After a while, you get tired of fighting with a program that irritates the hell out of you, and after 80 years I find that I irritate rather easily, and have a very low tolerance for crafty manipulators who think most of us have an I.Q. about the same as an unwashed turnip.
Just to quickly review here, Windows 8 started off being a derivative of Windows 7 - a "Windows 7 SP2" you might say - carefully aimed at all those cute young thumb-typers out there who perpetually seem to have a mobile device stuck to their ear, or clutched in both hands as they ride elevators or walk down the streets, not always avoiding walking into lamp posts. The future generation, in other words, presently numbering less than 10% of the total world-wide computer-users group.
Microsoft knew an O/S oriented toward the younger set and heavily dependent on multi-touch features for its appeal would meet with resistance among us older and wiser and less-impressionable but more mature adults, so they got crafty and spin-doctored us into thinking that this was going to run everything we're familiar with in Windows 7, plus new and graphically-enhanced Apps that will do everything from improving your love life to grooming your dog, if only you're willing to shell out from forty to seventy rasbuckniks in reliable old U.S. dollars to Mighty Microsoft. The beta version and the next-to-retail Release Preview both ran all of Windows 7's desktop enhancements such as its Windows Sidebar and Gadgets and its delightful slideshow-style Themes,
and many of us were thinking "Maybe all these damned tiles and this silly Start Screen will be tolerable if we can keep our Themes and our Gadgets and
do a little customizing on this damned thing..."
Not so! Out comes the retail version, and it's goodbye Sidebar and Gadgets, with a phony story telling us these were a security hazard that miraculously didn't provide us with any hard evidence in over four years - because if it had it would mean Microsoft's own Firewall and Defender had failed miserably in keeping out the hackers and malware, not to mention all these third-party security programs we all know and love, and use. So that story just didn't make it through the bullshit screen. The logical explanation more likely being they needed more attractiveness in Windows 8 but less in Windows 7, so they tried to persuade us our Sidebar and Gadgets are hazardous to our PC's health, and they knew of course that there isn't room for those on the very limited real estate of a smart phone or a pad or tablet or even some notebooks. So they got rid of that - but not before they'd created the impression we'd still have those in the final retail version for those of us who had the hardware to run them along with the rest of it. "Bait & Switch?" It sure smells like it to me, and I don't like being screwed around by people I've helped to make rich & famous by buying their products, even when those proved to be less than perfect or barely useable in some cases - Vista for example. If I buy a new car, I expect it to be fully functional and fully operational and completely capable of delivering the performance it was advertised to have. I don't buy a car that is rushed into production in time for the holiday season even though the experts say it still needs more work but they can patch it up later. That's not good enough when there's nothing wrong with the money I spent on the damned thing.
And as I've discovered, there are other Operating Systems out there, and I'm using one of them right now as I write this blog post. PC-BSD 9.0 to be exact.
You should give this a look, Folks. It's a very nice system, and it has a lot of features you probably wouldn't be expecting, including the price, which is Free.
This, you ought to see for yourself.
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