A
laptop for software development or ANY
serious work? No thanks.
Instead I want a better keyboard, video display, and processor and want room for several disk drives, provision for more peripheral devices, etc.
And I'm currently rushing back to the last update of Windows 7 Professional, a copy of Office 2016 (the 2013 version is fine except for Outlook that needs an update for a change in SMTP email standards), and an old version of Firefox. For Firefox, I have been using it to view my 6000+ HTML files of software documentation via a simple macro in the editor KEDIT, but now each time I want Firefox to display such a file I get an absurd delay and three popup windows, one to decline an update, one asking me to make Firefox my default Web browser, and one to announce that there is an update to Firefox. So, I'm just trying desperately to do MY work, and just from a simple attempt to use Firefox I get jabbed in the ribs about updates twice.
I've specified both to Firefox and Windows some hundreds of times, maybe thousands, dozens in the last week, that Firefox IS my default Web browser. Somehow Windows and/or Firefox interact in some way to refuse to accept that Firefox is my default Web browser.
For an update to Firefox, I've declined that now likely over 10,000 times, maybe 20,000 times, including a few hundred in the last two weeks.
It appears that Firefox does have old versions available. They worked MUCH better than the recent version I've tried to use, and the old versions didn't keep pestering me, interrupting my work, stopping, refusing to work, until I click NO to some pop-ups about updates. In the old days, when a horse or mule suddenly refused to move, it got whipped.
Just now I've had to stop all my work to respond to these problems of Windows and Firefox that have recently and for no good reason sabotaged my work.
I've also been having similar problems with Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader. E.g., somehow the location of Acrobat was changed from
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe
to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroRd32.exe
So, how that change was done, I don't know. To me, that sounds like a huge problem in computer security -- no such change should be possible. The change broke my KEDIT macro for starting Acrobat to read a line in KEDIT that has the tree name of a PDF file I want to read. Somehow, a bit amazing, the change was also made to my desktop icon for starting Acrobat -- the situation of LNK files for desktop icons now seems to be a complicated subject.
With rare exceptions, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise any and all updates to software that is working FINE.
So, back to Windows 7 Professional and some old version of Firefox. Then find how to get Adobe Acrobat OUT of the Windows auto-start list and try HARD to get an old, stable version of Acrobat that does NOT try to do updates.
These updates are nothing less than massive external attacks and sabotage of my work that force me into a version of mud wrestling that takes a huge fraction of my time.
No, no, no, no, absolutely no, essentially always, I want NO updates or new versions.
I want, close to screaming in frustration, to do MY work and avoid the system management disasters and sabotage of my work of absurd updates.
Circumstances, long story, pushed me into a laptop instead of my desktop I plugged together around an AMD FX-8350 processor. By the way, that processor has a cooling fan but it is quiet, can't hear it.
My three favorite pieces of software are Rexx, KEDIT, and TeX, and all are essentially perfect and none are subject to updates for at least some decades. These are three great tools, and I have great success and no problems with them.
If my collection of hand tools worked this way, somehow I would discover that all my English dimension socket wrenches had been converted to metric. Then I would discover that my reversible electric drill had adopted a default of rotating counter clockwise and would not rotate clockwise without my pushing two buttons and holding them for three seconds each, for each use of the drill. And a new drill would have a video message window that frequently put up "Do you want to?" requiring that I stop my work and take out 20 seconds and push two buttons. Still worse will be a car with a pop-up window on a heads up display: To avoid a collision at 60 MPH, I try to slam on the brakes but nothing happens until I click on some icon to respond to some message "Do you want to do that? Using the brakes ..." CRASH.
Wish me luck in defending myself from sabotaging updates and absurd pop-up windows.