You have a pretty powerful beast of a machine. There is no reason not to install a VM program like VirtualBox, grab the free version of Windows 10 from the official website (you will not be able to modify the wallpaper and other aesthetic settings but who cares?) and run your Windows-only program in it. That's what you should do, IMO. No need to use a different machine for that.jack action said:
Lots of things should work. But spending days trying to figure out how programs work, if they can fulfilled your needs, repair what you already installed because the new program screwed it up, etc., can really test your patience. Now I have something that works pretty good and I'm going to used it that way for a while. The old machine is beside the new one, it is just a matter of switching wires to bring it up to life. Sadly, it takes less time to do that than trying to make a program that I used once a year work.fluidistic said:
I'm not really used to Wine yet (I prefer getting the full 'Linux experience'), but the program is a Windows installer .exe and the message 'This program cannot be installed on OsNotIdentified' appears.fluidistic said:
The program would probably work, it's just the nice people who built the installer - thinking for me 
- that refuse to do the job. That reminds me of the time I used the Opera browser and some sites would refuse to serve me their content with the excuse that their websites were designed for IE, Chrome or Firefox. Just serve the freaking HTML, let me deal with the reading. You might be able to boot from a live Windows CD, DVD, or USB drive, run the install, then reboot from the internal HDD and run the installed program via Wine. Some programs won't install this way because they attempt to update the Windows registry, which they can't do on a non-writeable system. If your tax program is like that, you might still be able to clone it (copy the program and its DLLs and its directory) and drop it in that way.jack action said:Lots of things should work. But spending days trying to figure out how programs work, if they can fulfilled your needs, repair what you already installed because the new program screwed it up, etc., can really test your patience. Now I have something that works pretty good and I'm going to used it that way for a while. The old machine is beside the new one, it is just a matter of switching wires to bring it up to life. Sadly, it takes less time to do that than trying to make a program that I used once a year work.
I'm not really used to Wine yet (I prefer getting the full 'Linux experience'), but the program is a Windows installer .exe and the message 'This program cannot be installed on OsNotIdentified' appears.
You can change your User Agent string to tell sites that Opera is whatever browser they tell you they prefer. If you need to do it frequently, you can use this addon: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/user-agent-switcher/That reminds me of the time I used the Opera browser and some sites would refuse to serve me their content with the excuse that their websites were designed for IE, Chrome or Firefox. Just serve the freaking HTML, let me deal with the reading.
You can disable that -- Start > Search box > compmgmt.msc > Services and Applications > Services > Windows Update > Properties > Disabled > Applyklazoniac said:
By what measure(s)? Across the board?Eakery said:
Some people love it, some of us hate it. I think the less computer literate you are the more you are likely to love it because it has moved in the direction of smartphones.Eakery said:
That hits the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned. For this reason, I hated Win 8. I do not want every application displayed as a rectangle on the screen -- I'm much more comfortable creating a hierarchical file structure into which I can arrange the thousands of files I deal with in a much more logical manner. Win 10 is not as bad as Win 8, from the perspective of the user interface, but that's faint praise.phinds said:
Mark44 said:
User learns to mostly ignore that distracting image of clickable tile images, and to look alphabetically for the desired application or program from the left side panel from the Start button. I have TWO programs on Windows 10 which I OFTEN like to use, and for these, I put the tile of each onto the tiles menu. I IGNORE all the other tiles, because they are at least for me, just so much visual junk.sysprog said:
You can make your preferred programs stick to the taskbar, too, and ignore the tiles altogether. The Classic Shell interface allows you to let Win 10 look like Win 7 or Win XP, and has an option at the top of the Start menu to let you see the normal Win 10 view. There are many other ways to make Win 10 less obnoxious.symbolipoint said:
Perhaps you could find out something about why by clicking here (or more directly, here).Svein said:
I agree that Win 10 is not entirely devoid of advantages; it's better than Win 8, which was pretty much a downgrade from Win 7.danachiraq said:
Critically acclaimed compared to what and by whom?
Games are designed and written with certain platforms in mind. It's no surprise if MS improves its gaming capabilities in order to draw business away from competitors in that sector. Users who don't play resource-intensive games on Windows don't benefit from it being more gamer-friendly than its predecessors.
