Now that we Windows folks are on the verge of another involuntary OS upgrade, it seems appropriate to chronicle my last such experience, namely, that of migrating from XP Pro to Windows 10. Very likely, the historical PC business model will prevail until the next end of days event or a cultural collapse. If you have seen this warning on your Windows Update page: This PC doesn’t currently meet the minimum system requirements to run Windows 11, read on, for you are not alone.
This imminent transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 will begin with the negation of the selling point for Windows 10; I. E., that there would afterwards be no more new versions. No, indeed. Only endless automatic updates. I can still remember that promised perk as being the sugar that got me to choose the upgrade instead of finding a new OS, as my dignity had lobbied for. Thus, the essay that follows this 2022 edit two paragraph preamble is pertinent to what has not yet occurred, although it was about the last time Windows did something similar and thus we may learn from it.
Somewhere in the world, there is a saying that if you find that you are riding a tiger, don't jump off. It is sound advice and if you will permit me to make the analogy, I would liken that situation to being a Windows user. It may however, be wise to dismount, if the tiger you are riding starts jumping sharks. I am a man who avoided computers with great zeal from the time I became aware of them. That attitude began when I worked at a bank and was exposed to the crude office equipment of the 70s. I had more respect and admiration for a good slide-rule or an abacus.
Over the ensuing years, I couldn't help but notice billboard ads for familiar products and services which all sported dotcom URLs. I wondered for the longest time what those things were. Eventually, I came to the ignorant conclusion that the computers I saw in places of business were nothing more than glorified word-processors enhanced with calculators and the ability to print.
The was the word processing aspect of the devices that eventually piqued my interest, as I have always loved printed words. I had once been given an old DOS computer by a friend at Canada Post to use as a word processor. I had been diligently writing a book on a set of yellow legal pads and I imagine he felt sorry for me. The contraption weighed as much as a sack of gravel and sported a CRT screen. The screen's lovely obsidian background had a fluorescent, jade-coloured digital alarm clock font.
The unit came with a ten pound cardboard box of oversized paperback books on how to use it. One had to type long strings of computer code after hours of reading in order to set up a simple formatting template, such as a page of justified text. The impressive part to me, was how much information it could store. I still find that degree of word saving to be mind-boggling as an avid reader still mourning the destruction of the Serapeum in old Alexandria.
There had been at least two prior users of that computer. One was the giver, Jim Wong-Chu and the other was an acquaintance of his, Evelyn Lau, who went on to become a celebrated authoress and poetess. She hadn’t deleted her work from the DOS box. It was heavy reading and I could relate to much of it.
Rather than being a finished work, her angst-filled stream of consciousness diary entries seemed to me to be her way of opening an emotional steam-valve in order to get her creative train running without exploding. Again, I could relate to that and I wished I could have met her for coffee. I made a mental note to securely wipe the memory when swapping, trading or selling computers and word-processing equipment in my future.
Shortly, I became aware of spending more time getting the computer to work than I did composing anything. After a search for a word-processor, I found a beautiful old Smith Corona at a junk store in New Westminster. The proprietor was kind enough to let me sit and play with the unit until I was able to make it work. After a session or two, I was comfortable with it and took it home. I finished my first novel and gave away a small collection of manual typewriters I’d amassed over the years. Floppy disks served my writing needs until 2002.
I had two sons attending grade school and had been plagued for years by friends and family with admonitions to get a home computer, if not for myself, for them. Pointing out to those well-meaning busy-bodies that my boys had computers in their school classrooms and knew quite well how to use them; was less successful than trying to teach synchronized swimming to three cats and a grass-hopper.
Anyway, one morning in Vancouver waiting for my bus, I suddenly decided to purchase a home computer. All I can recall of my reasoning at the time was my feeling that even though I disagreed with many new trends, I wasn’t prepared to be the only fool in a bank line up waiting to cash my paper pay cheques.
Christmas was on the horizon when I purchased my first desktop system. It happened to be the first day Windows XP went retail in Canada. Hence, no one I knew could help me get acquainted with it as they all had older versions with quite different user interfaces
I soon discovered that computers, as long as the internet was working, could teach the patient student all that was necessary about how to use them, tweak them and fix them. I still think that is their greatest aspect. If my Suzuki could have talked and told me how the hell to reach its oil filter, I would have bought it a beer.
