Funny thing ain't it? I used to swear by Windows..Started off when it took like 16 floppies to load it, Was called Windows Manager back then. Now I swear at Windows.Mm.....no; I can't really agree with that. Never had an HP printer.....been an Epson man for over 35 years, and been really pleased with 'em.
Had an elderly HP-Compaq Presario desktop rig up till the start of the pandemic. Went to spring-clean it in Jan' of 2020, and it simply refused to boot after that. Checked everything I could think of, but no dice. It was, however, nearly 16 years old at that point, so I think the caps had finally dried out. They'd been looking iffy for the previous couple of years, so it was hardly unexpected. As for using it.....brilliant piece of kit. Belonged to my sister - had XP on it - when it came time to move to Win 7, like most people she bought new and was going to send the old rig to landfill.
I grabbed it, and re-purposed it to run Puppy Linux. Which it did for 6 years, till the spring-clean fiasco.....
----------------------------Now I run a fairly modern HP Pavilion desktop, which I've upgraded to within an inch of its life. 32 GB DDR4, SSDs - 5TB-worth! - Nvidia GPU.....etc, etc. Again, brilliant system (once you've sussed the UEFI crap out!)
Definitely agree about Dells. Had 2 of their laptops. First 'puter we ever had in our house was a 2002, 32-bit P4-based Inspiron 1100, with a gig-and-a-half of DDR1..! It was still going till last year, when the Intel Extreme graphics adapter finally gave up the ghost. So I replaced it with a Core2Duo-based, 4 GB 2008 Dell Latitude D630. Refurbed, and someone had shoe-horned Win 10 onto its 120 GB SSD. Which was the very first thing to go.....zapped, with extreme prejudice!
Now it dual-boots a pair of 64-bit Puppies. It's still in almost brand-new condition - obviously had an easy life - and absolutely everything still works. Even the auto-sensing screen brightness adjuster!
Amazing, really.....but it's what I've come to expect from Dell.
Mike.
I'm hoping my sister at least gives Linux a try, She's Old School and set in her ways, So not holding my breath. She said she will...but she says many things.
The first computer that interested me in computers was a Commodore 64, I truly enjoyed it. My Dad was 74 at the time and he enjoyed it too, went out and bought himself one...Even helped me type in programs from Ahoy! magazine. What a Dad he was.
