+Right then. At last a chance to say something without a pot-roast brisket demanding my attention. Much to say. This will be long post. So…
Good things: dead easy to set up once I had shut up the annoying doxy blathering. Had it running in about two hours. If memory serves, the Samsung took about two days. Very quick when switched on. Takes a matter of seconds before you get a screen capable of doing something. Old one took two minutes or more. Similarly on shut down; seconds as opposed to minutes and lots of things to click. Also allows me to chose when I want updates done rather than just taking over and shutting me out for two hours or more.
Bad things: Microsoft/Windows control-freak circuits seem unaddressed. I had to agree to let Windows access, inspect and even delete my Gmail. If I didn’t agree it would not finish setting up and letting me use it. Have now stopped it doing that and am wondering what nasties it’ll chuck at me for doing so. I do not want the Cloud storage thingey. Some of my documents will probably contain contain bank stuff and passwords and I do not trust it. So dug through many screens of settings until I find “unlink this machine”. I did this. Following day, cloud is back again. Windows does not tell you that unlink means for just a limited period. Back to screens again until get to another thing, name escapes me, which takes the whole Cloud access away. This seems to work.
Above point illustrates the whole Windows/Microsoft lack of ease-of-use. It is so not intuitive. Especially when it means you won’t be buying something from them. I need a simple word processor (can I use that description anymore?). Only want it to write letters, print recipes etc. Samsung had a basic version of MS Word which I could use free. Seems fair when I’m paying a fair bit for MS software. Not so on this thing. Want me to pay for the whole, mega-supercharged, go-faster Word and a lot of other stuff the functions of which defeat me. Punted around a bit on the machine and found Wordpad which appears to be free and does the job.
Still difficult to know what things the machine will do. For example, despite owning the Samsung for 10-15 years I only last year discovered the big list of stuff you get when hitting the start button. It initially reveals a list of some ten or so things. NOW I know that you can scroll down this to reveal many more. Scroll bar is hidden, invisible, unless you pull across slowly with cursor until it lights. Basic error, I know, but if a thing is invisible how do you know to look for it. Similarly, at startup, pretty picture plops on screen with a few msgs from Windows. Nowhere does it tell you to click once on screen to make anything happen. Took me a while to get this.
Anyhoo, it works. I can send emails and post stuff here and order supermarket stuff. Happy bunny. Must now go and do veggies to accompany Brisket. Thanks again for all help. Gods know what I’d have ended up with without your advice. Cheers!