Of course, my two boys were miles ahead of their Dad in their computational abilities and they both showed great patience while I muddled through the simplest operations. First we installed games. Several for each of us. We set up a system of individually dedicated hours of use. To be quite honest, that stage demarcated the point at which we three began to take different forks in the road of family time; not coming together in a significant way until we all took up playing Magic tournaments.
Looking back now, I have a warm, fuzzy nostalgia for those days. A n0stalgia that bears the soundtrack of Morrowind layered over the graphics of Warcraft, Myst, The Longest Journey and Silent Hunter. Our speech became peppered with newly acquired jargon like “flushing buffers”, “hot fixes”, “final patches” and “tapping Manna.” I recall inhaling massive platters of delicious Filipino cuisine as only red-eyed, all-night gamers can and continually striving to invent new ways of thwarting the maleficent Ebon Praetor.
We three fought like junk-yard dogs and bonded on levels never attained before. Bleeding corneas and auditory hallucinations became badges of honour. My darling wife just shook her head at the digital testosterone fest and kept us all watered and fed. Over time, I tired of games because of the dearth of relatable themes. I had found only one Norwegian game where it was impossible to die among the available library.
I began to dream about making a web-site. Starting from a snippet of html code which made a background colour appear, I slowly began to create a site, literally from out of the blue. I called it, Follow The Lynx. Luckily, I had stacks of manuscripts and a little scanner. Over several years, I expanded my web-site and machine-translated it into flawed French, Spanish and German. When an acquaintance told me that for every hour I spent on the internet, I would lose a friend, I laughed and told him that if that were true, then I had become friendless the very first day.
Circumstances led me to become very interested in computer security, after having watched items move around on my desktop by themselves. It was puzzling and it was disconcerting. A Google search introduced me to the so called, Trojan Horse. A piece of code that lurks on a victim’s computer, unseen and possessed of the ability to allow an operator to remotely manipulate another machine. Not something I wanted to put up with after having become increasingly tied into the internet system with personal communication, a paid-for website and on-line banking.
To prove that the intrusion was real, I opened a notepad text file on my desktop and wrote, “Hi, If you can see this, move my mouse up and down twice.”
My unwanted squatter did just that. I made a judgment call not to open hostilities due to my lack of expertise in this new field of devilry. It would have been like fighting a ghost with a baseball bat.
I bought and tried many different types of security software over the next few years and compiled a short-list of the most effective programs for countering each of the emerging categories of malware such as trojans, worms, dialers, viruses, port scanners, root-kits and such. I reviewed the ones that worked well on XP and posted my endorsements on Follow The Lynx. Some software engineers used my reviews on their own web-sites.
I discovered among the white hats who were writing security code in those days, a German, a Swede, a Finn and an Australian. Some of their work was free of charge. I can tell you that without those guys in the background, our devices were potentially nothing more than quanta of RAM, bandwidth and personal use telemetry for to be collected, amalgamated into a botnet and sold to the highest bidder on the dark web. A scheme akin to outlaws who rustled cows, created new herds and marketed to people on the other side of the ridge.
I stayed with XP but upgraded to XP Pro, when I learned that some useful Administrative Tools that were inaccessible in the vanilla version, were included with the upgrade. I used XP Pro until 2017 and I still hold it in high regard. I had never owned or operated an Apple system, so I left them out of my essay, except to say that it was their cost and the popular belief of their invulnerability to attack that put me off when I chose my first operating system.
I did try several Linux systems and manually set up dual-boots with XP/Ubuntu and XP/Mepis during my initial fit of Righteous Windignation. At that time, a geek couldn’t figure out how to get a printer to work in Linux, even if you gave them a case of chips, a six-pack of energy drinks and a fast internet connection. I tried in 2004 and my spent, pale avatar washed ashore on an obscure university archives web-site, reading about how it was indeed possible in theory to do that very thing.
I tried Ubuntu again in 2017 and they seemed to have finally solved those printing problems. They even included a dual-boot set-up in the installer. The on-board software easily replaced everything a typical Windows user would likely need by way of tools. There remained however, the tedious matter of learning to manipulate new versions of software in order to accomplish tasks that a Windows user could do with their eyes closed, a cat dancing on the keyboard and Dr. Phil chewing someone’s ass out in the next room. In addition, there were exotic file formats to be converted before sharing any of your work with PC users.