(^ typo corrected) Maybe closely enough for the comfort of some users. MS doesn't favor backward compatibility, and isn't shy about alienating users of its older systems. MS thinks it can rope them into paying for newer stuff, and it doesn't much care about their objections.
The bloatware that was designed to sell the product on touch screens is now also usable on other systems.
Windows phone users are a small minority of Windows 10 users and of phone users.
Cortana is intrusive, and like Edge, is treated preferentially when the user wants it removed from the taskbar.
Often Ferrari vehicles have a power-to-weight ratio advantage over other vehicles against which they are tested. Some Win 10 systems, despite having some faster components, can run slower than some Win 7 systems, depending on the workload.
That just more of MS trying to get its fingers into every pie it can smell.
Device drivers should be, and usually are, supplied by the hardware manufacturers. Most modern mature Linux systems can immediately recognize, and promptly install drivers for, any hardware configuration they encounter, and failing that, can, automatically, find and download them from the net, and install them.
That's MS trying to push its new browser on users, now that IE has for decades failed miserably compared to its competitors, despite having 'undocumented' OS 'fast paths' available .
Introduced? Belatedly -- VirtuaWin is open source (GNU license), leaner, and has more functionality, and it's been around since Win ME.
That's pretty minor.
Anecdotal. Better compared to what? Win 7 on an older system?
100% agree. You can't remove Edge and when I did disable Cortana, the Start menu started having issues. Basically, all of the apps in the Start menu are disabled including the Shut Down and Logout buttons the first time that you open it. You have to then close the Start menu and then open it a second time to see it display the apps correctly. Apparently, everything starts off as disabled until Cortana has checked them or you trigger it by opening the menu the first time.sysprog said:
Both Cortana and Edge are apparently both checked for and invoked in Win 10 startup, and both apparently contain code to re-enable themselves and re-install their shortcuts if the user has tried to put them out of sight.Borg said:
I suppose you could start from safe mode command prompt only and do the rename from there ...Borg said:
This is just an offhand guess, but as I recall, there's a Windows component that determines whether the audio output is shared, or seizable exclusively by a single application, and if that component is frequently getting control momentarily, it may be interacting with the audio driver, and so may prevent it from acting smoothly, and could introduce noisy interruptions. Are you using Intel audio drivers, Windows, or something else?BTW, I am on a brand new Dell Alienware laptop. One of the reasons that I've been poking around in the processes is that it has static in the sound when I first start it up. It tends to clear up after a while but can intermittantly get static again. It seems that Dell and MS have so many processes running to "enhance my experience", that listening to clear music isn't part of the experience that they've deemed as important. From the searches that I've done, this appears to be a common annoyance with some Dell laptops but I have yet to find a workable solution. I even called Dell tech support. They had me update some BIOS firmware and it seemed to go away. However, it came back again. So, if anyone knows how to solve this...
I did manage to rename it but the Start menu problem forced me to put it bak.sysprog said:
I'm not sure. I'll have to check when I'm back on it. I think that it's an NVIDIA audio driver but I know that there are Intel drivers floating around as well.sysprog said:
Maybe you could check out Classic Shell, and see whether that may help.Borg said:
This is about a year old, but may still be applicable for your new machine:
That's some sneaky BS by MS.sysprog said:
Appreciation from me to you, too, @Borg.Borg said:I turned off the fast startup yesterday but, before turning it off, I still had the same problem. One especially bad incident was when I opened a new Firefox window and then opened a list of 12 bookmarked pages all at once. Firefox CPU usage went to 100%, audio sounded like a 78 lp record running at 45, the mouse was slow, etc.
This morning after starting, I opened the same 12 tabs and no problems. CPU usage was normal and audio was completely unaffected!
Big Thanks @sysprog
MS is apparently, in its jaundiced-eye view, taking the approach that (given that the HW guys can blame the OS for slow boots) making the boots faster, even at the expense of true renewal, would make some users happier, and would help to further its nefarious agenda to foundationalize its 'OS as a subscription service' paradigm.Borg said: