Free software that you do not want

[papaof2]

I've been running the free version of Avast anti-virus on the Windows XP laptop I use for writing. I know, it's ancient - but it works and I have dozens of useful little programs on it (including a few that I wrote). Anyway, today Avast "intercepted" and quarantined an update for one of the free tools I use (BurnAware).

That's a false positive and was the last straw after the incredible boot slowdown the current version of Avast caused, I uninstalled Avast and it said a reboot was needed. Clicked to do the reboot and found that removing Avast had left the PC unbootable - it came up to the Windows screen then went to "the blue window of death" then rebooted too fast for me to read more than "exception" on that blue screen. I swapped the XP SSD for the Windows 10 SSD (see, I do use some current technology ;-) and checked that the XP drive was readable.

6+ hours later, I've managed to reinstall XP without disturbing any of the other installed software. Of course, I did lose the evening's writing time and there's not much on TV at 1:30AM local time.

Avast antivirus for XP appeared to be the least invasive of the free antivirus products when I installed it but they seem not to have tested the uninstall process. I'm sure I used some not-for-little-ears language while getting everything back together as Microsoft also does some less-than-intelligent things when you're rebuilding the operating system.

At least it's done - except for finding the next antivirus program. Or I could run MalwareBytes manually several times a day. At least it still installs and uninstalls without requiring a reboot.

[9idrr]

Both this desktop and my 12 y.o. Dell laptop are still runnin' XP and seem to be okay. MSE was great 'til they stopped supporting it for XP, but MalwarBytes seems to be sufficient now for my needs. When I was usin' my old 98ME machine, it seemed as though every time I ran into problems they'd go away as soon as I ditched AVG or Avast, whichever I'd be using at the time. Re-install one of them and I'd be fine for a bit, but I got tired of the r&r game and just went with Microsoft Security Essentials for as long as I could. The only things I've ever used in the way of open source were an Xubuntu version from back in '07 and Wary Puppy, but maybe you could see about Mint or something that is pretty secure. If your machine has the beans to run Win10, it should easily handle Cinnamon, shouldn't it?

[papaof2]

I tried LinuxMint on the laptop and while it's usable it doesn't support the development tools I use on Windows and I don't want to learn yet another computer programming language (so I've gotten lazy in my old age) as I have a lot of utilities I've written that work in Win 95 through Win 10. It is possible to write programs that don't do stupid things on different versions of an operating system.

I've dabbled with various flavors of Linux for years but never found one that I really liked. Mint does come close. I cut my programming teeth on DOS PC's and character-based terminals on AT&T Unix running on DEC PDP 11-70 computers and I have a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian OS on the network as an in-house web server.

I'll continue to run XP on a 4x3 screen laptop for writing for as long as I can get a replacement laptop. I have a Dell Vostro 1000 that's quite old but still works. It runs Win 7 and it monitors the solar power system I'm putting together.

[9idrr]

Sounds as though you've been doin' this for a good while. I can proudly say that I've been blissfully poundin' keyboards with no idea what I'm doin' since my TI99/4A. Somewhere under this computer table rests a machine with 256K RAM and runnin' Win98SE and dual-bootin' with Xubuntu 7.04. I may soon be usin' something with W7 and the latest Mint, but I don't want to get too modern or I might actually have to start learnin' what I'm actually doin'. After all, when all one has is dial up, one doesn't want to rush things.

[papaof2]

I lived with dialup for a LONG time. At one point, I had work dialup at 2400 baud (impressive in the days of 300 baud and that fast 1200 baud) and it ran through a Micom statistical multiplexer that provided up to 9 data channels. I used 2 channels - primary for the Tektronix 4014 80x24 character terminal and background channel for a boat anchor AT&T tractor feed, chain print printer. The stat mux did 3 lines to the terminal and then 1 line to the printer: blip, blip, blip; zip and repeat. That was high tech for the day ;-) Then I got a Radio Shack Color Computer and 2400 baud to the Internet. Then an 8086 DOS PC and a progression of PCs and modems up to 56K dialup and then... DSL! And boy was it fast ;-) My current provider (AT&T) offers 6Mbs as the base internet speed. And it goes up from there - soon to go even higher as they're running fiber on our road - multiple waist-deep holes on one side of the property to get the mole (pneumatic digger) below other utilities. I've not gone to get prices as I only want blazing speed one or two days a month and they only want to sell it by the month :-(

[papaof2]

I'm finding some of the later releases of Windows 10 to be "software I don't want" because Microsoft is becoming as nanny obsessive about control as Apple is - the only Apple product in this house is an iPod one of the kids gave my wife. I want a simple interface in Windows 10 that can change specific folder permissions - and KEEP THEM CHANGED! Microsoft now insists that any folder in the Program Files chain MUST be exactly the same as all the folders in that chain. Sorry, but my admin permissions allow me to change those things and they should STAY changed.

I've thought for a long time that it would be nice if the "global" search and replace function in Word actually worked globally - just change the "of" in Microsoft to "hi" and people around the world would no longer expect those products to be useful. Certainly not useful today when one of the updates now has Windows overriding my admin settings. There's one major reason I still use XP 99% of the time - it works!