Oh tried windows 11

[mikewalsh]

Huh. That's fine when someone else is buying the machine, and supplying it to you free of charge. Don't ever expect me to buy a Mac; it's WAY out of my price range, and I don't even like the company OR its products. And THAT dates back to the early 80s, when a balky Apple Lisa put me off Crapple's products for life.

Apple like to foster an artificial "snobbery" over the use of their products, suggesting - without ever actually saying so - that by using their products, others will think more highly of you!

Mike.

[ozsouth]

I have an interest in Win 11, as my wife needs Win for her craft design & cutting machine. I've wrestled with Win10,
spent near $A400 on ram & ssd upgrades, gone back to Win Defender AV as it's getting decent reviews now, and we
get reasonable performance - she just accepts it's going to crash on average twice a day, which is better than the
6-10 times it used to. This is on a 2yo Dell i5 laptop (I ran puppy live on it for several hours - no crashes).
I'm hoping Win 11 will improve things. I'm also going back to an HP next time.
As for Apple etc in business - lack of crashes means more employee productive time and no lost sales. Any small
business owner will tell you that's the difference between winning & losing, so if it works that way, I understand
the high initial outlay, with upgrades about every 5 years.
For me personally, the 'poor man's mac' (Chromebook with crostini) is the answer.

[BologneChe]

Huh. That's fine when someone else is buying the machine, and supplying it to you free of charge. Don't ever expect me to buy a Mac; it's WAY out of my price range, and I don't even like the company OR its products. And THAT dates back to the early 80s, when a balky Apple Lisa put me off Crapple's products for life.

Apple like to foster an artificial "snobbery" over the use of their products, suggesting - without ever actually saying so - that by using their products, others will think more highly of you!

Mike.

And I imagine being a Puppy Linux guru makes you empathize with humanity? You are in the same mood but in the other extreme

[sonny]

Leave "industry standard" Windows to businesses that can afford to have an "IT Department" (to help with all the fuss).
Ignorant and/or innocent home users should avoid using Windows at all costs. Their best friend is macOS or Linux.
Btw, I always purchase refurbished Macs (and PCs for my clients).
I paid $300 for a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13", Early 2015, i7, 16GB, 512GB) two weeks ago.
FYI, here's my local source for refurbished/off-lease deals (all commercial grade, not store-bought, student/home-grade hardware), as well as discounted CPU:
https://www.microcenter.com/category/42 ... 9/desktops
https://www.microcenter.com/category/42 ... ed-laptops

[mouldy]

I have an interest in Win 11, as my wife needs Win for her craft design & cutting machine. I've wrestled with Win10,
spent near $A400 on ram & ssd upgrades, gone back to Win Defender AV as it's getting decent reviews now, and we
get reasonable performance - she just accepts it's going to crash on average twice a day, which is better than the
6-10 times it used to. This is on a 2yo Dell i5 laptop (I ran puppy live on it for several hours - no crashes).
I'm hoping Win 11 will improve things. I'm also going back to an HP next time.
As for Apple etc in business - lack of crashes means more employee productive time and no lost sales. Any small
business owner will tell you that's the difference between winning & losing, so if it works that way, I understand
the high initial outlay, with upgrades about every 5 years.
For me personally, the 'poor man's mac' (Chromebook with crostini) is the answer.

You might experiment with WINE for your wife's software. Its come a long way. Course so has my experience with it. And if not WINE directly then the trial version Codeweaver Crossover, even though its just repacked WINE with proprietary frontend, it apparently has some tweaks that regular WINE doesnt. I was seriously surprised when I got latest Kindle for PC to install and run on regular WINE. Which was a good thing since the old version that did run in WINE was being deprecated and made non function (you couldnt register it to your account), As I mentioned, even the HRBLock tax sofware installs and runs in demo mode, it just wont accept activation code. And thats gotta be some relatively simple tweak since it apparently will run ok in Codeweaver Crossover version. But sorry, I am not purchasing proprietary WINE just for that. I should though download their demo version and try it to see. Maybe I could find the tweak that lets it work if it does. Only saw that one blog post from couple years back saying it did. Facts of life, not that many people use linux or WINE and those that do its more for things like MS Office or some game.

