March resolution - spring cleaning for the Windows XP machine

[lauradi7dw]

I've been giving some thought to the publicized April deadline of no more support for XP.  A friend suggested taking up with Ubuntu, which I am considering.  His sister (also a friend) gave him the stink-eye at that idea, knowing that any kind of computer skills are beyond me, but maybe it would be good for me. Before that, I need to clear things out and possibly pay a professional to give it a good scrub.  I got this machine just before I went back to school, so it has all of my coursework and stuff on it, plus a lot of photos, and journal articles I liked, and so forth. I may put most of that stuff on dropbox, but it will mean doing it one document at a time, I think.  I am curious to see whether the paid people can actually get rid of some of the annoyances. A couple of years ago, I accidentally downloaded chrome (one of those things where updating a program gives you a new different one if you don't unclick fast enough).  I immediately removed it as much as I could, but it has stayed underneath somewhere, causing messy scripts to slow me down on a regular basis.  I recently exacerbated this problem when I downloaded the MyAthens toolbar, to use for one of my volunteer gigs.  Now I get half a dozen script mess-up notices in a row several times a session, all of them having chrome and athens in the error message.  I followed the remove program directions to get rid of the MyAthens thing, but it's not in the list of programs.
I really want to keep this machine.  It works well with my vertical keyboard and the old laser printer.   For some reason, the newish Windows 8 machine hates my webmail program, and can't cope with anything more complicated than a short text livejournal post. The touch screen is fun, except when it's infuriating.   I'm not willing to give up on using this one at home, and relying on the new one for outside the house.
I've got a month.

Comments

[nosrednayduj]

I would recommend trying to get windows 7 installed on your machine. It's not that different from XP (yes, a lot of menu items are in different places, which is irritating, but it's nothing like the difference you see with windows 8). Ask the pros you're thinking of talking to about that option.

I would recommend against any unix variant if you aren't already familiar with unix. First off, it's extremely different, and second off, everything on the web thinks you have windows, which means that a lot of web pages don't really work right on your unix machine. Ken insists on using unix instead of windows and he's always cursing about this and that site. I just use windows, not particularly liking it, mind you, but having stuff work the way it's designed is easier.