This post is just a basic introduction to some of my thoughts on using Windows O/S and hopefully in later posts I will be giving more detail.

Most of my computing has been done on Windows O/S (O/S-Operating System).
So I have used Windows for many years from Win98 (& ? earlier-I forget!) to my present time with Windows 7 & now Windows 8 has just been released. I do have an older (secondary) desktop which runs Linux Fedora 17 but I rarely use that. It is quite useful to have from time to time to do non Windows computing on. I have never owned or tried computing on a Mac (Apple).

Well overall I quite like Windows. Mainly I guess because I am so used to it’s features. I also quite like free & open source software to run on Windows & there is a growing library of this software available now (eg Libre Office). There are so many things the computer software can do, and to have to buy commercial software for everything would be very expensive and out of my reach to do so.

Microsoft (the makers of Windows O/S) do have some free products to use and these are often cut down versions of their full products. They can be very useful (eg Microsoft Visual Studio Express versions & WebMatrix are 2 products I use). However adding all this software to my computer has and still is causing conflicts that can cause problems. The most prominent problem I have is that my Network Diagnostic Policy Service does not run! I have not been able to solve this!

Unfortunately I spend lots of time installing and uninstalling software to try & fix problems. For instance over the last few weeks I have had a problem with IIS web server & IIS Express (WebMatrix).
I have uninstalled & reinstalled & still the products fail again! Today I couldn’t connect to MySQL via phpmyadmin and have uninstalled & tried to reinstall MySQL but with no success yet! There are so many frustrating problems like this to fix on my computer and trying to fix these does waste a lot of my time.

One day I hope to get my Windows O/S computer in perfect working order…nice dream! 🙂