Windows 11: First Impressions

 I got a new PC two days ago. It runs Windows 11. My old PC ran Windows 10, and my work PC runs Windows 10. So what do I think about Windows 11?

First, the summary (tl;dr)

I was not disappointed; in fact, I've been pleased with Windows 11. The transition from Windows 10 was so smooth that it was practically seamless. There's been no loss in productivity, and if anything, there's been a small but significant gain in productivity.

Giving away the ending: my favorite part of Windows 11 is Linux! See the very end of this article.

Doing my homework

I'm not an early adopter. I was comfortable with Windows 10, I didn't see a reason to change, and I didn't have hardware with enough oomph to support Windows 11 anyway.

Then the hard disk died on my five-year-old Toshiba. The rest of the PC was in perfectly good shape, but it was five years old. That's a long time in computer years. Time to update everything.

So, knowing that the purchase was imminent, I went to the Web to read up on Windows 11. I read the Windows evangelists' breathless praise. I read the industry professionals' dispassionate analyses. And I read the critics' reviews. As a result, I knew what to expect.

Now, the details

This is what you really came for, right?

This is all subjective and non-quantitative, by the way. If you want a quantitative analysis, go to the web. If you want an objective review of Windows 11, dream on. There ain't no such thing. All evaluations of Windows 11 are subjective.

And there are no pictures, sorry. It's just words.

Look and feel (or "What about the 'Mac-like appearance' we were promised?")

The Windows 11 desktop and user interface do not look radically different from Windows 10. Even the most conservative, old-fashioned Windows users will feel instantly comfortable with Windows 11. The edges are rounded and the colors and tones are softer, which makes it, if not "Mac-like", then more modern. Updated. Contemporary.

The icons are also modern contemporary. Gone are the skeuomorphs — in Windows 11, all icons are 2D, stylized, usually two colors and simple symbols, instead of the multidimensional, multicolored, miniature masterpieces of yesteryear. Okay, I admit it, I liked the old-style icons better. But I can live with it.

Remember Windows XP? It was great for productivity, because it got out of the way of what you were working on, and it stayed out of the way. Subsequent Windows versions, and associated products like Office and Explorer, felt like they screamed "MICROSOFT!!!!!" at you all the time.

It may still be true of the Office suite. But Windows 11 is back to the XP paradigm of being unobtrusive, of letting you do your work, getting out of the way, and staying out of the way.

The Start menu

The biggest change is that the Start menu and the icons on the taskbar are centered on the bottom of the desktop. This is part of the "Mac-like" paradigm. Conservative users can put the Start menu and taskbar back on the left, if they want. But if  you leave it centered for a day or two, it will grow on you. Besides, it's no big deal. I have a Windows 10 PC and a Windows 11 PC side by side, and my brain doesn't freak out switching from one to the other. 

The Start menu tiles are gone. As many reviewers observed, "nobody used them anyway." Instead, the Start menu gives you a Search bar, a "Pinned" section, a "Recommended" section, and two small buttons labeled "All apps" and "More". 

• The Search bar will search for literally anything: a filename on your computer, an installed program or app, a program or app that can be installed from the Microsoft Store, or anything on the Internet. In true Microsoft style, it's so thorough that it's almost too helpful.
• The "Pinned" section starts with a collection of applications that Microsoft thinks will interest you. It adds other applications as you install them. You can add and remove applications in this section, and you should do so immediately, keeping only your most used or most important applications. You can also right-click to move applications to the top of the list or pin them to the taskbar.
• Do you miss that alphabetical program listing that was the main part of the Windows 10 Start menu? Click on the "All apps" button to the right of the "Pinned" heading. There you go.
• The "Recommended" section is like the "Recently Used" menus in previous versions of Windows, but now it can include both applications and files. That's a nice touch. As with the "Pinned" section, you can right-click to pin or remove items.
• The "More" button expands the "Recommended" list to include older selections and a bunch of totally useless stuff that Windows adds to the list during installations and updates.

Right-clicking the Start button gives you the same useful system-management menu as in Windows 10.

Microsoft's insistence on Microsoft products

Like every other company in the world, Microsoft exists to make money. And like every other company, they want to upsell you. 

Windows 11 is very insistent on pushing Microsoft applications on you. They got into trouble for this with past editions of Windows, and they're not-so-subtly trying to do it again.

Along with shilling Microsoft products, Windows 11 is very insistent on upselling you to the paid versions of their free-to-start products. It's the drug pusher business model: "First one's free."