Several months before my changeover to Windows 10, all my XP Pro system’s peripherals fried, one each day. Literally and digitally. Then I got a strange phone call from a nice sounding man who purported to work for my internet provider. He asked how my computer was doing and I told him that I had kept my XP Pro system up, running and maintained for over ten years without ever having had to re-install or to reformat. I had tweaked it in ways that are not even possible nowadays and it had become an extension of myself.
He understood that it was hard for me to abandon it but we both knew that using obsolete browsers and software on an unsupported platform was inviting disaster. He offered to chop a few bucks off my cable bill for a set period of time while I decided what to do. I contemplated going full caveman, but considered that at nearly sixty years old; what seemed like a noble challenge for a younger man or woman, seemed like folly to moi.
After a long internal debate, it seemed there was nothing certain in life but death, taxes and Windows and I decided to ride Bill’s Behemoth right on up to his wholly owned Pearly Gates. I ordered a new Windows 10 desktop ensemble forthwith. It took a month to mentally prepare for the transition because of being sorely cognizant of the “first one’s free” drug pusher tactics adopted by tech marketers and the end-user scourge of planned obsolescence employed by manufacturers.
For example, my first Windows XP computer at the turn of the millennium came equipped with free VOIP capability. On day two, I was chatting for free with friends all over the globe while busily chipping away at my keyboard and doing other work. Within a year, the VOIP capability converted into a paid for service. I investigated alternatives, came across Skype and read their entire EULA.
The first clause that caught my eye, revealed that in order to use the free service, one had to agree to share their “extra” bandwidth. That opened up an interesting business model. My portion of bandwidth was a strictly controlled and measured, purchased product. My basic internet cable package proved to be barely adequate to deal with the load placed upon it by me and my two gaming sons. There simply wasn’t any left over bandwidth to share with Skype.
During my transition from XP to Windows 10, I noticed changes, both good and bad. First was the not too thinly veiled attitude shift prompt inherent in Windows being marketed as a service rather than a concrete product. That accomplished several ends at once. Instead of a person buying and owning a copy of an operating system which, as their private property, was theirs to modify; a person would now be buying a service from a Corporation that would manage it as they saw fit. Not all bad, but a sea change in the perceptual mentality of many paying customers of the new serduct.
Thus, in Windows 10, updates were pushed out, downloaded and installed with no interaction from users. Of course, the lucrative sales trick of financially layered features still existed. For example, in Widows 10 Pro, a user could access the Group Policy Editor (as XP users had) for many administrative chores that a standard Windows 10 user, by design, could not. Also, Windows 10 Pro users could also postpone updates. However, updates could not be declined by either.
The good side of the new update model was the increased security of the internet at large, due to the smaller number of Windows boxes spreading infection due to known vulnerabilities. Because of myriad code glitches, a person should stay as current as the makers and keepers of the operating systems they use in order to participate in the quest to plug the fractally spawned holes in the C++ fabric. In my opinion, it wasn’t worth the extra money to pay extra for Widows 10 Pro, because a user could manually add several missing registry keys and files to gain those features.
If you migrated to Widows 10 as I did, you might have noticed that the folder, My Computer became This Computer and the folder, My Pictures became Pictures. You may have thought that insignificant at first glance but it underscored the thrust of the corporate vision. In other words, it’s not yours. I predicted that eventually, via an automatic update, those folders might possibly be labelled, Another Computer and Some Pictures.
Another major design facet I saw in Windows 10 was that it was aimed at multiple device users and those people were being nudged to the Cloud. If you were a multi-device user, you were in for a treat. You could sync all your gadgets, all the time with a minimum of clicks. You could beam Netflix to your bedroom TV and you could remotely interact with your Xbox. Networking with other remote computers and the sharing of files and resources received the lion’s share of new development. Clearly an attempt to keep up with Apple. Users were told this was in response to their needs, which was true. But it was equally true that they were led thither by Apple Envy until it was too complicated to go back.