[mouldy]

I was curious enough that I downloaded and tried two week trial of Codeweaver Crossover for HRBlock tax software, nope. Other than their proprietary frontend, same as latest versions WINE, wont accept activation code. So yea, no guarantees, but WINE is free and it works well for some things. Right now HRBlock tax software not one of them.

[cthisbear]

Thanks mouldy.
I have just downloaded it to try on some old boxes.
Not because I am a WinBot fan but because more options are better practice.
Best practice is Puppy...Joy and Love are inbuilt.

I posted earlier about my wife's new HP....and Windows 10 sucking any joy out of life
with its Crippleware. Talk about the lost weekend, but instead of booze it was MicroCrap
doing my head in.

I am going to have a pickup from soon from Arnies Recon, because I have a lot of hard drives, desktops etc to
get rid of. At least it is re-used responsibly for free.

https://www.arniesrecon.com/

Arnies Recon
1/17 Barclay Street
Marrickville,
NSW 2204

[mikewalsh]

Huh. That's fine when someone else is buying the machine, and supplying it to you free of charge. Don't ever expect me to buy a Mac; it's WAY out of my price range, and I don't even like the company OR its products. And THAT dates back to the early 80s, when a balky Apple Lisa put me off Crapple's products for life.

Apple like to foster an artificial "snobbery" over the use of their products, suggesting - without ever actually saying so - that by using their products, others will think more highly of you!

Mike.

And I imagine being a Puppy Linux guru makes you empathize with humanity? You are in the same mood but in the other extreme

Oh, trust me, I'm no "guru". I moderate here to help out, and where Puppy is concerned I'm not much more than a 'tinkerer'. I frequently amaze myself that I manage to make anything work at all...!

No, I had a bad experience with Apple's products a long time ago, which gave me a low opinion of not only their products, but the company itself. But that's ALL it is.....simply my opinion.

Many people like Apple's stuff. (Many people also have a much bigger bank balance than I do..... )

Mike.

[mouldy]

I recently ran across an iso of Tiny10. Sorry no download link, I must have downloaded it sometime back cause of my fondness for TinyXP 'Beast Edition' back in the day.

Anyway its 32bit and installed it takes 5GB disk space. Its big problem, it cant recognize usb drives. No problem with SATA drives. It would install and run variety of 32bit windows software. But unfortunately Easytether which I have always used to tether windows to android phone fails, obviously missing something, but seems windows had now implemented more security to modify systems files, administrator is not good enough. So got idea of trying something I never tried, using Azilink to tether windows. The Azilink app installs on phone. Yes you need developer debug mode. You need openvpn and adb on the windows computer.

I wasnt having lot luck and only mention of Azilink and windows was few posts from XP/Vista era. But on computer side of things its mostly openvpn with little help from adb. Adb tools is like 1MB and the community edition of current openvpn is less than 5MB.

So not sure if it was that usb problem or what, so I installed win10LITE, another hacked version that does work very well, its 10GB installed. Easytether works fine on it. So finally figured out its a permissions thing. You need to go find openvpn.exe in installed programs and right click and choose compatibility tab and check box to run as administrator. Compatibility tab, not security tab. Yea for whatever reason it has to be done this way. Arguments on openvpn forum about this. But enough of a hint what to look for. Then do the adb forward port command, then right click the azilink.ovpn file and 'run in openvpn' option. It throws up terminal and same output as it does in linux run as root or using sudo, etc. Connected and can surf. So interesting little puzzle, and yes Virginia, Azilink can still tether modern windows computer. Probably still works in mac too, but dont have a mac. Azilink is good open source tethering option on locked phone, but few seem to have the patience for it. And yea it can take a bit work to figure it out, but it works well when you do. I use a small script to connect with it in linux. Sure one could do a batch file in windows. I am just not a big windows user, havent done much commandline on windows side of fence since DOS.

Now that I have figured that out, suppose I should go try Tiny10 again but kinda lost interest. No doubt probably a Tiny11 out now or soon. The n-lite hackers offer these once in a while. These n-lited version of windows, you have to make sure they are locked down, cause they cant be auto updated without huge mess. Probably a non-working computer after such updating attempt made.