The web browser: Edge

Windows 11 comes with the Microsoft Edge web browser. You may want to install your preferred browser, be it Firefox or Google Chrome. Your browsing habits are money in the pocket of the company whose browser you use, and Microsoft doesn't want to let go of that money. Windows 11 makes it more difficult than in previous versions to switch your default browser from Edge to the preferred browser, because, of course, they don't want you to switch. But you can still do it.

However, this time, technology may convince you to stay with Edge anyway. Several head-to-head comparisons put Edge on a par with, or slightly better than, the market leader (65% market share), Google Chrome in every way. My experience with Edge has been good so far. It is very fast, and it follows Windows 11's lead in being unobtrusive. It gets the job done, and stays out of your way.

Cloud storage: OneDrive

Microsoft's cloud storage solution, OneDrive, gives you 5 GB of free storage. Once you hit 5 GB, OneDrive starts demanding money from you. Like an insistent salesman, the only way to get OneDrive to leave you alone is to stop using it. You have to go into the OneDrive settings and select "Unlink your PC". And again, like an insistent salesman, OneDrive will threaten you with dire consequences if you Unlink, and it will immediately offer to sign you up again after you Unlink.

Other options, such as Dropbox, work just as well as OneDrive. I'm just saying.

The Office Suite

I think that the revenue from MS Office sales and subscriptions pays the salaries of thousands of Microsoft employees. Windows 11 starts you with a free trial, and then pushes you into an array of paid subscriptions, or into paid, cloud-based Office 365 as an alternative.

MS Office is the default office suite for the entire world. You may think you cannot live without it. But there are two free alternatives, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. From a technical and practical standpoint, LO and OO are identical, and both are almost 100 percent compatible with MS Office. In fact, they can read and write MS Office files.

I prefer LO for various reasons, but either one will work for you. I suggest you start with LO or OO, and don't buy MS Office until you find that you need it.

Worthless widgets

Windows 11 includes widgets, tiny apps that clutter your PC and your screen. I don't have any use for them at all. Your mileage may vary.

Cellphone connection

Windows 11 is supposed to connect seamlessly and wirelessly to your iPhone or Android cellphone. I'll just say that the Android connection doesn't work yet, and leave it at that.

However, I can still connect my PC to my phone via a USB cable.

UPDATED INFO, APRIL 30, 2025: It works now. In Windows 11 is an app called "Phone Link," which allows the PC to connect nicely with your iPhone or Andoid cellphone. It's not "seamless," but it's getting tantalizingly close. It allows you to run phone apps from your PC, which is as wonderful as it sounds. It also allows you to transfer photos and files more easily between the two.

Multimedia, or "Can it run Netflix?"

The short and sweet answer is yes. In fact, all of your favorite streaming services are now available as apps in the Microsoft Store. You don't need to open a browser to run Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, DisneyPlus, or any of a host of streaming services.

Windows 11 also casts to your large-screen TV using either Google Chromecast or Amazon FireTV.

When it comes to multimedia, your hardware will be the limiting factor, not your software.

Virus protection: McAfee? Why???

The Windows 11 on my new PC came with McAfee bundled as the antivirus and network security application. It's a free one-year subscription. I left it there until it got obnoxious (it took less than a day), and then I got rid of it.

I know I've badmouthed Microsoft for pushing their products over competing products, but Windows 11 very quietly ships with an excellent antivirus and network security system. In Windows 10 it was called "Defender"; in Windows 11 it's called "Windows Security".  It doesn't cost anything extra. It's free inside every box of corn flakes. And it really is excellent.

I don't understand why someone felt the need to bundle McAfee with Windows 11. Was it Dell, or was it MS? I don't care. As soon as I uninstalled McAfee, Windows Security automatically stepped in and took over the security duties.

Linux!

If Microsoft sends Windows 11 users a questionnaire, and asks what users' favorite Windows 11 feature is, I'm going to say, "Linux!"

Microsoft has fully embraced Linux. They have been working for years on their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a complex project that lets Linux run as if it were the native operating system (OS), or a co-existing OS, on Windows machines. 

Until now, if you wanted near-native Linux performance on a Windows machine, you had to install a virtual-machine engine, such as VMWare or VirtualBox, and create a Linux virtual machine inside that engine. It works great, nobody's complaining, but it can take a lot of work to get the Linux VM set up properly and interacting happily with Windows.

