Classic Shell solves a lot of things, but it doesn't solve the control panel items being in multiple places, defaulting to full screen Metro versions of apps, and a half dozen other things. Most (not all) of these have solutions, if you're willing to put the time in, but there is one solution that fixes everything -- boot the Windows 7 recovery disk and choose install. Then wait for Windows 10 SP1. If Microsoft hasn't a clue by that time, switch to another platform.

There are times when you don't have a choice, but then, I agree, XP is a good solution. Or the XP emulation built into 7 Pro.

I can appreciate that, for a gaming machine. My PC is my main workstation, on which I do a variety of stuff, sometimes all at the same time, and the Windows 8 gui was not worth the aggravation. But for games, sure. I bet most of your games will fit on one page of the start screen. If Windows is concentrating on being a gaming platform, then maybe it's time for business customers to look for something else.

Well, installing a different OS is a reasonable thing to do if you're relatively competent, but why would you pay the Microsoft tax once when you buy the machine, and then pay it again to install a different OS?

I have a friend who's wife has an architecture business. She does most of her work on the laptop (Windows 7). The laptop hard drive failed, so she decided it was time to upgrade, bought a Dell. Tried to work with Windows 8 for awhile, and sent the laptop back. Customer service was apologetic and understanding. (I wasn't there at the time, but I do wonder why they didn't just offer to ship a machine with Windows 7.) She made the decision to fix her old laptop. I helped her husband install a solid state drive and get the machine back up again. She's back online on Windows 7. Hopefully, by the time she's forced to upgrade, there will be something reasonable to upgrade to.

A *lot* worse UI. And since the UI is what the user touches more often than anything else in an OS, it is significant. I'm buying another copy of 7 just in case, and intend to wait until OS 10 SP1 (to give it a fair chance) before deciding whether I'm going to continue with Microsoft or not.

At work, management has already given employees a choice between Winders and Mac, and there is a growing community here of enterprise mac users. I don't think that's for me, not really an Apple fan, (my last Mac was a G4 -- I went back to Windows about the time Apple and Adobe got into a pissing contest) but I tried Windows 8 (my copy is now collecting dust on the shelf) and that just isn't happening.

...but there are applications where I don't care about backup, and Raid 1 is enough. Moreover, I can build from there, to Raid 5 (or 10) with commercial grade plug-and-play enclosures, using hot swap hard disk as offline backup (because, as noted previously, disk is cheap) for a majority of the features of an enterprise storage setup, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

> Is that really what you mean? Do you mean that when you ask your local IT for space, you get jack squat?

That would be hyperbole, but, essentially, yes. In a time when 4 terabyte drives can be had for less than $200, (wholesale, but any PC builder knows where to get them) trying to get larger than a 40 Gbyte share or virtual drive is like pulling teeth, and you pay a monthly price for the storage for which you could more than buy the storage outright every month. Now, mind you, a lot of this pays for "enterprise" drives, enclosures, storage admins, and your storage supplier's profit margin. I understand that. But it does leave a developer in a situation where getting enough for a reasonable virtual instance, even just for sandbox work not intended for production, is like pulling teeth, whereas, hey look! I have a terabyte right on my PC! And Sam next to me, he has a terabyte on his! Maybe we can do something with that.

I support apps on a mix of servers, and the most often issue I have to deal with is full partitions. (Not the hardest, but the most numerous.) This is because we're trying to squeeze an app server into too small a space. It's a double whammy -- buy really expensive enterprise grade storage, and *then* try to cut corners by doling it out in Bumble quantities. Exactly the opposite of your suggestion.

So, like you said, that's their own bad decisions.

Take daily full snapshots of your 3 TB system? You'd reach a petabyte in less than a year.

You're right, it's actually a policy thing more than a cost thing. Using white box like google and I think Yahoo, the price of storage is dirt cheap. (Compensate for reliability with some decent raid/backup scheme) No reason why they couldn't take advantage of that.

But storage on the intranet remains miniscule and expensive. Try to get a partition big enough to build a reasonably sized virtual instance, and you'll get handed 20 Gbytes because "storage is expensive".

And so, potential customers continue to do their stuff on their own PC, because really, storage isn't that expensive.

> now they are upping the ante with unlimited OneDrive storage.

Think of the Pr0n! You could put the entire country's Pr0n in the cloud!

But seriously, it'll be "unlimited" until disk space becomes an issue. Which is to say, it's unlimited until it isn't.

> Nixon could only have wet dreams over what the US Government can and does do now.

And probably does, in whatever hell he resides.

I think back in the Grant administration.

Especially since there's been so many high-profile hard drive crashes recently.

Later in the same article "It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer."

You're right, nobody would break into a computer that way, unless, perhaps, if they were powerfully arrogant, and wanted to make a point.

> Not impossible, but also pretty difficult to achieve since it usually means physical access to something relatively local to the sender.

Wow I just had a flashback. This was the first step of the plan in most Mission Impossible episodes.