Users had already seen 40 gig hard drives and 3 gigs of RAM give way to 500 terabyte hard drives sporting 32 gigs of RAM. That growth started to occur back in the Windows Vista and Windows 7 days. It was driven by the fad of downloading movies, TV shows, games and music as commodities rather than well considered choices of personal taste that one was willing to pay for and to slowly collect. You may have seen reality shows about unfortunate people with hoarding disorders. Believe me, there is a digital hoarding disorder that makes them pale by comparison. Such behaviour is encouraged because it is good for business. It is practised because it brings a feelings of insulated safety.
Some time ago on Outlook, links to Cloud storage appeared. Storage was free within prescribed limits but subject to future change. Users were encouraged to share those new folders but didn’t have to. For many people, this solved pressing problems of full hard drives. It was also marketed as a better way to send attachments. I couldn’t help but notice that the facility of sending attachments in Hotmail had conveniently and steadily degraded from the time I first used it.
That begged two questions. Was the old service cut back to encourage a new way or was the new way an organic outgrowth of meeting the needs of an insatiably demanding public? For the purpose of plotting myself on a graph, I honestly said that in fifteen years of website creation, podcasting, photo editing, collecting music, gaming and research, I had yet to fill an 80 gig hard drive.
To eulogize my trusty old XP, I said that it was as stable as a draft horse and that even if you smeared bacon on the keyboard, a raccoon still couldn’t break it. That stability had disappeared with the Windows 8.1 upgrade and I was very happy to say that Widows 10 seemed to be built of the same sturdy bones as XP had been.
You couldn't break it, but you could piss it off to the point that it would refuse to play unless you were willing to play by its rules. Sound familiar? I broke it within the first two hours of use while performing simple security tweaks but I had it fixed within minutes of ceasing my efforts to modify it. I decided to treated it as an unbroken horse. That is, with respect and gentleness, but requiring some reciprocation when it came to performing the work that I intend for it. It had to be both quick when spurred and capable of slogging through lengthy operations.
Finally, I spoke of a few programs and simple tweaks I had found to be of immense benefit to those who would be changing to Windows 10, bearing in mind that it was purported to be Windows last OS version. There would be no Windows 11. You either chose Windows 10, Linux , Mac or God forbid, Raspberry.
To avoid clutter and a ragged registry, I suggested the free CrapCleaner program. To give the on-board Windows Defender anti-virus another set of eyes and ears, I suggested the free Malwarebytes stand-alone scanner. To scrub data traces, endless Windows logs and large memory dumps, I heartily recommended East-Tec Eraser.
Diskeeper 16 was recommended to help preserve hard drives by preventing the fragmentation of files even as they were being created. I recommended Spybot Search & Destroy for a free and thorough security/utility program. Another free program from Spybot was called Anti-Beacon. This was of particular utility, nay, necessity for a Windows 10 user, as it was a simple way to turn off a growing hell-broth of telemetry services tracking your computer use and sending the data to Microsoft using your bandwidth.
I had found that LibreOffice, paint.net, VLC Media Player, Audacity and ImgBurn all worked well in Windows 10. All five programs were free. The first was a complete office suite, the others were a photo editor, an audio/video player/converter, an audio recorder/mixer, and an ISO image burner.
For hand-tweaking, I suggested that interested parties could do a little research and find instructions for manually adding registry entries that would enable hidden switches, or uninstalling unwanted Windows apps not provided with a means to do so or how to safely disable unnecessary services. As this was a realm of personal risk and reward, I refrained from offering any of my personal recommendations.
A few words were said about the interface of Windows 10 as compared to Windows XP Pro. Everything appeared to be buried a layer or two deeper than it was before. I learned that most people relied on Windows Classic Shell so their desktop and start menus would resembled those of XP or Windows 7. I was advised by my computer builder not to take that route and I believed him to be right due to the attack surface it created by its popularity.
Once I had negotiated the counter-intuitive account creation process, uninstalled the live tile Start Menu disco ball and used the provided Power Shell to uninstall apps that offered no uninstall options, the system opened up like a bizarre steamed clam and I navigated with greater ease under the hood. Whether or not to muzzle Cortana was not discussed because to do so would have required a forty page manual. I happily found Windows Media Player 12 lurking in the bilge and rescued it. She could still rip and burn CDs, but the process was different than I remembered from the good old days.
fin