With Windows 11, Microsoft has put a VM engine called Hyper-V into the OS, and WSL runs smoothly and seamlessly on Hyper-V. Microsoft has been testing a graphical version of WSL for a few years now, and that is the version of WSL running inside Windows 11. With WSLg (g for graphical), you can start your favorite Linux distro, and then run any Linux graphical application on the Windows desktop.

In fact, Linux applications will appear in, and run directly from, the Start menu's "Recommended" section.

Here's a really good YouTube video that shows you how to set up WSL on Windows 11 and how easy it is to use.

Summary (wait, didn't I already do this at the top?)

I was not disappointed; in fact, I've been pleased with Windows 11. The transition from Windows 10 was so smooth that it was practically seamless. There's been no loss in productivity, and if anything, there's been a small but significant gain in productivity.

And it's still true, my favorite part of Windows 11 is Linux.

More tools for Linux, Windows, and Mac!

Once again, from the "where have you been all my life?" department, I bring you three useful programs for your computer. One is a document converter, one is an image converter, and one is a souped-up terminal emulator and a Linux shell.

The document converter: Pandoc

The first program is a free-and-open-source document conversion tool called Pandoc. It should have been called DocMagick. Pandoc will convert a document from nearly any format to nearly any other format. It's ridiculously simple to use.

Its only drawback, if you want to look at it that way, is that it's a command-line tool. You don't click on an icon, or right-click on a file icon. No, if you're on Windows you have to open a Command.com window or a PowerShell window. On Mac OS, you have to open a terminal window. Linux? You're already there.

To convert a file from HTML to PDF, for example, you type this command:

    pandoc thisfile.html -o thisfile.pdf

All done!

Pandoc also makes slide shows in PDF, PowerPoint, and several other formats.

Pandoc supports 27 input file formats, and 47 output file formats. It has been around for 12 years. Go to pandoc.org to read more about pandoc and to download it for your Linux, Windows, or Mac OS box.

The image converter: ImageMagick

The second program is an image conversion tool called ImageMagick. ImageMagick will convert an image from nearly any format to nearly any other format - over 200 different file formats. What's more, it will process, filter, and enhance your image while it's at it. And even more, it can be used to create image files on its own.

Like pandoc, ImageMagick is a command-line-only tool (No longer true! Keep reading). Many people will prefer a GUI-oriented tool like PhotoShop. (Aside: For those who can't afford PhotoShop, there are many alternatives. I recommend Paint.NET if you have Windows, or Krita for Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.) With a GUI-oriented tool, you open a graphics file, do your editing, and then select Export or Save As to save it in a different format.

STOP THE PRESSES! ImageMagick now has a GUI! Keep reading ...

ImageMagick is not as intuitive as the GUI-oriented products, but it's still pretty easy to use. To convert a file from JPG to PNG, for example, you type this command:

    convert thisfile.jpg thisfile.png

or, if you have a newer version of ImageMagick installed:

    magick thisfile.jpg thisfile.png

All done!

To use the GUI instead of the command line, instead of using the 'convert' or 'magick' command, type this simple command:

    display

ImageMagick has been around for a long time: 28 years, according to Wikipedia. It is free-and-open-source software. Go to imagemagick.org to read more about ImageMagick and to download it for your Linux, Windows, or Mac OS box.

The terminal emulator: MobaXterm

The third program is a variation on the good old Microsoft Windows terminal emulator. If you are old enough to remember 5 1/4-inch floppy disks, you will remember Procomm and its variants, which ruled the roost for many years. If you're old enough to remember Windows XP, you will remember HyperTerm, which came free with Windows for many years. When Procomm disappeared, and Microsoft stopped including HyperTerm in Windows, freeware like PuTTY and TeraTerm filled the void in the market.

I recently discovered a free (but not open-source) alternative for Windows that is better than any of today's alternatives. Created by the French software firm Mobatek, MobaXterm is a Windows-based terminal emulator that supports direct serial connection, SSH, and much, much more. With its built-in X11 server, you can remotely log into a Linux system, run a graphical program (like, for demonstration purposes, xclock) and see it running on your Windows display.

Having the X11 server in MobaXterm has eliminated the need to run a VNC server on my remote machines and a VNC client on my PC. Life is much simpler.

Bonus: MobaXterm gives you Linux!

But MobaXterm isn't just a terminal emulator. Incorporating both Cygwin and BusyBox into its programming,  MobaXterm adds a Linux command line to your Windows PC.

