Terminal Notes

The title is merely my dark sense of humor: I’m making some necessary adjustments in my computer ministry.

I’ll help you with Win7 and Vista. I’ll give you some limited help with Win8. I’ll help you a lot with running XP in a virtual machine (VM) or even earlier versions of Windows. Lots of really great software won’t run otherwise. However, I will not even investigate running Win10. If you upgrade to that, you are on your own.

After reading the commentary from professional security researchers and real computer technicians, along with published writings of those who keep track of government policy regarding such things, I cannot in good conscience go any farther with Windows. There was a time when Windows was designed to sell your eyeballs to advertisers. You as a Windows user was the product Microsoft sold to their business partners. But over the past few years, the snooping and monitoring have gone too far — way too far. Not just the loss of privacy, but that the snooping now takes priority over any usability. Microsoft is so dedicated to tracking you in every detail that they are willing to break your system in order to promote even more snooping. (Google’s Android is no better.)

I can’t emphasize this enough: I’ve spent a lot of time fixing stuff that MS broke for my clients. Updates are wiping out user profiles and people can’t logon. The typical fixes are simple enough for me, but convoluted processes most users can’t navigate. Further, MS and all her experts cannot even come up with a consistent explanation why it happens. Some machines never see it, but others do it consistently. Some users see it all the time even when they replace the machines with really good hardware. These are people who never run anything atypical, just read the MSM news and check their email — standard mainstream consumer stuff. No malware, no viruses, nothing like that, but their system breaks every freaking time Windows updates.

I’m not the only person convinced it’s due to undetected surveillance crap.

I could go on at length. For example, that damned little application that now runs in the SysTray advertising the free upgrade to Win10 itself keeps crashing and seems to break other stuff. The point is not that I’m unwilling to help you; I cannot.

If you need to know about migrating to Linux/BSD/Unix, I’ll be glad to help you. I don’t recommend Macs, but I know a little about them and you can get a lot of help with those from other sources. But my work with Windows is “terminal” — I can’t go any farther with it. This has nothing to do with being a fanboy, because all operating systems suck. I take no part in the religious fanaticism of the Linux fan clubs. It’s really about protecting you and your actual control of your own computer. I don’t even care about the privacy so much, but the increasing loss of choices, the demand that you lie down for virtual rape by just about any passing hacker, government or otherwise, is more than I can tolerate.