On 14/09/2018 20:39, NY wrote:

"Wolf K" wrote in message

I prefer 8.1, but then I have Modern Mix, which avoids the "Metro" GUI.

In terms of UI, I think the peak of Windows perfection was XP or 7.

Both are too cluttered with unnecessary bloat and eye-candy, such as the
themes service, one of the first services I disable on a new
installation. The most professional GUI was Windows 2000.

Things went downhill when they tried to make do without a start menu
altogether, or else grudgingly give us one which is the Win8/10 "mess of
tiles".

Agreed, a phone interface doesn't really work without a touch screen,
and a keyboard/mouse is much more efficient for inputting anything in
any real quantity.

I would say that Classic Shell (or an equivalent) is the one *essential*
package that is needed on any Win 8/10 PC to make it usable.

Well, one can do quite a lot by tedious step-by-step customisation,
which at least is free - what's the point of paying for an OS, and
then paying again to make it usable.

The real problem with Win 10 is that it doesn't have a proper
email/newsgroup client

As it happens, there's currently an (off-topic for the ng) thread about
this in uk.tech.digital-tv. You can download and install Thunderbird,
but some have complained in the past that it's very easy to get muddled
and send what was intended as a private email to a ng by mistake, and
I've definitely seen examples of this within the last few years, so I'll
repeat here what I posted there explaining how to avoid that ...

1) Create two profiles, say 'Mail' and 'News'. This can be done by
copying twice an existing profile containing both types of messaging,
and then later deleting the type that is 'alien'.

2) Launch two separate windows of T'bird, one for each profile. The
easiest way to do this is copy the Thunderbird Start Menu item twice,
renaming the copies to, say, ...
Thunderbird Mail
Thunderbird News
.... and then rt-click each, choose Properties, Shortcut, and alter the
Target field which launches the program to ...
C:\...\thunderbird.exe -no-remote -P Mail
C:\...\thunderbird.exe -no-remote -P News
.... note the -no-remote switch is needed to ensure that two windows are
launched.

That is sufficient to ensure that you launch mail and news into two
windows, but in the Vista+ Start Menu 'recent' items, and perhaps
elsewhere, they will not be distinguishable, because they both launch
the same program. To distinguish them there you have to ...

3) Go into the T'Bird program folder and create two copies of
thunderbird.exe, say ...
thunderbird_mail.exe
thunderbird_news.exe
.... then reedit the Start Menu item properties as above to launch the
appropriate exe instead of thunderbird.exe. Now you should find there
will be two items in the 'recent' section of the Start Menu.

Thereafter, beware that every time T'bird automatically updates itself,
once the update is complete, do not attempt to launch it until you've
made the two exe copies and checked that the Start Menu items still
point to the correct programs, not old copies in a backup folder
alongside the updated program folder.

or else a free program like Thunderbird which is good but has its
problems - like not being able to add recipients from the address book
after you've opened a blank email (as far as I can tell - you have to go
the address book, select users and then say "send to these people"). And
I don't think Thunderbird has the ability to select photos from a
folder, say "send these photos by email"Â* and then *crucially* have it
offer to shrink those photos from camera size to 800x600 or whatever.

These are not problems to me. Presumably your method of working is
rather different from mine. My problem with Thunderbird is not being
able to select multiple threads in a ng and delete them all at once with
a single keystroke (for those that haven't tried to do this, what
happens is that only the topmost post in each selected thread is
deleted) - that seems to me to be a most extraordinary omission in
expected functionality.

I'm sticking with my Win 7 PC for as long as humanly possible. I'm not
sure whether to go for Win 10 or Ubuntu once my trusty Win 7 expires.

I use Ubuntu quite a lot for development work. Win10 was installed on a
second-hand PC, but I've moved it to one partition and installed Ubuntu.
Currently I never use Win10, but am keeping it current in case it
should prove useful for something. I'm writing this on W7.