I know that Windows 10 offers the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a good way to run native Linux alongside Windows. But this is a great alternative, especially if your main OS will remain Windows and you only need Linux as an adjunct. I've been running Cygwin for years, so I'm very comfortable with MobaXterm.

Mobatek also offers a Professional version of MobaXterm, for a modest annual subscription. MobaXterm can run multiple sessions at once, each in its own tab, making it easy to switch between them. The free version will save up to 12 configurations; the Professional version will allow you to save a virtually unlimited number of configurations.

MobaXterm is 10 years old and, and it is being actively maintained and improved. Even if you're happy with the Windows terminal emulator you're using right now, I highly recommend that you go to the MobaXterm website, read about it, download it, and give it a try. You won't be sorry.

Windows 10, After Two Months

I bought a new laptop PC two months ago. It came with Windows 8, but was sold as compatible with the soon-to-arrive Windows 10 operating system. After about a week of use, Microsoft invited me to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, and I jumped at the chance. So I've been running Windows 10 on my laptop PC for a couple of months now, almost from the day I bought it. Mostly, I like Windows 10. It is chock full of really nice features, and (so far) appears to be a worthy successor to Windows 7.

I do have a few objections to it, which I will enumerate here.

1. Upselling

One thing I don't like about it is I feel like it's constantly upselling, trying to get me to download or buy more and more software. It's built-in advertising. Ironically, the upselling efforts backfire with me, as I usually end up uninstalling or at least deactivating the software that is doing the upselling.

2. Bloatware in the install

Another thing I don't like about it is that the Windows 10 upgrade came with its own load of bloatware or crapware. I'm still finding all sorts of apps and programs that I really don't want, and it takes me a few minutes every time I find one, to uninstall it. I've noticed, to my annoyance, that some of them can't be uninstalled.

If you leave the bloatware on your PC, it eats up disk space, which isn't a big deal, but it also eats up memory and CPU time, and those two things matter. In addition, the bloatware may be doing things in the background that you really don't want your computer to be doing. That takes us to the next point.

3. "We're watching you ..."

A third thing that I don't like is that Windows 10, and many (if not all) of the apps that come with it, are set by default to snoop on everything you do on your computer, and phone home to report it to a cloud server somewhere. Microsoft and its minions intend to perform "data mining" on this information, or sell it to third parties who will do their own "data mining", all this so that they can "enhance your online experience." That means that they want to sell you stuff, and they're going to bombard you with slyly targeted come-ons, designed to separate you from your money. And your privacy. You need to go into the Settings menus and manually disable all of this invasion-of-privacy stuff.

4. Forced upgrades

Finally, one thing that I find irritating to the point of profanity is Microsoft's insistence on automatically downloading and installing updates to the OS and the drivers, whenever they feel like it. I don't mind Windows 10 telling me that an update is available, but I absolutely hate the way it takes over my computer when it decides it's time for the update. I wrote a couple of posts about this problem and its solutions, here and here.

Microsoft is giving away Windows 10 for free

No, that subject line is not wrong. Microsoft, the software giant that we learned to fear and loathe many years ago for their heavyhanded and predatory business tactics, has done some really nice things in the past decade.

For one, they released a free version of their Visual Studio software development tools for hobbyists and cheap small developers.

For another, they released a free virus protection package that is small, quiet, effective, and VERY polite, compared to many of the other packages out there.

Now word comes from Forbes magazine that Windows 10 will be available as a free upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8, for the first year of its release. Author Gordon Kelly digs into Microsoft's astute reasoning behind offering the free release. It makes good sense from a business, technical and financial point of view, if you follow Kelly's reasoning.

I'm going to wait for some early reviews of the released version of the OS before I make the jump. Microsoft's track record with software releases since Windows 3.1 has been spotty. WinXP was great, Vista stunk, Win7 has been pretty good, Win8 was avoidable, Win9 never happened. But if Win10 gets good reviews, if it looks like a worthy successor to both XP and Win7, I'll jump on the bandwagon. It's worth it for me.

And Microsoft is betting that it will be worth it for millions of other users.

UPDATE, FEB 16, 2015: The beta version of Windows 10 is available for really-and-truly free, if you want to try it yourself. Just be aware of the fact that it is still buggy. Don't install it on your only computer, or your main computer, or the computer you use for mission-critical applications. In fact, you might just want to install it on a virtual machine, such as VMWare or VirtualBox. This CBS news article points you to the download site.