[mouldy]

Wow setting up simple bat file to first run the adb port forwarding command and then running openvpn to connect, not anywhere as simple as script in linux. Probably simpler way if I was more familiar with windows scripting, but I ended up daisychaining two bat files. First one calls the second. This "call" makes it finish first one before calling the second. I had it fail with it all in one bat file, it didnt wait for first command to finish before running second. The cart gets ahead of the horse. And double clicking on windows kinda drives me nuts. But now double click the bat file on desktop and it tethers to phone just like in linux.

[amethyst]

And double clicking on windows kinda drives me nuts

I think you can change that....

[darry19662018]

Good luck getting win11 running on an “old” machine. With its tpm chip requirement. Even some machines from 2018 won’t install it. Though there is a registry hack.

[darry19662018]

[xenial]

I have not used windows for many years,windows 7 was the last version i used and i am assuming a microsoft key is required to run this.?.
I have seen xp downloads everywhere for free but without the key it would be fairly useless.

I am perfectly happy with puppy but sometimes i get a brief nostalgic itch to just use windows for a few minutes.

[amethyst]

I have not used windows for many years,windows 7 was the last version i used and i am assuming a microsoft key is required to run this.?.
I have seen xp downloads everywhere for free but without the key it would be fairly useless.

I am perfectly happy with puppy but sometimes i get a brief nostalgic itch to just use windows for a few minutes.

Registration keys for XP is widely available on the net.

[rg66]

Good luck getting win11 running on an “old” machine. With its tpm chip requirement. Even some machines from 2018 won’t install it. Though there is a registry hack.

Just boot Ventoy from USB with Windows 11 ISO on it, you can use ventoyplugson to do the registry hacks automatically. Tested and working on Acer Veriton E430 which would never pass Windows 11 requirements. It actually runs fairly fast with Intel G2030 CPU and 4GB RAM.

[wizard]

@rg66

you can use ventoyplugson to do the registry hacks automatically.

Interesting, any links to how to do this?

thanks
wizard

[rg66]

Go to ventoy.net > Document to read about using ventoy. When you run ventoyplugson go to Global Control Plugin > VTOY_WIN11_BYPASS_CHECK and set to 1.

[mikewalsh]

I am perfectly happy with puppy but sometimes i get a brief nostalgic itch to just use windows for a few minutes.

You want to watch that, mate. There's an outside chance it could become a compulsion, y'know..?

(*snigger*)

Mike.

[wiak]

Currently I have Windows 10 Pro available in dual boot with my Linux systems on this machine. It is upgradable to Windows 11 but that is numerically higher than Windows 10 so it is bound to be even more horrible. I feel no nostalgia towards Windows at all - makes me feel bored whenever I have logged into it, and completely out of control of the system. The only thing I have usefully used it for was to shrink the ntfs partition it is sitting in to one quarter of what it originally occupied.

[Phoenix]

I have not used windows for many years,windows 7 was the last version i used and i am assuming a microsoft key is required to run this.?.
I have seen xp downloads everywhere for free but without the key it would be fairly useless.

I am perfectly happy with puppy but sometimes i get a brief nostalgic itch to just use windows for a few minutes.

I believe you can use it but Windows will be annoying all the way through,

[Grey]

Today it turned out that the opportunity to download Win 10 and 11 from the official website is closed for my country.
This is the second good news in a week, after the news that Coca-Cola is closing factories with its poison

[mouldy]

Today it turned out that the opportunity to download Win 10 and 11 from the official website is closed for my country.
This is the second good news in a week, after the news that Coca-Cola is closing factories with its poison

LOL, always some small blessings in worst of circumstances.

The soda pop sellers did me big favor back in 60s here in America when they went from using cane sugar to much cheaper high fructose corn syrup. It didnt taste right and I stopped buying it. Anymore its in EVERYTHING even slightly processed in this country. Marketers figured out something called Bliss Point and amount sweetener needed to maximize sales for every product. Crazy humans.

