus application was/is.
I do have a genuine install of Windows 10 on a hard disk but that is out of my machine now and put in a bottom drawer. Windows 10 seems to me to be too close to the dystopian world of George Orwell's "1984" in ways that data is fed back to Microsoft even though the correct options have been selected to disable this reverse data feed. This also applies to many sites harvesting personal data. Too much of my time spent chasing and blocking/disabling/killing nasties or fine tuning the Windows "system" to keep things working. Enough. !.
For many years I have been dabbling with Linux and now Linux operating systems have matured significantly to the point where one questions the reason for using Windows as the preferred operating system.
I now have Linux Mint MATE ver 20.2 on an SSD and the speed and stability is tremendous. All of the programs I want or need are there in Linux form and open source, free. The only thing I will miss a little is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and FSX. However for these flight simulators I can use Wine or Virtual Box/Vmware running either XP 32 bit or Vista 64 bit as the "guest" OS. However, there is another way to run these Windows based programs under Linux without Wine or a virtual machine. I am looking at the code to use to make it happen.
Yes, the time has come to simply use my machine for what I want and give away all the tinkering/chasing/fixing up and data "theft", is that too strong a word, with Windows.
So it is goodbye Windows after nearly forty years.
Cheers,
Aunty Jack.
Last edited:
