...and some of the worst drivers in the country.

...if it doesn't say Binford on it, somebody else makes it."

I tried Fedora but I gave up on it when it repeatedly kernel-panicked on me. Wasn't fair, though - I was attempting to run it on a Sony laptop and Sony is notoriously Linux-unfriendly.

Bluestar is my first experience with Arch-based Linux. So far, so good...

Never bothered with Twitter. Seems like a great way to give everyone microstatus, but not useful for much else.

I haven't seen mod points in over 10 years. I suspect it will be a long while yet before I see them again. Oh well, I have other things to do anyway.

I do nto have a lot of experience with decent smartwatches except one - I have an ASUS ZenWatch. It's a bit on the pricey side but it is an Android based watch and it has some elegance to it. Keeps good time. The one downer is that it drains its battery in about 3 days, but it takes less than an hour to completely charge.

Hope that's of some help.

Trump has some good ideas, and I think he is striking a chord with a lot of voters who are sick of career politicians. My concern with him is that he likely is completely unaware of everything he's getting himself into. You cannot fire senators like you can secretaries and mail room clerks, and being President doesn't equate to being supreme leader (not supposed to, anyway). Also, the government's budget is very different than that of a hotel chain or casino and you can't [easily] just lay off whole bureaus of people to save a little money. If he's elected, I have a feeling there will be some very ugly surprises waiting for him.

Microsoft limits OEMs to a maximum of 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage in order to purchase reduced price licenses of Windows

I have a tablet that has 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. It runs Windows 10 and Android as well - dual boot. It's a Chinese device, even by brand. If that is a limitation imposed by Microsoft then this tablet maker doesn't seem to care.

That said, Windows 10 on a tablet is mediocre at best. I much preferred Windows 8.x for touch devices. I use the Android side almost exclusively.

I was initially a little wary of Windows 10 but when I started using it I was all right with it - for a while. It seemed to be stable, it ran the applications I needed (Pinnacle Studio and PaintShop Pro) and it seemed to be faster than Windows 7. Seemed like a good move for me.

But then I got a new computer with Windows 10 pre-installed. I thought, "great, now I can move my old computer to Linux like I planned and still run my important applications on the new one." Things were fine, until I realized that I was connected to the network without having entered my network password. And it knew my passwords on various websites that I had accessed with Edge. It knew how to access my bank, my social media - everything. Now, I am not a big fish by any means, but I do not like the idea of my passwords and keys being stashed on a server over which I have zero control.

Do I believe Microsoft will do Bad Things with that information? No, I don't. It's convenient to have it know what I need for me so I don't have to look it up. But, it's unnerving that they harvested that info without my knowledge. It also is unsettling to think that it's on a network computer somewhere.

On this basis alone I hesitate to recommend Windows 10.

You can always install Linux, BSD or an older version of Windows as long as there are drivers for your hardware. I would recommend Windows 7 if you stay with Microsoft.

Windows 10 is a strange animal, and I do not trust it personally. It was an eye-opener when a new computer knew my Wi-Fi security code when it was never on the network before.

Good article. That has given me an idea for when I am finally done updating my son's computer (I am on day three of Windows 7 updates and patches). When I have finally finished, I will make a CloneZilla image of the hard drive so that I do not need to go through this pain again as thoroughly as I have this time. This has been a true nightmare - every update reveals more and bigger updates and as a result the process is getting longer and longer. The current situation is that there were 207 patches and updates, and about 15 of them failed to install. I am now seeing another huge update.

On the plus side, the image I take will have exactly what we want in it - MS Office stripped off, Trend Micro stripped off, a minimum of crapware and useless pre-installed garbage and a few other things deliberately installed and configured. Everything tuned just right.

I am looking forward to finally getting this all finished. I expected it to take 6-8 hours, not half the week.

*If* he chooses to upgrade to 10, I'll take a snapshot of his hard drive then too.