Also, you can get 'data-bashers' who will feed all sorts of things into a program, equivalent to doing things like putting cd-roms into toasters. Part of the process here is things like 'industrial design', where things are meant to be consistant and give the user the understanding of what to do next. Searching for songs on apple's itune is an example: you would expect a search link in the window, but it's unusually in the frame.

It's not well enough to document it in the manual, since (a) it becomes the manual writer's problem, and (b) the manual writer might miss clues too. For example, the obnoxious 'and press enter' one sees, was left out, and the end result was a call support about a program sitting at the prompt for want of words in the manual. You can't suppose every one is computer literate.

In the day, it had very press reviews, in that users were not really prepared for what the NT world was going to do.

People were still used to the DOS idiom, and the idea that some sort of program protection might be implemented, and the other supprises that ME brought were not someone like a home user was ready to adjust to. The lack of a DOS boot, and even that there were multiple IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM programs to wrangle with, just made doing things that were simple in Win98SE and earlier, just that much harder to do.

Any of the windows were susceptable to 'drag and drop' the windows directory somewhere else, but you could boot into a DOS prompt (sort of), and fix it. The DOS was also moved, but IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM were still in the root directory.

ME did fix a few bugs, such as in scandisk, but it was pretty good at introducing many more. The P!us pack was rolled into the distro, and I got it to work somewhat better if you removed IExplorer from the base install, and installed it as a separate application (98Lite).

It's called Open Shell these days, Bew developers. But if you are acustomed to a particular kind of menu, you can tell CS to use that form, eg classic, xp, 7, whatever. PinMenu is good too for lesser or always available menu options.

Tip. Put a link to opening 'open shell', somewhere accessable from the desktop (even in a folder under there). It's handy restarting it.

Whenever you receive a call from one of these scammers do what you can to talk to a live person. This is what costs them money. When I get a robo-call telling me about pack pain medication or having an import message from my credit card company, I always press whatever button I need to push to seem interested and speak with a representative. Then I keep that person on the phone for as long as possible until they give up and hang up on me.

If everyone did this, the overhead of these bastards would be too high to keep calling people. At worse, it would make them limit their calls to known suckers.

The Windows calculator is only an algebraic one. It does not handle RPN notation, In my younger days, I wrote a program in 8bit rombasic that emulated something like a HP15, but you could set the operation in 'base by', eg "base 73 by 10's". You could set your own degrees and logs as well, independently of the base (eg 28 sto T would set the circle to 28 degrees.)

The calculator on the desktop is not really all that useful, unless you can edit the calculation history. For plain dos and Windows, i used to use a thing called 'acalc' from PC-DOS 7, but i wrote a rather cute calculator in REXX, which does much of the same thing. (It supports trig functions in circles too).

Of course, we see reactos has a nice calculator that looks pretty much like the windows one. They had the thing set up so you could run the winxp type version under w2000. Microsoft forced you through a large DLL for this activity. Nothing like what you need to run the norton desktop for windows one though. It uses quite a large slab of the application.