Dumped Windows 10

Rocky Raab

Installed Linux Mint 19.3 instead. Did it kinda accidentally, in fact. Was trying Mint out on a USB stick and somehow didn't UNclick the box that said Install. Oooops! Luckily, I had backups of all my documents and photos!

Anyway, over the past week, I found a program that substitutes quite well for my beloved but now gone forever Quicken 2010 and am pretty well settled in with my new operating system. Which by the way uses only a fraction of what Windows needed, both space and memory, is immune to hacking and malware, doesn't need anti-virus, and comes pre-installed with LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other programs I use. Nice!

So...after being a Windows user for almost 50 years, I'm now Windows free. My other computer is a travel laptop, and it's a Chromebook.

If you hate Win 10 and now that Win 7 has been terminated, you might look into Linux Mint or Linux Lite.

select-fire

Still running Windows 7.. it works just fine

Rocky Raab

But Microsoft ended service for it last week. No more security patches - and 7 was leaky from the get-go. If it crashes for you, you're SOL. You might want to start looking for an alternative You might want to watch https://youtu.be/Orrv5ufjYpo
 and if you decide to give it a look, this one  https://youtu.be/NEL9HJUoe4s

Cling2myguns

Windows 7 was terrible. I like Windows 10, once you get it all set up to look and work more like XP, it is great.

I am curious about Linux though, may have to look at it.

Rocky Raab

There are a bazillion different versions of Linux. The one most like Windows 10 in look and feel is Mint 19.3. The one most like Win 7 is Linux Lite 4.8. Both are the most current distributions. You can run either one without installing it (unless you mess up like I did!) by downloading it to a bootable USB stick. Download the Linux of your choice, then download Rufus to make the bootable USB stick. Easy peasy. Find Rufus 3.8 here: https://filehippo.com/download_rufus/

Marc1301

You can still download Windows 10 for free if you want to,...........

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/

I'm still running Windows 7 Pro on my desktop, but am playing with upgrading to 10 from 8.1 on my laptop. It's fine to keep using 7 for a good while as long as you don't visit questionable sites, or are an idiot when it comes to computers in general. Plan on sticking with programs you are currently using as well.

Rocky Raab

Eventually, 7 users will have to change, marc. If your machine is capable, go to W10. If not, one of the Linux options may be the best alternative. (And for a cheap, utterly safe travel machine, get a Chromebook.)

Marc1301

I agree Rocky, just sayin' it's not an emergency for an experienced user right now. I have limited experience with Linux, having only run one of the hundreds of distributions out there for a brief time (Ubuntu). Since I know you are into the market large, as am I,....what financial program are you using to run under Linux, and what do you think of it?

I have an old XP desktop that I could experiment on with Linux if I so choose.

Rocky Raab

Ubuntu is a dinosaur few people use any more. Mint 19.3 Cinnamon is great. Very Windows-like.

Mint.com (not the linux distribution, it's confusing) is great for real-time monitoring of your financials, but it is not a management program - no reports, no check-writing, can't make transfers or payments. For Quicken-like use, I'm now using kMyMoney. It's drawback is that the newest version is 2015, and it has only two check-writing templates. I had to write my own in HTML to get things to fit my checks. I can't write HTML. But LibreOffice can save text layouts in HTML! So I just juggled up a doc until it fit my checks and told kMyMoney to use that as the template. Ta-Daaa! Other folks like GnuCash. I haven't played with that one because it's more of a double-entry accounting package - above my head.

allen griggs

Almost 50 years of Windows?  What, you got your first laptop in 1973?  Precocious, or else, you used your time machine.

Rocky Raab

'76 - and it was a used desktop machine. With 5" floppies, one to hold the DOS program disc and one to save.

I think it's safe to say that's "almost 50" do you not? But maybe I should have said "with Microsoft"

allen griggs

Oops, that's what I get for being a cave man, and a Luddite.  Hell Rocky I didn't know computers existed in the seventies.
I didn't get one until 20 years ago.
Sorry.

Rocky Raab

No offense taken, allen. FWIW, I started with a Radio Shack TRS-80 that you had to manually program in Basic each and every time you used it. Unless you recorded all your keystrokes on a cassette player, and used that to load your program into the 'pooter! I thought DOS 3.1 was  HUGE upgrade! Load DOS into the massive 16k memory, swap to the Write 1.0 word processing disk and one empty 5" floppy in the other drive, and I was smokin' as a writer!

No internet, dot matrix were the high-end printers, and a 5" floppy held 128 kilobytes, your entire storage limit.

I was wrong, too! Couldn't have been '76. The first IBM PC came out in '81, and I probably bought mine used in '83. I paid $1200 for it - a tremendous hit to my budget in Jimmy Carter's years of malaise, gas lines, and 20% mortgage rates!

Marc1301

The TRS-80 M1 came out in 1977 according to this site. My first were a Timex/Sinclair 1000, followed closely by a Commodore 64. I only tinkered around with them. I really started with computers with Windows 3.0/3.1 in the early nineties. My first Windows machine was a Packard Bell Pentium 75 IIRC.

http://www.oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html

Rocky Raab

We've both come a long way, for sure. When I worked at NASA and launching the Space Shuttle, we had stand-alone word processors (can't recall the name) that communicated with other NASA centers through a telephone modem at 2400 bps. But if you wanted it to come through with less garbling, you selected 600 bps. That was the early-mid-80s.