As I call it...

Bought a new laptop tonight, as Talula's poor old dear is just that. God love her, she still runs, but the battery is now only good for 1 hour and I'm not buying a new battery.

She makes a fine stereo and DVD player, though. Given all the savage beatings she's had, that's saying something!

So, I've been fighting with this new pile of shit for 3 hours now, and I have come to the conclusion that I hate it. It only took it an hour to start up and run.

Now reboots only take 10 minutes. But it's got 8 GIG of RAM. It uses 2 idling with the desktop. It took me half hour just to FIND a desktop.

No classic folders, no classic theme. I was able to lobotomize Firefox with the folder off my desktop and APP DATA, so that's good.

I just hate the high contrast options in 10, and how everything you want to do is hidden.

If anyone knows of a hack to uninstall EDGE, please post it.

I despise the new Task Manager.

Google up "how to's"? All the pages you get lie. Nothing they say to do is there. I want Classic Folders, dammit!

When I was a child, they once remodeled my room without letting me know.

I very nearly had a psychotic break over it and slept under the kitchen table for a week.

Bathroom remodel? Forget it. I used the outhouse (and yes, we had one until 1980) for nearly a year afterwards and had to be dragged into the bath.

This is how well I handle change.

The last time I had to get a new phone, I smashed 3 of them before I got used to it and decided that I liked it.

Not to get political, but as soon as I hit the start button on this new laptop, I got a picture of Hillary Clinton.

Really?!

And all the lovely spyware apps - share everything with everyone!

No!

I've been turning off the ones I could find for an hour now.

I'm about ready to shove the 7 Pro DVD into this thing and see what happens...

Paolo,

I can feel the pain you are going through. I allowed my PC to be updated in August when it was first released and then found out that about half was missing (no dvd drivers for example) and the other half fell over regularly. Of course, Microslop did not admit to any failures. Every time I reported something I was told to run SFC, which identified possible problems/corruption but did nothing to fix them.

When they released the update in September it took 3 hours to download and a further 3 to install. However, it did fix most of the problems.

You cannot get rid of edge, but by manipulating the 'preferences' you can substitute Firefox as default anywhere that it currently says edge.

There has been a lot of fuss about the 'start' menu. Personally, I never used it that much under earlier versions. I have always put the shortcuts that I use most of the time on the Desktop, but the one significant improvement is that I can now put the most important onto the task bar as well. This means that they are available even when I am running most apps.

My biggest dislike is the fact that frequently when I use the Windows logo (usually to shutdown) it has 'new' beside the apps tag. Since I do not download apps it means that either something has downloaded itself (rarely since Norton seems to catch them first) or something has been updated. I have yet to find a way to identify what actually has been updated.

Rather than go back to 7 why not look at 'Open Desktop' aka Unix. That does take a little getting used to but has been stable for a long time.

Best of Luck

It's taken about 10 hours of work and study, but I think I've finally whipped it into shape. Still shopping for a gray, low contrast theme, though. I do like the Clearview setting it came with for sharpening text. Most programs I use are installed; Yahoo Messenger was a neat trick, requiring finding the .exe file in Program Files, setting it for 'run as admin', and compatibility for Windows 8, for all users. That got it. I know Krister had fits with that one in the beginning.

For now, Photoshop CS3 is installed and works, although there is no Adobe Gamma, so I'll need to find a gamma adjuster that can handle wide color gamuts. Windows can't do it, so it claims.

I think I found exactly what you need: http://classicshell.net

It is free, and (I think) open source. Allows you to change between classic folders/explorer and the default one. Same for Start Menu. Take a look at the website it has screenshots showing what it does.

You can also get similar software and other Windows Desktop Customizations from StarDock -- http://www.stardock.com/products -- for fairly cheap, like $5 to $10.