Hi folks, it has been a while since I posted anything on this page. Just been busy living life. Not a whole lot to write about unless I wanted to waste space.
But recently windows 10 crept into my life again. A friend of mine had a windows 8 notebook that was not working right, and that she had not used in 2 years. She gave it to me and asked me to wipe out all her data on it, and if I could get it to work, to give it to someone who could use it.
Step back in time for a moment here. XP was the most liked OS from Microsoft. Win 7 was ok, but it was moving towards what is now Win 10. Win 8 was almost a completely new operating system with its new look and the way things were organized. Many say XP and Win 7 had better organization. They could find things easier on those systems. This is why they were so uncomfortable with win 8 and win 10. Lack of start button, a shutdown button and other basic controls, the home screen layout and other things, just made the win 7 post OS's seem alien to many people.
And another big fact. Win 10 had two major changes. Win 10 was no longer a stand alone operating system but rather like a service, constantly upgrading and updating. Good? Bad? Depends on your point of view. All that background stuff going on eats up a lot of bandwidth (data) if you are on metered service, and slows down your computer if you do not and are busy doing things.
The second major change was the user agreement and this alone has caused many people to swear they would never upgrade to win 10. To put it in simple words, windows 10 is spyware with an operating system wrapped around it. As part of the user agreement, windows has reserved the right to what what you do, and report it to anyone. That is correct. They reserved the right to watch, log, record every keystroke, every word your computer microphone picks up, anything you do while using their software and share that data with anyone they want, with or without your permission to do so. In other words, they totally removed your right to any kind of privacy.
That bothers me. It bothers me a lot. It bothers me alot because of the recent happenings with the 2016 US Presidential elections, and how claims are being made, that data collected by people on the internet somehow contributed to interference with our election process by outside interests.
It bothers me because of recent events with FaceBook, and its data collections. And Google, and now Microsoft thru its Operating System. Privacy advocates are very much alarmed as to what Microsoft's win 10 user agreement implies.
That said, lets get back to the little laptop. Ok, so this HP Pavilion x2 notebook, with 4g mem, 120G HD, with a detachable screen that is the size of my Samsung tablet, is sitting here on my desk.
The Operating system would not operate correctly and I had to do a factory reset, losing all data, which in this case was not a bad thing at all. It took about 2 hours to do. But something was wrong and it had no sound. So I needed to find drivers for it. But there is no sticker showing the model number of it anywhere on the thing. So I had to figure out where to find that info in win 8.
But wait - I just found out after that notebook finished its factory reset, it was no longer windows 8. It was windows 10! mm This changes everything. I am not a fan of win 10. Well I found the info I needed, and managed to finish setting up the "new" old notebook.
It was while I was trying to get the thing to work in the first place, and after the factory reset which upgraded it to Win 10 that I started noticing things.
First, the thing all but demanded I have a Microsoft account to continue. I got around that.
Second, it wanted email account information. I got around that.
Third it wanted a password. I could not get around that so I made it a simple one. Now I have to input the password every time I start it up.. This is another annoyance.
The average computer user would not know how to get around these startup problems and would end up giving MS some very sensitive data. It is my intention of finishing the setup on this laptop without giving it ANY personal data or any way it can track back to me. That privacy issues stands out as a flashing red flag when it comes to windows 10.
So I get the thing running.. Keep in mind Win 10 has been around a few years now and some "kinks" and "bugs" have already been fixed.. like the start button, or the "power button".
This one does not have a "my computer" icon.. I am finding it difficult to find things I could easily find in XP and Win7. Everything is there, but its all been changed around and reorganized making it difficult to find things that I once could find in seconds. Where is the control panel?
Why the boxy look on the home screen? Is that the home screen, or is it this other one with regular icons and the trash bin icon? I don't know.
Either way I have decided to keep this little notebook. But I will never use it for Email or personal stuff which MS Can collect data from and track. Why keep it then? Because most folks have already or are slowly migrating to Win10, since its the only OS available to them now, and I am starting to get more "service calls" by family and friends to come fix their computers. Computers running Win10 and its nice to have a little one here that I can use to see and play with to figure out what the did to theirs and how to correct it.
As for my Desktop computer, which is really in a full size tower case, when Win7 stops working, I might just unplug from the internet. I have no desire to allow MS, Google, or FB to be tracking me, spying on me, and dumping thousands of Adverts on me after paying the outrageous Internet access fees, that our local ISP's charge around here.
I will still have that little notebook laptop to use to fix other folks computers. So I will be fine.
Also one other note.. I gave up on tablets.. They too are being bombarded with adverts. At least with win7 I have 2 good adblockers. Even my smart phone is now being hit with adverts. So I stopped using it for anything other than Talking and texting.
