[Coco] OT: MS shenanigans, XP, Win10...

[Francis Swygert]

While I run XP on one of my computers still attached to the Internet, I should have added that I run Firefox, NOT Windows Explorer. With Explorer I was getting a good many attacks, don't notice any with Firefox. I don't visit questionable sites either, just a few that I know should be "clean". If I have any unknown sites to visit I do so with my Linux Mint machine first. 

Mint is a viable alternative, and pretty easy to switch to from XP. That's the main system on what was my main computer. Since getting married and moving into my wife's house I've been using her computer more, which I recently upgraded to Windows 10. I still prefer Mint and may switch one of her computers to it, but running it in a Oracle Virtual Box for now. Dual boot is an option, but hard to do with Win10 already installed and no install media to work with. Had to return one refurbed computer that I tried dual booting with and accidentally lost the backup partition. The company had no way to make me new media, so told me to send the thing back for a replacement. 

If you're going to run Mint for an extended time I suggest you install the latest LTS (long term service) version. That is guaranteed to be supported for at least three years. Otherwise they make a new "version" every six months. You don't have to upgrade, I run Mint 9 on an older laptop because it's the latest version that will run fast on older hardware (Pentium 4 800 MHz in my case), but it helps to know you want need to upgrade for three years. The latest 17.2 is a LTS version, so it's a good time! 

Mint was intended to be as user friendly to install and ready to use as possible. So they use some proprietary software (but free to use) for things like video drivers and codecs for music and video. In the later respect it's more ready to use than Windows. You might have to run down a driver for some obscure piece of hardware, but for most it will install and run with no issues.  Frank Swygert
 Fix-It-Frank Handyman Service
 803-604-6548