Want to eliminate Cortana? How about the popup notification urging you to get on with installing Microsoft Word? Or that other about the lack of virus protection? Microsoft has a history of poor respect for their customers, and instead aggressively pushing products. And then there's the history of Clippy (ugh) and the modern incarnation, Cortana, that's simply more irritating than valuable. And finally a bunch of default Windows settings are downright intrusive or put extra load onto the computer than is necessary.

Upgrading an older computer with an SSD drive breaths a new life into the computer. I have upgraded several MacBook Pro's (2009 through 2012) and joyfully experienced a great performance improvement -- each felt like a new machine, even though we're talking a 6-8 year-old computer. Today the task is upgrading my girlfriends Windows laptop with an SSD drive. You know the story, it takes 2+ minutes to boot the system, and doing anything takes forever. We're hoping that an SSD drive will mean a huge experience upgrade. Fortunately the process is fairly simple, even though Windows does not have built-in migration software.

Microsoft's Windows operating system family is an egregious example of closed source operating systems and the risk to consumers from overly-controlling manufacturers. Many of us worry what Microsoft does with information collected from its customers, and chafe at the lack of control we have over our computers. But the popularity of Windows means there's lots of enticing software and a large number of folks comfortable in that environment. As they might wish for an open alternative, with a strong NO SPYWARE guarantee, they want a thing which behaves like Windows. Getting there means undertaking an effort to reverse engineer a Windows implementation in the open source world.

Microsoft's Windows operating system family seems ubiquitous today, but that wasn't always the case. Windows was introduced in the 1980's, and computers of various kind date back to the 1950's. That means a whole lot of computer history predated Windows.