I HATE MICROSOFT!!!!

Yes, I hate Microsoft. I hate them with a passion that burns my soul like an Asian monk covered in gasoline. I was probably screaming today like that monk.

It all started shortly after the first of day 2016. I noticed that my laptop (which used to be a Win 7 OS, and had been recently upgraded to Windows 10) started acting weird. Well, let me go back a little further. I'd waited a month or two after Windows 10 was released to the public to upgrade to it. You know, that free upgrade that Microsoft is so conveniently offering all their customers, you know, 3/4 of the world.

My son told me that he'd been using Windows 10 for awhile and he likes it, so i took the plunge and put it on my Windows 7 laptop. I used it for a couple of weeks and it seemed all right. I have a desktop too that I use primarily for gaming and it's Windows 8.1, which I despise ( but I use a program called "start-is-back" to make it look and feel like Windows 7 and so I was all right with it.) Since I seemed to like Windows 10, I went ahead and put it on my desktop too. Everything seemed to be going fine, there were things in Windows 10 that I really liked, although I didn't think they out-weighed a lot of the negative aspects that came with it, such as the lack of control over your own PC that it brought with it.

A couple of days into 2016 though, I started noticing that my laptop was acting very slow and sluggish. so I ran disk cleanup, that didn't seem to help though. I started to worry that I might have a virus or malware on my PC, so I ran my anti-virus and it said there was nothing there. I downloaded another malicious software remover tool and ran it. It found 8 things that it said weren't malicious, but I might want them off my PC, so I removed them and that didn't fix the problem either. I then scanned my hard drive for errors and it came back clean. It was at this point that I was beginning to suspect the real culprit was someone a little closer to the problem. I decided to run system restore to see if that would help. Upon opening the control panel though, I was confronted with a new problem. I couldn't click on anything! On top of that, just opening control panel seemed to freeze the whole computer. I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, but task manager popped up and immediately froze as well. After a minute or so of this and futilely clicking on the screen I was unceremoniously dumped to a black screen of nothingness that lasted for about two minutes, then suddenly I was back on the desktop as if nothing at all had happened. No crash reports, no error logs, nothing.

I did this five or six times in a row, with exactly the same result. I was getting angry. I started combing forums like "How-to-Geek" and "Tom's Hardware", looking for people who might be experiencing the same sort of problem. Apparently there are a lot of them, but there didn't seem to be any coherent answers that seemed to fix the problem. Most people seemed to have either given up or re-installed an older operating system. I knew I had back-up disks for my laptop, though sadly I had none for my desktop (always make back-up disks for re-installing folks!) I pulled out my disks and started the 3 to 5 hour process of re-installing windows 7 on the laptop and updating everything again. My disks were 4 years old, so there were a whole lot of updates to download and install. Eventually though, I got my laptop back to Win 7 and it's now working fine again. It was during the updating process that I started noticing that my desktop was starting to act funny as well! I did all the same things, anti-virus, hard drive scans, all with the same results, no apparent problems. I knew I didn't have back-up disks to revert back to Win 8.1 though, so I started combing forums once again. I did find that I could download an ISO image of Win 8.1 from Microsoft and using my existing product key reinstall Win 8.1 on my machine.

I'm going to shorten the story up a little at this point. It wasn't very easy to do and involved a call to tech support for my PC (CybertronPC). They have a great tech support, it's the first time I've called them and they did a wonderful job helping me get through the re-installation process. But all of this that I've been telling you isn't why I hate Microsoft. Here's why I hate Microsoft. I had just finished re-installing Win 8.1 on my desktop and went to windows update to install all those patches for it that knew would be out there waiting for me. Windows told me there were 155 IMPORTANT updates and that it would be a 2.6 gigabyte download. I started going up and down through the list of updates trying to figure out how that could possibly add up, it didn't seem right. Most people would have just hit the update button and walked away, knowing it would take awhile. I started adding up the individual updates (which were mostly followed by a kb, meaning they're tiny) and there was no way that they would add up to 2.6 gigabytes. Then I noticed that none of them were check marked? If none of them had a check mark next to them, how could they be included in the download.? Then I noticed the other tab, the "optional updates" tab. there were only 6, so I clicked on it. 5 of these 6 optional downloads weren't check marked either, only the last one was. What did it say next to it? "Upgrade to Windows 10.......2.6 gigabytes"

Microsoft was trying to sneak Windows 10 back onto my computer, an "upgrade" disguised as an "update". An optional update that was check marked by default while all those "important" updates weren't check marked at all. Microsoft is the worse than the worst of the sleazy malware uploaders for doing something like this. After all that work and pain, if I'd just clicked update and walked away like most people would have, I'd have been stuck with Windows 10 again! Microsoft, I hate you, you make my skin crawl, and if I could live in this technological world today without you, I most certainly would!

A split house-hold...

About 3 months ago, our media-center PC became infected with the HORRIBLE Win7 trojan. If you're not familiar with it, count yourself lucky. It's one of those trojans that installs itself on your PC and tells you that you have fake viruses and that you need to purchase their product to clean your computer...the worst part being that they've emulated the look and feel of Microsoft Security Essentials which is what I use on my PC's. Basically if you've been infected with this trojan, YOU"LL NEVER GET RID OF IT! Everything I tried would not get rid of this thing off the computer, and my wife's laptop as well. We had to wipe both hard-drives and start from scratch. It worked fine on the laptop, but wouldn't you know, I ran into a few snags with the media-center pc. When I bought it originally it was a Vista computer. After Windows 7 came out, I'd upgraded it, but alas, I failed to make a clean boot disk. So when I tried to use the old, original boot disk I'd made for Vista, it wouldn't install, I just kept getting a corrupted data warning.

Well, I wasn't about to shell out money for a brand new install of Windows 7, so I decided to go the open source route and installed Ubuntu, a free version of Linux. All in all, I haven't been to upset about the change. It has a clean interface (the classic gui that is), and does pretty much everything my windows 7 pc does. The only 2 real complaints I have about it is, it doesn't support single-clicking (you have to double-click to open programs) and Netflix doesn't allow you to stream movies to it, because of Ubuntu being open-source I guess, and the software that Netflix uses for streaming is proprietary. You can watch Hulu though, and just about any other video site works as well. I've never tried, but I imagine I'd have trouble with my bank's website as well, and probably other sites where transactions are involved, not sure about that though. I've still got windows 7 on my laptop, but if they'd ever fix it where I could stream Netflix and do my online shopping through Ubuntu, I could see myself slipping the corporate leash for good and going freeware!