Finding a desktop PC with minimum bloatware

Dunno about an iPhone but I sync my android phone's camera folder with a Linux server and Windows 10. Take a photo on the phone and it just appears on the other machines.

It seems simple to me.

But anyone with a clue has noticed how convenient they are.

There will always be some luddites. Same with stupid phones and with landline phones too.

It isnt about vital, its actually about what is convenient.

Just today I could communicate with someone who had a misleading label on some bottles of wine she is selling on one of the facebook buy swap sell groups. It was handy to clear up the confusing labelling while I was out in the car and I could have picked them up when out already if the labelling had been accurate.

Doesn?t do instant messaging. The world's moved on, again.

I quite often MMS a picture of something that is for sale at a garage sale to a mate of mine who isnt there and buy it for him when he says that he wants it. He does the same thing for me. And send videos when its more than one item too.

Useless to do it with a camera and send it when I have got home again and have to go out to buy it for him if he wants it and find that someone else has bought it.

Yes, but not what he listed in the para you deleted from the quoting.

And doing it your way is a lot easier on Win than Linux for a technoklutz.

The wayback machine shows that the softwaregeeks.co.uk website originally listed a company name "Bonodo Ltd", that was struck off in October 2017.

But the current website and nominet claims the company/domain is owned/registered by "softwaregeeks.co.uk GmbH" though no such company is shown on the Unternehmens Register

I suspect the domain has been snapped-up and is being used by fly-by-nights since the original company folded ...

The company "Software Geeks Ltd" (which may or not be related) was registered and struck off without ever filing any return

A company German website (which may or not be related) shows a UK owner of "Softwaregeek Ltd"

That hasn't existed long enough to file any accounts

and is registered down this shady lane

where they share an address with several other companies with a various foreign owners and a history of being struck off

It all smells iffy to me, what sort of invoices did you get?

You pay more than £100 if you buy direct from MS. I got mine off Amazon for half that.

You don't even have to do that, ie pay, for Win 10. The only bits that don't work are the "personalisation" stuff and you have a "Windows isn't Activated" OWTE bottom right corner.

Not for Win10, download the ISO, install and use (after switching off cortina and the nagging to setup onedrive, etc).

Win10 doesn't *need* to be "activated", it all works apart from the "personalisation". You do have a lower right corner on screen text asking you to activate windows but that's easy to ignore.

Unless things have changed in the last couple of years. This free use of Win10 was fairly easy to find just after it was released, couple of years ago it was getting a bit buried, these days I guess it's in the basement with a tiger.

Just hat I was going to say.

Linux Ubuntu has nearly all the drivers I need, and the ones it doesn't can be downloaded and installed.

The invoices look to be kosher VAT invoices. They reflect the company changes you mention.

The point is I don't care if Softwaregeeks file their Companies House returns on time or if they get struck off. I do care if the licences work and have I been seen as "diligent" in avoiding pirate software. Given that Microsoft themselves provide the software and activate the software licence I think I have passed both tests. Win 10 professional for £20.

I think the truth is that Microsoft have always preferred people use their software rather than use Linux. Hence they have not cracked down on piracy and I even suspect MS deliberately provide cheap "dodgy" looking licences to get money from people who are unwilling to pay the full amount, at least they don't stamp out this practice.

I have one machine without a valid licence, this has this activation symbol. It was a Win 7 laptop that I tried to upgrade free to Win10 years ago, but the upgrade failed due to hardware incompatibility. So I left it on Win7. Recently the SSD died, so I slapped in a spare SSD with win10 already installed. The Win10 SSD just worked, perfectly, on the laptop, apart from the "not activated" message. I feel cheated out of my free upgrade ;o).

They OP wouldn't (anyway) though would he, if the machine came pre-installed with W10 (and what I was answering).

Oh, ok. Whilst I must have some un-activated machines around here (test installs etc) I can't remember ever running one like that for any time because it's so easy to get activated, even from a previous W7/8/8.1 install.

An elderly mate has an old PC running W7 and it only has an 80G hdd (that is now full).

I've got him to order a 240G SSD and a 2.5 to 3.5" adaptor tray, plus an external 1TB USB drive (he has no backups) and my intention is to backup all his data, swap the HD for SSD and install W10 on the SSD from scratch. If all goes well we can re-install any apps and restore his data.

This would probably be after a dog walk as his elderly black lab is a good influence on our (rescue) 'Borkie' (Beagle / Yorkshire terrier) ... as even with all of us taking it in turns walking / running him all day long ... doesn't seem to wear him out but does calm him down a bit ... ;-(

Cheers, T i m

Is that like 'Robin Reliant' or are you 'foreign (where some languages swap the word order around)?

