windoze 10

Jerry Monoman - I suppose you have never looked at the alternatives available in Linux to replace MS Office. The LibreOffice suite (which will also, I am told, run on MS) is a near 100% dropin replacement for Windows Office. It is true that originally it had problems, and had compatibility problems with Windows documents, etc, but nowadays it is will directly read almost all Windows stuff (not just documents, but spreadsheets, presentations and so on), and it is being improved all the time, unlike the Windows stuff, if posts on this thread are anything to go by. (and of course, Windows and Office never had problems....... so never needed to be improved or fixed )

I for one will never forget the time some years I spent preparing a document for a big customer, with limited time to go, and finding that MS Office would not work properly with the document - I later found out it was apparently because the document was 'too big' - whatever that means - it was about 1 GB. I now regularly write much longer (bigger?) documents in LibreOffice Writer with no problems - same experience with Calc (replaces Excel) and other documents.

You say you 'need' to run certain applications - have you looked for Linux replacements?

You say "Should anyone be able to assure me that Linux, of any origin, will run all these with at least the MS programs loaded at the same time..." - you seem to be implying that you want to run these (MS) applications under Linux?. Of course you can run a dual-boot system, and run your applications with Windows, and use LInux for other things.

The hardware you are running it on is largely irrelevant - LInux will often run on ancient software successfully - it certainly uses less memory than Windows. Its been many years (in my experience) since the speed of the hardware made a noticeably significant difference to the speed of word processing documents.

Perhaps you should give Linux a try anyway, but there's no obligation if you want to stick to the past. All the people in threads like this and others who post complaints about Windows cannot all be wrong - there is no smoke without fire - all I am doing is pointing out an alternative.

Ok I'll bite.

I spent several days getting 'astronomy linux' (a specialsit bundle of Ubuntu) running on an old laptop, handheld by several 'experts'.

Getting all the drivers installed was the most unituitive and horrible computer experience I can remember.

Towards the end the advice I got was 'Try another version of Linux'...

I eventually got the thing to boot properly and start up, but by then I just hadn't got the heart to go through the effort to get the astronomy software working and add the drivers for my astro gear.

...

As for Libre Office, I had to drop it as it just couldn't handle many of the files sent me through my work without destroying the formating.

I now use Office 365 and it has never failed me in 6 years, including opening all the various formats sent by MEW contributors (except Apple's format), and all the other programs work as well (I would be lost without Outlook, vastly better than struggling against Thunderbird, which I tried.

I'm not averse to opensource/freeware - I use firefox and many other programs of that kind, but I judge each one on its merits and my own experiences.

When I wrote the original query, going into device manager didn't throw up anything relating to sound, the entry was just missing. However when I just switched it on now it took a long time to boot, probably uploading yet another update, then it all works just by magic. the ways of Mr Microsoft pass all human understanding!

Duncan, pleased to hear it got sorted.. ..now that you mention it, when I installed the same one, it needed several restarts before it straightened itself out.. and without prompting for them. As you say, He works in a mysterious way....

D

I use a dual boot Windows 7/Linux system on one of my laptop PC,s. One feature I find useful is that Linux can "see" the windows partition and I can transfer compatible files between the two systems.

Libre office is FREE and can load and save windows files, admittedly sometimes with formatting differences. I can live with that. Personally, I think a lot of the windows "improvements" have been change for changes sake, with the bonus that manufacturers have been able to sell people new equipment, because as was mentioned above, the old kit no longer works.

As for me, I have several old tower systems which I assembled over the years. They still run various windows OS from windows 2000 upwards, as the (old) programs I am running on them do what I require of them and do not need to access the internet.

The 1903 update worked perfectly (I think) on my Desktop, but sound failed on my Acer Laptop. No output, and a red cross on the Speaker Icon.

Fair number of other people reporting the same problem on the web with a variety of fixes none of which worked for me. Microsoft's web support advice hopeless. Microsoft's diagnostic tools report everything on my laptop is working correctly - it believes the latest audio device driver is installed and working correctly. Acer's diagnostic toolkit often does better than Microsoft, but not in this case, though it did find a number of unrelated driver updates that Microsoft didn't. (An Intel diagnostic found another driver upgrade missed by both Microsoft and Acer.) This confusion is one reason why Windows is a bit unreliable and a bit insecure: it relies on device drivers provided by Microsoft, Hardware Vendors and Software developers, and there is no standard way of managing them. Linux and Apple don't use drivers and both have coherent software management systems.

