Changing a computer from Linux to Windows....

You probably won't be doing this very often, and that's good, because you're looking at hours and hours of reformatting, re-installing, restoring programs and features, re-tuning all your preferences, etc., etc., etc.

A couple of things are a big help. A good partitioning tool, like Minitool Partition Wizard, and the best tweaking tool for Windows, Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4 for Windows 10. I especially like this latest version of UWT, because it has new features which let you remove these "Most Recent", "Just Arrived", "You Gotta See This" crap from your Windows Explorer/File Explorer lists in Desktop, and it also lets you call a halt to those "active tiles" that keep constantly changing their contents so quickly you aren't really sure whether you want to be bothered with all that flashing bullshit or not. So now you can opt for "Not!" and freeze the little bastards onto one presentation instead of a rapidly-flying loop of crap. And you've just gotta love that one! Maybe it looked good to some butt-smoocher at Mighty Microsoft, but it's a brainwave whose time will never come around my house. Thanks heaps to Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4.

I've been trying out Linux Mint on this old quad-core for about a week now, and I like it a lot, but I haven't yet been able to train it to share with anything else on the drive, so I've reverted to Win-10 again, for further twiddling with that. In Linux, you are encouraged to configure it to suit yourself, although it works fine right out of the box, so to speak. Windows, on the other hand, almost never works fine right out of the box, and you seldom have a choice to make about reconfiguring it if you wish to preserve your sanity, not to mention your virginity or your common sense. That's because they've shipped a lot of their construction projects offshore to exotic lands like Bunga-Bunga where English is a foreign language, and us Palefaces are disgusting infidels or non-believers who ought really to be purged from the unwashed masses whose auras have real teeth if you can get within range of them. Get the picture? Would I lie to you?

And you'll notice, I hope, that my favorite desktop gadgets really do still work in Windows 10 - but I hasten to qualify this remark with the bad news that it isn't so if you're a Windows Insider running the latest fast-track builds, like 10549, for example. So if you like your desktop gadgets, maybe you should re-think the idea of remaining a Windows Insider fighting your way through the latest new experimental versions of Wonderful Windows Ten. And you've just heard this from one who has, with the fresh teeth-marks of it still healing on his wrinkled old posterior.