Out Of The Box you mean? Yeah, most recent Linux distros have most of the basic drivers you need and often some of the extra (like for printers).

They can but how easily for most users, struggling to fix stuff themselves?

Eg, say you need a driver for something under both Windows and Linux.

For Windows you go to the relevant web site and more often than not you will find a Downloads section and in that either a list of products or even a utility that will detect what of that brand products you have installed / connected and get and install the drivers for you. Even if it doesn't, the driver is likely to be a single exe file that just runs and works.

For Linux, the same website is likely to offer nothing for Linux or direct you so some 'special needs' 'give this a try and good luck' link or generic driver that you have to install manually and / or compile yourself (without giving line by line instructions how).

Or some Github bizarre / lucky-click page that may or may not give you something you want.

It's like all (most) Linux people have never actually met ordinary non-computer-literate / interested people who just want to get on with their day, not take up some obscure hobby (or even have a basement to do so in, had they wanted). ;-)

I have been building, installing, upgrading and maintaining PC's both commercially and informally for friends and family since the 80's and have NEVER struggled with getting an OS to work (fully) than I have with the little I have played with Linux. And that's part of the problem of course, I haven't (and don't want to) 'study Linux in the same way I haven't and didn't 'study' MSDOS, CPM, OS/2, Windows or even OSX, yet I typically found all of them much easier to work with because (excluding MSDOS etc), you didn't generally have to conjure up un-intuitive CLI gobbledygook to be able to do stuff.

And even then I typically could, I could create a basic autoexec.bat or config.sys direct from the terminal or edit an .ini file but Linux .. with all it's bizzare file structures and 'you can't do this here' restrictions (even though you just installed the thing) getting in the way.

I'm sure it's all logical to someone used to any *nix or used to having to program / run stuff from the CLI, just to get simple things to work but that ain't 'most people'.

So, I install Windows and see something hasn't been fully configured in device manager, the chances are a Windows Update will fix most / all of that. If it doesn't I can generally use plain English (on websites) and the mouse to fix it.

With Linux this long term PC builder will give it a go ... do some Googling and hope to stumble upon someone who has posted an accurate / up-to-date step-by-step walk through that I can copy/paste into my version of that distro with that DE on my hardware and hope it works for me also.

If it doesn't, I don't bother asking Linux geeks for help as their version of what might help isn't generally the same as mine (because it rarely helps), so will just re-install the Windows the hardware was 'designed for'.

I wish it wasn't still like this (and it is getting better) as I really would like to make use of this free (of cost, I'm not interested in any other type of 'free') especially if it's supposed to be 'better' (safer / faster etc)?

Cheers, T i m

If it activates, it's legit. Nice link by the way!

Those seem to be bids on ebay, not 'buy it now' prices. And grade C?

A mess.

Yes, one bid on ebay for the Tier 1 machine, which was Grade C, but the only fault were the marks on the lid where stickers were removed. To go into detail, it came with a faulty ram module, and they replaced the 2 x

The X230T was a "Make Offer" on ebay, and I just added the 500GB mSATA ssd, leaving it with the 500GB HD it came with. It was not graded, but there are no faults or marks beyond a very small amount of expected scuffing. I also have the two WWAN cards to dispose of that were taken out when the ssd's were fitted.

I did expect to do some work to get these machines how I wanted, but I am sure I could get one of these, to this spec, for much less than a vaguely similar Mac

The above is obviously OT for the original question, but I would be happy to put either of these machines (one is W7, the other W10) up against my friend's refurbished Mac in a straight comparison about what they will actually be useful for.

This friend has had and used full time a W10 Windows .desktop machine from a small builder. It has a 500GB SSD and 2TB HD, and he uses it with a huge 42" (?) monitor. He has had no problems with it, beyond the initial setup where he couldn't find passwords etc., and then integrating other machines like his MS Surface and various TV and audio interfaces with the whole system, where I have assisted. Why he wants now to break out and use a Mac for his writing, I don't know. He has already replaced what he described as the cheap keyboard and mouse it came with, and keeps telling me how small the screen is and how he has to find his glasses to read it. He has had to plug in usb drives to use his documents and provide space.

I suspect, like the schoolchildren's climate change protest, there has been an element of subtle brainwashing involved.

I wasn?t talking about removing all the built in apps, I was talking about reverting to the previous UI.

To quote the site in question: "The product comes with step-by-step instructions for installation/activation, along with a volume license product key"

So basically its a volume license key version of windows. Not licensed for resale. To use it legitimately you would need to have a Volume licensing program agreement in place with MS. [1]

For comparison, my *trade* price on Win 10 Home x64 is £78.13 ex VAT.