Sometimes, running obsolete software has its advantages.
I noted before there are a plethora of free movies on YouTube - without ads! We watched the entire Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western saga - "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly", "For a Fistful of Dollars", etc. with nary an ad - although most were listed as "Free, with Ads!" (Note: Some of these "free" films are also the network television versions, cut for time and content - bummer!).
So why no ads? Well, I am using adblocker plus, and I am running Windows 7 Ultimate, which is now orphaned. And I disabled updates for Chrome (even on the netbook) so the "new, fun" version of Chrome, which blocks adblock, won't load.
And will never load, on my (now) three hoary old Toshiba laptops - as I now get a message every time I log onto chrome that "Chrome won't update until you install Windows 11!!!"
What a shame. I guess I need to get Windows 11, which has ads in the operating system. And to do so, I will need to buy a new computer. I mean, I want to have the latest and greatest, and for sure, I don't want to be seen on an airplane (which I never go on anymore) with my "lame" laptop with its four hour battery life. People I don't know might mock me! Wait until they find out I don't own an Applewatch! I will be shunned like Amish!
Do we really need all these "updates"? Increasingly, I think not. Just as GM finally got the Vega or the Fiero right, just as the last cars were coming off the assembly line, older versions of software are often the best, just as they are updated for the last time. Windows 7 Ultimate has been a very stable platform for me, and Word 2000 works great for word processing, and Quickbooks Pro 2002 does everything I would want it to do - and more. I paid for these programs, 20 years ago. Why should I pay again, just so I can save my documents in ".docx" format? Particularly when I can download .docx documents using shareware and save them in good old reliable .doc format?
What are the "advantages" of the new versions of these programs, other than an opportunity for the software maker to sell yet another new copy of their software? I am a big fan of Quickbooks, but after paying for three or four upgrades, I kinda got burned out on having "the latest and greatest."
And often, particularly today, these "software upgrades" are not upgrades, but a chance to put ads or spyware in your computer, or, as with Chrome, disable adblocker type software. In other words, the upgrade helps them, but not you.
The other issue I have with "upgrades" is how they clutter your hard drive. Windows was the worst at this, installing upgrade after upgrade, until the patches and fixes took up more space on your hard drive than Windows itself actually did.
Of course, this is all old school thinking. "Hard drive?" a friend asks, "Isn't that one of those spinning thingies? Who uses those anymore?" And of course, he has a new netbook or Apple that uses solid-state storage, but actually stores most of his data on the "cloud" which is, of course, a plethora of servers and.... hard drives. Electric cars may be the wave of the future, but IC engines will keep going for another 30 years at least, if nothing else because there are billions of them running around on the planet, and they do last a decade or two. I suspect we will say the same for hard drives - their obituary has been prematurely written dozens of times, already.
But of course, the powers-that-be will have none of this self-reliance nonsense. No doubt, I will log on someday and Chrome will refuse to load or Google will disable it somehow. And then, I will have to return to Firefox or figure out how to load Linux on my computer (where do I buy the install discs for that? Drivers? What?) or chuck it all and buy one of these crappy Windows 11 machines for $400 or more.
Or maybe by then, my need for a computer will dissipate completely. I certainly hope so.
In the meantime, I don't need much more than what I already have, to surf the net, check the balance on my bank account, and download free movies.
I mean, what more would these super-duper modern computers really do for me? And no, I have no desire to tick-tock, facebook, or tweeter!
