A friend recommended WPS office and I was liking it a lot until it wanted me to pay to either open or save files after X number of days. I ended up switching back to LibreOffice.
My bank recently cut off online account access to Win 7 users. Thank goodness I had a Win 10 machine available. Still, I keep Windows 7 for the older programs I have that won't run on higher versions.
-system NVMe SSD (C:)-data NVMe SSD (D:)-data SATA HDD (E:)-data SATA HDD (E:)-system NVMe SSD (C:)-data NVMe SSD (D:)-data SATA HDD (C:)-system NVMe SSD (D:)-data NVMe SSD (E:)
Those "cool dinosaur cursors" were leftovers from Windows 95/98 and all the same control panels and settings for mouse cursors and sounds still exist in Windows. The themes are also set within the registry, so if you copy/paste the files as well as set the right registry keys you can migrate old cursor/sound schemes over to 10/11. I use Windows XP sounds on Windows 10 for example.
With the indexing service introduced in Vista it was very good in Vista/7. Very fast, good results, no complaints.
It doesn't make you pay to open or save files. There are, however, various features sprinkled around the UI that pop open 'BUY NOW' windows without warning. You probably had something ticked. It's extremely annoying and why I was glad to finally uninstall it when I no longer needed to read pptx files on my home machine.
You can try OnlyOffice. It's my go to when I'm on Linux, never seen any nag screen.
I don't split my drives like this anymore, there's no point. If it's a system drive, then I don't have a need to split it unless I want to dual boot Linux. If it's a storage drive, there's no point to split it since I can just organize it in folders right away. If I'm gonna make a NAS cluster, then it'll be one big file dump I'll sort much the same way I sort my storage drives. Split partitioning for file storage alone is stupid.
I used this: https://samueljayasingh.github.io/Universal-Windows-Debloater/ and Sophia Script, but UWD should do you just fine.
The only reason it existed in the first place was because of filesystem limitations. DOS had a 34 MB partition size limit and then required logical partitions so if you had a big ass hard drive you had to have a bunch of drive letters or use janky drivers and software. It was ass. It didn’t help that Microsoft and IBM were playing grabass with each other and everyone was stuck on that POS version of DOS for years.
Just use WinUtil. It's not extremely intrusive and it does a good job at bringing Windows 10/11 to a sane default for you. I'd avoid all other debloater programs and/or scripts, WinUtil has the most eyes on the source code and it's maintainer actually knows a thing or two about administrating Windows and how it works and doesn't try to go out of his way to rip out absolutely everything out of the OS because he's mentally a Linux autist that wants to turn Windows into some minimal Arch-esque installation or whatever the fuck goes through the minds of idiots that consider Windows Update and Windows Defender as "bloat" that needs to be ripped out. Then you'll run something like this and encounter issues later down the line.
She's 60 years old, she's not switching to Linux. I'm lucky she uses an adblocker.
I use OneDrive's encrypted Personal Vault to store passwords. It's handy.
What exaxtly are you worried about? You may be overcorrecting. She’s unlikely to get malware off the Internet these days. The major culprit, like always, is social engineering. It might be better to have her rely on the AI as a filter than have her talking with ‘Bob from Microsafe’ on some scam site. Do you really want to be constantly wrestling with maintaining old builds and workarounds for this person?
and soon Windows will be vibe-coded by Indians in Rust.
I'm not "worried" about anything, I want my mom to have a usable device that isn't bogged down with a thousand pounds of bullshit nobody in the history of mankind has ever asked for. It's not a security issue, it's a common courtesy. And no, I don't want to be constantly maintaining old builds, that's why I'm asking if there's a preferred way to make the new builds function without trying to constantly railroad the user into talking to a glorified Markov chain that tells people to eat sodium bromide because it's trained on a dataset scraped from the Library of Babel.
Avoid regedit directly. That has a tendency to lead to future problems with updates. Stick with gpedit. Don’t worry too much about bloat. Turn off the startup apps and ignore it. A few hundred megabytes isn’t a big deal. Any browser that supports uBlock origin (or the Brave browser) is good enough.