[rockedge]

I had WinXP running on all kinds of machines. Getting Windows to run on different machines has never really been an issue. EXCEPT for my older high end industrial grade DELL laptop from 2008. Windows 7 Pro was it. Windows 7 Pro could not be upgraded to Win10. Just a message from Micro$$ saying maybe someday,

That machine no longer has anything Micro$$ on it and it was designed for Windows.

[sonny]

As long as the computer has enough memory and storage, Windows 11 will install and run fine.
However, as long as Windows 11 is running on your computer, you are Microsoft's mine.
By the way, welcome to the kennels, jesicacraddock!

[mouldy]

It is strange that Windows 11 works fine on a 20-year-old computer. Because new versions of windows take up more RAM, which increases the load on the whole computer. I have not yet upgraded my computer to Windows 11 as I feel that this operating system still needs work. I am using 10 windows and it completely satisfies me. I used to use a pirated version, but recently I bought the key to activate windows, and I don't regret the money I spent. The licensed version is much more optimized.

Win10 and think win11 both were made so you could run the official version legitimately without activation. Course if you didnt activate, there were handful of minor handicaps, you couldnt synchronize with your M$ account (who wants a M$ account???), you couldnt change your wallpaper (easy workaround) and you got the watermark that you arent activated. Also pretty easy to get rid of. That was it. You were free to use it with the minor limitations. Cause keeping you using windows and data collected in background more important to M$ than the upfront fee to buy win10. Android cell phones plus Chromebooks were eating M$'s lunch. So when there is actual competition, you cant be so high handed or you lose market share.

As to running on old computer, depends what you want to do with it. It wont work if you are trying to open 20 browser windows while playing an online game and five other things all at same time. Lock it down so it isnt trying to serve two masters, then do one thing at a time and its fine. One thing at a time takes far less RAM or processor speed.

If you want to do multiple things simultaneously while letting it update itself and send spy info back to mothership, then yea, you need a powerful modern computer.

First time I tried win10 cause my tax software sniffed and refused to run on XP. After nightmare three days getting it working in WINE, decided windows for once a year taxes the better option. I think it could run on XP, but it wouldnt cause it tested for operating system before trying. Anyway, much as I didnt like XP and its bubble notifications, I liked win10 less, lot blinking lights and spinning jiggling background crap and some lady AI trying to talk to me and failing. So went looking how to lock it down and remove the unnecessary cruft and background stuff. Wow, night and day. Locked down it was mild mannered and speedy and pleasant. But getting there isnt easy, and keeping it like that also not easy. Let it update and you are back to sideshow at a carnival and SLOW. Cause M$ wants you to have the carnival sideshow experience. Come talk to the two headed AI lady.... See Bill Gates bite the head off a chicken. BUY, BUY, BUY!

[tosim]

I too used to keep Windows on one of my computers just to do my"TurboTax" once a year. However, last year, I was able to (through my browser) and one of my websites, do the software online.
Even gave me a reduced rate. Did same thing this year.

[BologneChe]

I too used to keep Windows on one of my computers just to do my"TurboTax" once a year. However, last year, I was able to (through my browser) and one of my websites, do the software online.
Even gave me a reduced rate. Did same thing this year.

I just have Windows 10 under Virtualbox to do a TurboTax session...the Windows update took longer than doing my taxes for both levels of government!

[rockedge]

Found out just now my DELL INSPIRON 1505E which is 32 bit and runs 32bit Windows 10 no longer can run TurboTax 2024!!

TurboTax at bare minimum needs Windows 10 64 bit. Next season only Windows 11+ will be supported.

Bought it and overlooked the minimum system requirements beforehand. Now trying to bring back to life a Dell Optiplex 980 refurbished machine that came with Win10 installed which I never used. This machine has run nothing but some type of Puppy Linux.

Of course can't login to Windows because I never knew the passwords that were set. Now attempting to do backdoor the thing and reset the passwords.

What a hassle for a once a year thing....but now I must get Win10 to run to seek enlightenment.

[sonny]

These days, Windows 11 computers feel more like Microsoft-owned devices than our own.
Imagine using a company's computer or cellphone every day...