Microsoft snuck "Copilot" onto my computer when I wasn't looking. They didn't even ask first. Since the machine is old, slow and short on storage space, it bollixed everything up and had to be removed.
It's probably time for a "new" computer.* For interoperability, it'll need to run Windows. I'd like to move to Linux, but writing these days requires .doc or docx files most of the time, and my experience with the Rasberry Pi showed that it's awkward at best to get compatible files off a *nix box with any certainty that they'll play nice on an editor's copy of Word.
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* I have, in fact, purchased exactly two brand-new desktop computers in my long string of machines going back to MS-DOS and before: a Coleco Adam and, about a decade back, a nice little Acer package from Woot! that eventually succumbed to a nasty virus that neither I nor the IT experts at work could scrub. Everything else has been used/refurb/open box. Laptops, I've done better, a couple of Eee minis (one great, one sluggish) and the MacBook Air, which is probably the single most expensive computer I have purchased. But the Macbook Pro and Surface Pro were used, and my Surface RT -- now about as dead-ended a product as the Adam -- was a new-in-box but superseded model. The little Surface Pro recently scrolled off the support roster; I've kept it off wi-fi so it doesn't find out and I'm looking at it with an eye to *nix installation.
Stuck on windows as well for a variety of reasons, mostly application related, but as far as the .doc .docx issue, I'm using LIbre Office and it supports those formats just fine for general purposes. Used it all the time when working to send/read docs from the MS Office suite at the office. I was running it on both my Linux and Windows boot ups (until the Linux drive died, haven't bothered to reinstall it)
ReplyDeleteAlthough I realize it might not support your specific writing needs. Please feel free to forget I said anything if you've already considered and discarded this option.
I regularly use all of the M$office product output via LibreOffice under Mint Linux (on dual and quad core amd/intel machines) without any issues. The Rpi-4/400 is under powered but it does work. I have a Rpi400 and its fun and if you patient it works ok. Its bottleneck is that uSD as storage device is very slow.
ReplyDeleteBeen doing that since bailing on M$ products back in '06.
Eck!
My 7-year-old personal laptop is set up for dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. It was blessed not only with Co-Pilot, but the Secure Boot patch that wasn't supposed to affect Ubuntu, but did. I haven't yet applied the fix (not supplied by Microsoft, of course), but I need to soon, as I have some SDR tools on the Ubuntu side that I need to use in a couple weeks. Thanks, Microsoft.
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