UPDATE, SEP 1, 2015: I've been running Windows 10 on my laptop PC for a couple of months now. Mostly, I like it. 

One thing I don't like about it is I feel like it's constantly upselling, trying to get me to download or buy more and more software. Ironically, the upselling efforts backfire with me, as I usually end up uninstalling or at least deactivating the software that is doing the upselling.

Another thing I don't like about it is that the Windows 10 upgrade came with its own load of bloatware or crapware. I'm still finding all sorts of apps and programs that I really don't want, and it takes me a few minutes every time I find one, to uninstall it. I've noticed, to my annoyance, that some of them can't be uninstalled.

A third thing that I don't like is that Windows 10, and all the apps that come with it, are set by default to snoop on everything you do on your computer, and phone home to report it to a cloud server somewhere. Microsoft and its minions intend to perform "data mining" on this information, or sell it to third parties who will do their own "data mining" so that they can "enhance your online experience." That means that they want to sell you stuff, and they're going to bombard you with slyly targeted come-ons, designed to separate you from your money. And your privacy. You need to go into the Settings menus and manually disable all of this invasion-of-privacy stuff.

Finally, I find it irritating to the point of profanity is Microsoft's insistence on automatically downloading and installing updates to the OS and the drivers. I don't mind Windows 10 telling me that an upgrade is available, but I absolutely hate the way it takes over my computer when it decides it's time to do the upgrade. I wrote a couple of posts about this problem and its solutions, here and here.

Wow. That's quite an update. I'm going to turn it into its own separate post.

Windows XP discontinuance - AP's view

Here's what the Associated Press (specifically Bree Fowler, a particularly savvy reporter) has to say about "the end of Windows XP ." If the AP complains about my requoting their article in its entirety, I will edit this posting to simply provide excerpts. However, since AP articles don't last as long as this blog does, I'm going to claim "fair use" or "archival purposes" or something. And I'll provide a reference to the original article: http://news.yahoo.com/end-windows-xp-support-spells-trouble-192945132--finance.html

I particularly liked Ms. Fowler's description of Windows XP as "persistently popular," and the remark from one user, who summed up his alternatives this way: "I am worried about security threats, but I'd rather have my identity stolen than put up with Windows 8." That sounds an awfully lot like "I'd rather have my fingernals ripped out with a pair of pliers ..." :-)

---

AP article begins here

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End of Windows XP Support Spells Trouble for some
by Bree Fowler

NEW YORK (AP) — Microsoft will end support for the persistently popular Windows XP on Tuesday, and the move could put everything from the operations of heavy industry to the identities of everyday people in danger.

"What once was considered low-hanging fruit by hackers now has a big neon bull's eye on it," says Patrick Thomas, a security consultant at the San Jose, Calif.-based firm Neohapsis.

Microsoft has released a handful of Windows operating systems since 2001, but XP's popularity and the durability of the computers it was installed on kept it around longer than expected. Analysts say that if a PC is more than five years old, chances are it's running XP.

While users can still run XP after Tuesday, Microsoft says it will no longer provide security updates, issue fixes to non-security related problems or offer online technical content updates. The company is discontinuing XP to focus on maintaining its newer operating systems, the core programs that run personal computers.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company says it will provide anti-malware-related updates through July 14, 2015, but warns that the tweaks could be of limited help on an outdated operating system.

Most industry experts say they recognize that the time for Microsoft to end support for such a dated system has come, but the move poses both security and operational risks for the remaining users. In addition to home computers, XP is used to run everything from water treatment facilities and power plants to small businesses like doctor's offices.

Thomas says XP appealed to a wide variety of people and businesses that saw it as a reliable workhorse and many chose to stick with it instead of upgrading to Windows Vista, Windows 7 or 8.

Thomas notes that companies generally resist change because they don't like risk. As a result, businesses most likely to still be using XP include banks and financial services companies, along with health care providers. He also pointed to schools from the university level down, saying that they often don't have enough money to fund equipment upgrades.

Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes, says that without patches to fix bugs in the software XP PCs will be prone to freezing up and crashing, while the absence of updated security related protections make the computers susceptible to hackers.

He added that future security patches released for Microsoft's newer systems will serve as a way for hackers to reverse engineer ways to breach now-unprotected Windows XP computers.

"It's going to be interesting to say the least," he says. "There are plenty of black hats out there that are looking for the first vulnerability and will be looking at Windows 7 and 8 to find those vulnerabilities. And if you're able to find a vulnerability in XP, it's pretty much a silver key."

Those weaknesses can affect businesses both large and small.

Mark Bernardo, general manager of automation software at General Electric Co.'s Intelligent Platforms division, says moving to a new operating system can be extremely complicated and expensive for industrial companies. Bernardo, whose GE division offers advisory services for upgrading from XP, says many of the unit's customers fall into the fields of water and waste water, along with oil and gas.

"Even if their sole network is completely sealed off from attack, there are still operational issues to deal with," he says.

Meanwhile, many small businesses are put off by the hefty cost of upgrading or just aren't focused on their IT needs. Although a consumer can buy an entry-level PC for a few hundred dollars, a computer powerful enough for business use may run $1,000 or more after adding the necessary software.

Barry Maher, a salesperson trainer and motivational speaker based in Corona, Calif., says his IT consultant warned him about the end of XP support last year. But he was so busy with other things that he didn't start actively looking for a new computer until a few weeks ago.

"This probably hasn't been as high a priority as it should have been," he says.

He got his current PC just before Microsoft released Vista in 2007. He never bought another PC because, "As long as the machine is doing what I want it to do, and running the software I need to run, I would never change it."

Mark McCreary, a Philadelphia-based attorney with the firm Fox Rothschild LLP, says small businesses could be among the most effected by the end of support, because they don't have the same kinds of firewalls and in-house IT departments that larger companies possess. And if they don't upgrade and something bad happens, they could face lawsuits from customers.

But he says he doesn't expect the wide-spread malware attacks and disasters that others are predicting — at least for a while.

"It's not that you blow it off and wait another seven years, but it's not like everything is going to explode on April 8 either," he says.

McCreary points to Microsoft's plans to keep providing malware-related updates for well over a year, adding that he doubts hackers are actually saving up their malware attacks for the day support ends.

But Sam Glines, CEO of Norse, a threat-detection firm with major offices in St. Louis and Silicon Valley, disagrees. He believes hackers have been watching potential targets for some time now.

"There's a gearing up on the part of the dark side to take advantage of this end of support," Glines says.

He worries most about doctors like his father and others the health care industry, who may be very smart people, but just aren't focused on technology. He notes that health care-related information is 10 to 20 times more valuable on the black market than financial information, because it can be used to create fraudulent medical claims and illegally obtain prescription drugs, making doctor's offices tempting targets.

Meanwhile, without updates from Microsoft, regular people who currently use XP at home need to be extra careful.

Mike Eldridge, 39, of Spring Lake, Mich., says that since his computer is currently on its last legs, he's going to cross his fingers and hope for the best until it finally dies.

"I am worried about security threats, but I'd rather have my identity stolen than put up with Windows 8," he says.

___

AP Business Writer Joyce M. Rosenberg in New York contributed to this report.

___

Follow Bree Fowler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBreeFowler

Windows is dead. Long live Windows.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the impending death of Windows XP, arguably the best version of Windows we have seen yet. Well, today is the day that Microsoft pulls the plug on XP. Here is Microsoft's official announcement.

(I'm writing this on a Windows 7 computer. Windows 7 is a worthy successor to XP, and in many ways it improves on the XP, ahem, experience. But if Windows 7 is so good, then why does it have a "compatibility mode" to enable it to run WinXP programs, and why did / does Microsoft have an official "downgrade path" for those who wished / wish to downgrade from Win7 to XP? Yeah. That's right.)

No matter how much you loved WinXP and want to keep it, it is now vital - critical - for you to switch to a modern operating system. With the end of official support, WinXP will become increasingly vulnerable to hacks and malicious programming. You need to protect yourself by switching to Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OS X, or a recent flavor of Linux.

It's always tough to see an old workhorse retired, especially when there's so much work left in it. Windows XP wasn't perfect, and it was plagued with security holes its entire life, but it was the best operating system Microsoft came out with - better than any Windows OS before it, and better than any Windows OS that came after it for almost ten years. We bid Windows XP a fond farewell, and we park it next to the Big Boy locomotive, the Willys Jeep, the A-10 Warthog and so many other inventions that went obsolete long before they wore out or stopped being useful.

EDITED TO ADD, EIGHT YEARS LATER, in case anybody didn't get the subtle joke in the second paragraph: Microsoft originally said that "XP" stood for "experience".

