Win 10 works great on an old machine, ...except when you turn it on.

At startup, the drive is often at 100% disk usage as Win10 is busy doing something (scaping data, evaluating your PC before an upgrade, defragging the drive, scanning for viruses, indexing files, ...). The PC is so bogged down that it's useless for 20 minutes until the job is done.

These scraping and maintenance apps are so poorly written that they consume all resources. They should run quietly in the background, but instead they hog the CPU and disk. Sometimes the "run once" application are screwed up and run every time the machine is turned on. I've had to go into the scheduler a few times an disable them.

I'm not sure if it is incompetence or planned obsolescence, but MS keeps adding more of these processes and ruining the Win10 experience for many people. Searching for "win10 100% disk usage" shows that there are more than a dozen different processes that can have this problem behavior. Some of my PCs have this problem regularly, others don't.

I really like Moto phones. They have mostly plain Android with minimal crapware (unlike Samsung) and they are affordable (unlike Samsung). They were available unlocked very early on. The recent Moto G Power is a great phone at $219.99 US.

Another shortsighted thing that Google did was selling off Motorola. Again, lack of vision and long-term commitment.

I like Google. I like Gmail and many Google services.
I previously liked Google devices, but I will never buy another Google device since they drop support for them so quickly. I've been burned several times and had to retire phones and tablets prematurely because Google lost interest.
The last thing I want is a long term purchase like a car or TV somehow linked to a Google only device.

Do you feel that MS Office has gone downhill since Office 2010 (or 2003)? Every new helpful feature and UI improvement seems only to have made it worse.
Microsoft is re-inventing itself to become the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. https://hitchhikersguidetoeart...

Note the following similarities between MS and SSC products:

Their attempts to be friendly and useful are extremely annoying. Generally, their automatic actions are almost but not entirely unlike what the user wanted.

The key thing about Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

Their product's fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.

I have a Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with that style of keyboard and I like it. It works great for a slim laptop keyboard which can't have much travel.

Which goes to show that Google is bad at marketing their products and tends to discontinue them rather than fix and improve them. It does not build consumer confidence.
Although there were warnings earlier in the year, in July Google informed customers "Hangouts is going away soon, so switch to Google Chat now."
How many Google messaging apps have been built and shut down now? ARS did a good article on this "A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps". https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
I'm hoping GMail and Meet continue to prosper.

Everyone is making good points about Google, but Google Meet does need this feature to "ring" a person. I like Meet and use it regularly. But not everyone monitors their email closely to see a Meet notification soon after it is sent. There is no convenient way to quickly get a persons attention. It kind of defeats the purpose if I need to phone a colleague to tell them to check their email for the link and join me in a Meet call.

Lenovo-Moto phones seem to offer good phones at much less than half the price of Samsung or Apple, if you want the stock Google software experience. Has anyone had good or bad experiences with Lenovo?

The Moto-G Power looks great at under $200 USD. Nice big Screen. 3 day battery. Good camera. I don't see why Samsung is popular with their much more expensive phones.

It is amazing how many ways Microsoft is pushing crappy clickbait news to its Win10 customers.
There is a weather icon on the task bar that shows news when you hover over it, the Edge browser shows news by default on new taba which I disable, the Start menu has a MS News tile...
I would be more inclined to pay attention to news headlines if they had intelligent informative headlines instead of clickbait type wording.

Every site (including Slashdot and real news sites) have Clickbait links somewhere on the page. They have trained me to intentionally ignore and skip over sections of their pages. I wish for a search engine could promote pages that didn't include clickbait. And a browser that would blank out their useless images.

Suck, squeeze, BANG, flow - it's still a four stroke engine

I don't know why some people avoid wearing a helmet, but the mask sounds like a good way to avoid eating bugs :).
My point is there are other motivations for keeping a mask on even when other people aren't around.
We all weigh convenience differently.

>"I very commonly saw people wearing masks while they're alone driving in their car."

What a stupid comment. I often leave my mask on in the car because it's more convenient than taking it on and off between locations. Your biases are reading too much into your observations.

I find I am using Edge more often because Chrome seems to cause a lot of disk activity when I fire it up. What in the world is it doing? Edge doesn't cause the same disk thrashing. It isn't really a big deal other than I find it annoying on PCs with louder hard drives. It isn't this memory efficiency stuff because it happens even before I open a page.