The Dubious End of Windows 7
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing, General, Gripes, Humour, Uncategorized
So… at a stupid hour of the morning (meaning: it’s now Sunday!) I am almost forced to give up trying to resurrect an existing Win7 partition. The reason seems to be not that there is any real problem with the system, but that there is either a memory decay issue or something to do with the NVIDIA video driver. Trouble is… it’s difficult to tell which one it is. It looks like CCleaner (alias Crap Cleaner, I used to use it regularly on XP) can cure the issue, but first I have to pay for the privilege. [1]
Contrast this with the situation on Mageia 8 Linux. Many programs can be substituted for those available in the Windows ecosystem because the focus is really on the filetype; also, of course, a lot of work performed nowadays on Win10/11 is actually on the Internet and really depends upon the capabilities of the browser. As it happens, over the years a number of programs have been ported across OSes so that there is no difficulty manipulating the same files on concurrent ports of the same program – think of Audacity (sound editor), VLC media player, and various Internet browsers, a category which now includes Microsoft’s own Edge! [2] This means that their online services, such as Office, would be performed in a browser rather than a dedicated program… but isn’t this killing their own markets? Why would anyone want to buy a system with their OS when everything can be done online through a browser?
Corollary: I am handling the same files with programs ported to Windows, Android and Linux.
I could see the way things were going already, way back under XP: programs that used to be free (albeit with limited functionality) are now “Pro” and you have to pay more money for the dubious benefit of maintaining the “security” of an OS that is obviously more open to attack than others. In this particular case, the trouble is not that I cannot find out where the problem is, oh no, the trouble is that its nature is such that I cannot complete scanning and register for the “Pro” version that allegedly would cure this. I keep getting the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) before any “solution” can be applied, which, from my long and painful years of experience, is absolutely typical of Windows. It repeatedly BSODs during scanning… plus, even if I could prevent this problem, this particular machine was made in 2008, is running a now-defunct version of Windows, and its final fate will be to end its days running Linux.
This is the real issue with closed-source software: running the operating system which runs it already costs money, and then you have to pay more money each year because (a) it is not secure enough by design, (b) this means that there is a whole host of malware, spyware, Trojans and stuff designed specifically to infect it, and (c) different security/system apps seem to target different malware so that in the end, if you want something approaching real security (because the different apps overlap in detection capabilities to some extent, and therefore coverage is dodgy), you need to waste a whole lot of time and power regularly scanning with a number of them, which also slows the machine down. Many of the programs I used to run under XP and 98SE, such as BearShare (a file-sharing program) and others (mainly security scanners) that I used to think were so good, were apparently bearers of malware and needed to be avoided; this was one of the reasons that I gave up on M$ in the first place and also didn’t go for the Fruity One – there were a whole load of free OSes out there, I had already had experience with one (trashing at least one hard drive in the process) and the experience of forever having to reinstall Win3.x (sometimes several times a week, it literally reduced me to tears at times, I kid you not, I have witnesses!) turned out to be a strange blessing, giving me strength in the early days when my unfamiliarity with Mandrake proved to be rather similar to my experience with the different incarnations of “Win”… I developed the art of patience, the Zen of OS installation.
However… there’s the thing. Normally, even if something goes wrong with the boot process on Mageia (and on my main system, it has, right now), the thing still works; it doesn’t go “Bork” when booting and if it does, well, the kind of system hygiene that you could apply means that reinstallation is easy and can happen while you are sleeping. We might add that there are applications (programs) which are third-party (i.e., proprietary; you have to pay for them) even under a free OS and yes, I do actually pay for them – precisely because I can use them under a free OS and the money that I pay doesn’t go to an account in Redmond. Programs like this include SoftMaker Office (which I used, among other things, to help a certain South African gentleman get his second novel typeset) [3] and WPS Office, perpetrated by KingSoft, who have been at this for a long time and guess what? The Linux version of their (very good) M$-compatible office suite is actually free to install under Linux! [4]
Anyway, I just paid for “Pro” and Win7 is still dying, I may have to let it expire on this particular machine soon. I bought this reconditioned laptop exactly because (a) I have been so sick of the constant e-waste that this kind of thing generates and (b) Windoze is sh*t and needs to be replaced by something that is useful and not prone to the type of “planned obsolescence” so prevalent in the Windoze ecology.
That’s my two penn’orth of opinion. A penny for your thoughts, lazangen’lemen???
[1] Yes, I did pay. Alas!
[2] Imagine: a Chrome-based browser on Linux. Who would’a thunk?
[3] Did I mention that SoftMaker have a FreeOffice that you can download on Windoze? No? Well, I’ve mentioned it now… https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
[4] See: https://www.wps.com/office/linux/
