Posted on 03/12/2013 2:55:18 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Pff... yeah, right. They sold you an operating system, not a perpetual support contract. In fact, all of the product updates that you got free of charge from them since you bought the system are given to you only because MS deems it a good business move; they have absolutely no obligation to give out a single update for free.
I’ve never had that happen with mine; it’s stable or better than XP was. What about adjusting your mouse ‘touchiness’ setting? Are you using a splt-screen window, with tree on left and files on right?
Save yourself some headaches, skip Vista and go right to Win7. It’s much better than Vista in terms of the interface, stability, and pretty much every respect, and it doesn’t have all the annoying features of Win8, so it won’t be that big of a learning curve. Plus, the support for Vista will only last a few years longer at this point, so you’d be upgrading again soon anyway.
I switched this PC from WinXP to Win8 and it’s OK as far as it goes. Bought the $40 download in December and I am reasonably happy with it. It’s not the greatest Windows ever, but acceptable.
I certainly wouldn’t pay retail price for it. It’s not $160 good. It’s $40 good and you get what you pay for.
When this box fails, I’m most likely going to go to Ubuntu or some “ix/ux” based OS that is open source.
I have had enough of Microsoft, and Apple too for that matter.
“There are antivirus packages, lots of them, that do a pretty good job on identifying harmful content.”
I’d have to disagree with that one. They may be able to identify harmful programs, but they certainly fail when it comes to stopping infections from happening, or repairing a machine that has become infected. I’ve tried pretty much every commercial and shareware/freeware AV program out there, and they all fall short when facing the newer generation of malware.
The best I can say about AV software at this point is that it can be a good alert system, since they will usually catch at least one or two parts of the malware package being installed. So, they can give you an early warning that you need to get into safe mode fast and try to do your own removal and repairs of all the stuff that the AV software undoubtedly let slip through, before your machine is completely locked down.
I think Vista has about 3 more years before it “sunsets”.
While having no affilitation, I often find it useful.
However, my go to file explorer is one I've used for years and am hanging onto the old v7 till it evaporates -- PowerDesk.
But I'm guessing that recommendations for file manager apps in here could go on ad infinitum .. lol !
If you are a cheapskate, like me, you can get free support sometimes if you subscribe to the MS newsgroups. They have one for pretty much every product and version, and the Microsoft MVPs answer a lot of support questions there, free of charge.
No guarantee, and you may have to wait a few days for someone to reply, but worth a shot if you refuse to pay MS for tech support.
“It shoud be illegal for Microsoft to withdraw support.”
It is for car companies, at least for 20 years.
Did IE-10 get installed?
Maybe try a different browser.
I was kidding about installing Vista.
I use Slimbrowser.
It works better than either IE or Firefox.
It is tabbed and is easy to use.
I bet there are tons of XP users willing to pay a small fee to MS to keep current with updates after 2014. Why must MS be so anal about it? Tasbards.
Well I set up libraries to make such things easily accessible. Of course I am only accessing 3tb of data but I universally find it much easier to use and find..and organize. I personally hate Win 8. The file system is the same but the start menu is a P.I.T.A.
I used and recommended PowerDesk (several versions) for many, many yrs, but on Win-7 Pro, it took-over my desktop, and I had to get rid of it. Took a while to get used to using Win Explorer, but at least I’m in control again. Still have the older version CDs in the software library, but since Avanquest bought it, it somehow changed for the worse. JMO.
Those people should all switch to Ubuntu Linux
Well, an OS isn’t a durable product like a car. There’s also no expectation that an OS will even be functional, much less supported, for that long. An OS is designed to run a machine that is planned to be obsolete within a few years, so the lifetime of the OS is not much longer than that.
If cars were like computers, then their top speed would double every few years, and nobody could drive a car 20 years old on the highway safely. Old cars would be curiosities maintained only by geeks who could replace every part themselves, just like old computers and operating systems are today.
Why cant they adapt? My company transitioned to 7 with almost zero hiccups and it is used in a lab setting. In fact our tracking system improved vastly because since they reencoded everything. It cost the company a pretty penny.
Thanks, I will try that. It is somewhat useable (as per my wife) but I hate it.
I have installed Firefox on several of her other computers but not this one. It is less than 1 year old Dell.
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