Audio is rather complicated. Turns out my laptop has an extra layer of control (used to manage Dolby and other features) between the driver and operating system. I think it's the interface between this and Windows that's failed, not the driver. I was able to get audio working again by bypassing this layer. Although sound now works less fancy features, Windows is still red-flagging the Speaker Icon...

Given time, no doubt the developers will find and fix the fault. How long it takes depends on where it is. Could be Microsoft boobed, or it could be a third-party.

After a painful career in IT I'm amused by end-user debates about the merits of operating systems and software packages. They tend to be about visible features, functional things like a particular program or the look and feel of the display. Whilst functionality is important, non-functional aspects of computer system like performance, efficiency, reliability, security, portability, certification, integrity and maintainability are far more interesting. Under the bonnet these things are so complicated it's a wonder computers work at all...

Dave

As usual SOD and Neil are both correct.

When you get it all to work properly Linux is great. When it doesn't work well, you are on your own!

Having said that, I use Ubuntu for most things and am very pleased with it. I'd like to flag one piece of software which hasn't been mentioned and that is Oracle VirtualBox (usual disclaimer). I use it under Ubuntu to run Windows Vista and through that, my TurboCad 16. It works well and I have a shared area where I get Windows to save all my files (so the virtual Windows disk is kept relatively small). Connecting to other devices can get complicated but, for instance, I can print from Windows to my wireless printer on the Ubuntu network.

Worth a look if you get too frustrated with WIndows.

Regards Tom

Neil - I can sympathise with your problems trying to get drivers installed in Linux for your astro gear, but I would suggest this is not confined to Linux. In my opinion there are (and always will be) users of specialist software, and I would suggest that instead of a large user market to push software producers into making their software useable, you are virtually on your own. I have had the opposite problem using development software which was impossible to use on Windows, despite being 'compatible' and that was provide by a large company with (presumably) resources to do the work (but failed for me)

As for the Libreoffice experience, I have seen you make this same comment some time ago on another thread. I did make the point that the software is under constant development, and also that I (and I know of others, mostly in the business field in which I worked) who were almost reduced to tears by the problems with MS Office, and they were stuck with it because of business use. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice. OO is still under development as far as I know, but LO has long overtaken it. As I mentioned earlier, there were problems, but it has progressed enormously these days: I don't believe Office has done so. As another post on this thread suggests, the problem quite possibly lay with the hardware in use. Linux will usually run on a smaller or older machine than Windows, but everything has its limitations. As someone else noted Broadcom drivers for WiFi are a pig on Linux - the manufacturers won't release info, so development is hindered - but there are drivers which work if you search for it. I have a laptop on which the graphics devices were produced by a small company subsequently taken over by MS. When it was bought, Windows was already installed. Now nothing will run properly on it - Windows apparently stopped making the chips and also the drivers: no info was released, so no drivers were developed for Linux (not for want of trying) - now it just collects dust on my shelves. (It will actually run with Linux, but the graphics rendering is done in software instead of the graphics chips, so it is very slow - Linux did at least achieve that)

In a perfect world, everybody would be happy with everything immediately it came on the market, but this is never true: Windows used to sell its product for a relatively high price (try looking at the cost of business support for the older WIndows versions), and apparently has been forced into now making it available much more cheaply because of competition (and possibly public opinion). Despite having the funding (its a big company), Windows still generates threads such as this spotlighting complaints. In contrast Linux is generally free, even such things as Ubuntu, produced by Canonical (but their business support costs money) and it is also usually developed by a small team working virtually for nothing, or for donations (Linux Mint publishes a list of its donors and receipts on its web page).

While you may dislike Linux and not use it, which is your prerogative, I feel that development of alternative tools to the 'Big Tech' approach should be encouraged, but unfortunately there are all too many reports on the lines of "I tried it once, and I couldn't get it working, so its useless and I'll never use it, and others shouldn't". Far better, don't you think, to encourage its use, and let the developers provide us with new and better tools?

I also disagree with comments on the lines of "If Linux fails, your on your own". It was my own experience, and I have heard others say the same, that MS gives virtually NO help beyond their fatuous (to my mind) FAQ pages if you have problems - really, you are left with the option to seek help on the Internet, and it usually is there. Exactly the same argument applies to Linux - there are literally thousands of forums and sites offering help - Linux Mint has its own user forums, and it is often addressed by the founder of Mint - the same can be said of most other Linux dialogues. In this day, the Internet is full of sites with people willing to help - you just need to look.