Why people don't want to stop using Windows XP

Windows XP, arguably the best Windows OS that Microsoft ever created, is scheduled to die on April 8, 2014. Oh, the OS will continue to work just fine, but that's the date when Microsoft will stop supporting it or issuing security updates and patches for it. After April 8, if you want to use Windows XP, you're on your own.

Yet people won't stop using XP. (Remarkably, most ATMs in the world run on Windows XP, even with three weeks remaining before the end-of-support date.) Why not? Because it works.

Not only does it work, but it has proven over the years, from its inception in 2001 until now, that it is a healthy, robust, easy-to-use version of Windows. It is such a good operating system that Windows Vista was unable to unseat it in 2007. Windows 7, released in 2012, was more an apology for the bloated, sluggish, dead-out-of-the-box Vista than it was a replacement for Windows XP, and it did not surpass XP in market share until August 2012 (according to Wikipedia). The only reason Win7 got any market share from XP was that Microsoft stopped shipping XP. After June 30, 2008. if you wanted to get an XP license, you had to buy one on eBay or Amazon. The latest version of Windows, known as Windows 8, has been received almost as poorly as Vista was.

XP has proven so robust and so popular that Microsoft has had to provide "downgrade paths" and "compatibility modes" for Win7 and Win8 users who wanted to revert to XP.

Some critics, Microsoft included, will say that Win7 and Win8 have a greatly improved feature set over XP. Well, so did Vista, and nobody wanted Vista.

They will also tell you that XP is riddled with security holes - not to mention regular old bugs. Well, so is every version of Windows that has come after XP.

The Linux heads will tout the superiority of Linux over any version of Windows. That's a religious debate that I don't want to get into here. But the pervasiveness of the Windows OS, in any flavor, is undeniable. And XP is the best OS that Microsoft has come up with yet.

Note: This post was written on a Windows 7 computer.

Cleaning up your (non-Mac) PC

I'm rebuilding my sweet wife's computer's hard disk today. We tried all the other solutions to speed up her PC, and none of them restored it to its original speed. Two of the tools that I had put on her computer before the rebuild were CCleaner and Registry Booster, tools that do a really good (but obviously not good enough) job of cleaning all the junk that accumulates, like electronic grit, in the machinery of a Windows computer.

After the rebuild I went to the Internet to download a new copy of Registry Booster for her, and I found an interesting discussion that went something like this. Each entry is from a different player:

"Why does PC World even recommend Registry Booster? When you go to the Registry Booster website, they offer a free scan of your PC, and then they tell you that you have 354 problems with your registry but they won't correct them for you unless you buy the full version of RB. That's not fair!"

"Yeah, that's called scareware." (No smiley.)

"What a rip-off."

"All registry cleaners are rip-offs."

"I don't know why nobody uses the free, web-based registry cleaner from Microsoft. It's at http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm ."

"Nobody uses it because nobody knows about it, you moron. But thanks for telling us about it. Now I'm gonna start using it."

"Hey everybody, i just found out that you have to run it from IE 7 or IE 8. And it temporarily installs an Active X control on your computer, but it deletes it later."

I just tried it. It displays an EULA that you have to accept, then it downloads a couple of things to your computer, runs a bunch of tests, does the cleanup, and then the last step is "Uploading information to Microsoft." Yikes. I should have read the EULA better before I ran it. Oh, well. The Internet's collective opinion is that it works as well as Registry Booster but it doesn't cost any money. It does require you to become more dependent on Microsoft, though. If that's a price you're willing to pay, then go ahead and try it on your own computer.

Registry Booster is available from http://www.uniblue.com/.

CCleaner is available from http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner.

Once again, the Microsoft tool is available from http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/cleanup.htm, and it only runs under Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

These tools work for Windows XP, Vista and 7.

What was once a "program" is now an "app"

Observe, with me, the interesting progression of terminology in the software industry.

(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.

Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)

Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":

• program
• software program
• firmware
• code
• suite
• application
• app

Back when computers were brand new, they used to run programs. A program was a series of instructions that the computer followed to complete a task. The earliest computers had to be programmed, or fed instructions, by flipping a series of switches on the front panel. (After flipping the switches hundreds of times just to enter one program, and still getting it wrong, engineers decided they needed to invent a different way to program a computer -- in a hurry. That's how we ended up with mass storage devices.)

Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.

As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.

I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.

Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.

We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.

Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.

Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.

With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."

Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".

But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.