[Pulpmeister]

Due to a total hard drive failure on my tower PC which was running Windows 7, and using such archaic software as Office 2007, Paintshop Pro 7, and stuff, I have had to bow down to the winds of time and buy an all-new tower PC with (aaaargh!) Windows 10. (At least I managed to recover 90 percent of the data from my dead drive, or rather, a data recovery expert did).

W10 has, as many of you might know, a whole lot of unimprovements. In another part of my life I produce the quarterly magazine for my local Rolls-Royce club, which I do in Word 7, and all I had to do was go "save as"/pdf and I had the necessary pdf to email to the printer, and to post on the club website.

Nope, not available on W10. Imagine my shock to find it missing. Imagine further that the only obvious solution is laboriously using on-line converters (which I deeply distrust).

Mind you, W10 accepts Office 2007 itself okay, but has bizarre side effects. There is some very weird stuff with quotes. If I type quote I was going... I get Ï was going…

Yes, not start quote; an umlaut. If I start with a consonant I get no quotes at at all.

To get what I want, I now have to type quote I space was going…
Clearly an unimprovement.

Paint Shop Pro 7, an ancient but very easy to use photo programme, does not run under W10. Somewhere I have Photoshop, but I don't need heavyweight for everyday use, I need something that starts with the basics: crop, colour balance, bright/contrast, rotate, resize, clone retouch… as the primary set of functions. I could do that with my eyes closed in PSP7.
I have tracked down a freeware product that does something very close to what I want, so far so good.

But simple one click conversion of docx to pdf????? What was Microsoft thinking? An egregious unimprovement.

W10 also seethes with clutter, which doesn't got over well with someone who likes a clean desk (digital desk… my physical desk is an archaeologist's challenge).

Of course, W10 is a commercial product which has to be all thing to all people.

Except, it seems, to me.

Don't worry, I'm just a 76 year old grumbling about change.

Oh, and by the way, a tip from the data recovery expert: the first time your hard drive demands CHKDSK be run, race not walk to your nearest expert and get that old drive cloned to a brand new hard drive, and put the new one in your tower. If I'd had my 2 terabyte HD cloned a year ago, and filed the old one away, I'd still be seamlessly using my beloved old software.

A further hint: keep the old drive carefully stored just in case your new one goes kablooie. You may need to clone it again…