Its perhaps also worth pointing out that most servers, which everyone relies on for their Internet access run under Linux, not Windows. If it was that unreliable, do you really think that would be the case?

To sum up, I would like to see an end to the Windows/Linux argument - both have their merits, and it is always your choice which you use. Much better to encourage both systems, because then we all benefit in the end - lets see more requests for help/offers of help for these OS's, instead of bashing them. Its as depressing as hell to respond with a suggestion when someone posts about an issue and it leads to attacks and aspersions because 'Linux is crap' or 'Windows is expensive junk' I dislike posting nowadays, even when I see something where I could help, simply because of this trend to rubbish everything. It is fair to say that many people do respond positively - this thread has many such posts.

These are my opinions, and my experiences - if you don't agree with them, that's your problem, or if they raise your blood pressure you are perfectly at liberty to ignore it all.

+1 .... especially around here - it's not like it hasn't already been done to death many times.

I was quite interested in this remark by MM57, so I did a complete update of my W10. Up to now no adverse effects (touching wood).

But when I do the steps above, I don't get a Linux shell, but a window with a "Windows PowerShell".

I'm beginning to think there are different variants of W10 around...

Kind regards,
Hans

There are indeed several variants of Windows 10, plus what's loaded by default on a particular computer depends on the hardware vendor. The bash shell (Linux) is an advanced developer feature, far too scary for ordinary Microsoft groupies. It usually has to be switched on by an Administrator from Settings->Update&Security. This set of instructions describes all the steps.

The bash shell is the Linux equivalent of Microsoft's PowerShell, not a full Linux installation. The extra power bash provides might only be useful to command line and scripting gurus, not the average civilian! Powershell is well beyond most Microsoft users and Bash goes to the next level. Very useful if needed, mostly not!

Dave

I suppose I ought to bring this topic to a close by a simple piece of additional information which I should have included in my original post

1 I use my laptop at least one every week ofcten every day.

2 My efforts on Linux are about the beginning of every mont. I learnt as a very early computer adopter that the technology is constantly evolving.

3. Although commentators have given me food for thought nobody has addressed my original question in one single response.

I don't think I asked for any suggestions of alternative OSs.

But nevertheless Many thanks to all.

Jerry

Well, fwiw, Its only MICROSOFT that is ending support for windows 7, all of the other suppliers are still supporting it in the main, Antivirus programs are still available and in some cases better, and drivers for specialist equipment still seems to be available from their original suppliers too.

I have no difficulty getting Antivirus support for Windows XP and 7 from Avast etc including firewall protection.

So, whats the problem?

In my case, the regular updates in windows 10 that can only be posponed to a point before the machine forces you to update - in my case right in the middle of a rather fiddly engraving job, where the machine suddenly decided to reboot and dump the program even after I had clicked the box to postpone !!!

Don't seem to have that problem with XP and 7

In my early experiments with running various DOS & Win 32 bit programs under Linux I tried, and indeed did use for a while, Oracle's Virtual Box. The main problem I found was that it was a multi-load sequence to run the DOS program - load Linux, load VB, load XP, load DOS program, whilst shutting down was only slightly less time consuming. Other than that, everything worked ok with lots of access to my data files. One way of speeding up somewhat was to write a DOS batch file for use within XP and thus automate some of the sequences. The major problem, though, was that the system just wasn't fast enough with the DOS program stuttering when trying to rapidly step through data records. Eventually I had to abandon VB in favour of DOSEmu.

In respect of anti-virus & other support for deceased Windows versions, I used to run, eg SuperAntiSpy on Windows 2000. When W2K was eventually abandoned by Microsoft, initially SAS et al all worked satisfactorily, however, as time rolled by, scan times became slower and slower, with SAS in particular taking many hours. The effective result being that I was forced to upgrade regardless of my wishes if I wished to maintain system protection. Thus, when support for XP was ceased, in addition to the other problems of hardware & software compatibility, I could envisage a loss of system protection as well.

Peter G. Shaw

There's yet another build coming to W10 sometime in November for the early adopters to get, but most pc's will not be forced to get it for some time.

I guess that's how beta-testing is done these days.