Windows 10 on my mind

I confess that this blog is really for me. If anyone else wants to read it that’s fine but it is mainly a mechanism for me to get things off my mind. When a particular thought has been going round your head for ages, writing it down is sometimes a good way to file it away and move on to something else.

Windows 10 has certainly been on my mind for some time now. I run two computers, a desk machine and a laptop, both were running 32-bit Windows 7 Pro. When that Windows 10 icon popped up in the system tray it seemed like a good way forward so I reserved it on both machines.

The desk machine was the first to offer it and I duly installed it. It seemed fine but after a few weeks I clicked the Windows button and got a message to say there was a critical error with the start menu and that they would try to fix it when I next signed in. It didn’t get fixed. Calling the error ‘critical’ was appropriate: the start menu, the search function and the notifications button were all inoperative. I could just about drive the machine by right clicking the Windows button and using the pop-up menu (quite useful, that). Oh yes, and all the useful applications disappeared off the task bar. To run Outlook, I was reduced to using ‘Run’ on the pop-up menu and typing ‘outlook.exe’.

Google searches did not help much and Windows answers offered what looked like useful fixes which didn’t fix the problem. At that time, I think I was just within the month when I could have reverted to Windows 7 but I pressed on with the nuclear option of a reset. That seemed to have worked, although it deleted all my applications. In some ways that wasn’t a problem. I got rid of a lot of dross I had accumulated in five years on the machine and it gave me the impetus to go for Office 365, something I had been thinking about for a while. So far so good.

Then the critical error came back. Well, five years isn’t a bad lifetime for a computer, so I just went out and bought a new machine with 64-bit Windows 10 pre-installed.

The thing is that I like Windows 10, mostly. I hate the live tiles  and have turned most of them off. I got really pissed off when I realised that the picture app was busying itself constructing galleries out of my photographs. That may or may not be a good feature but I am quite capable of organising my own photographs and I certainly don’t want it done without my permission. I seem to have stopped that by not giving it a folder to work from. Also, hovering over the notifications button sometimes says there are new notifications when there aren’t.

The worst thing – and this is in my mind not in Windows 10 – is that, for the first time since I have been using computers, I am finding myself on edge worrying that something will go wrong again.

Well, now the laptop wants to install Windows 10. This machine is now effectively my emergency backup and I just can’t risk the same problem again. From Google searches, the only ways to stop the installation seem to involve some fairly serious hacking and I don’t want to make a mistake with that. So I have decided to go ahead with the install and then immediately revert to Windows 7. I understand that when you do that you get a questionnaire asking why. I might just give them a link to this blog post.

It’s now done! I have to confess that, after watching the poor little laptop sitting literally for hours downloading and installing Windows 10 (I mean ‘literally’, not ‘metaphorically’) and seeing Windows 10 appear, I very nearly decided to live with it. But then I remembered why I had done it and restored Windows 7. It all seemed to go well, although that pesky ‘Get Windows 10’ icon is still there in the system tray. I’m not letting my pointer get anywhere near it. By the time Microsoft stop supporting Windows 7 I’ll either be ready to buy a new laptop or to decide I don’t need a laptop as well as a desk machine.

Literally Metaphorical

I don’t consider myself a linguistic pedant. I try to use punctuation as well and clearly as I am able but I’m not too bothered about how others punctuate – provided it does not lead to misunderstanding.

And I’m not too bothered about the way in which language evolves and the meaning of words changes, although you need to be careful that you do not weaken the language or introduce contradictions. In ‘Through the Looking Glass‘ Humpty Dumpty said “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less“. But I don’t think you should use that as a licence to make up your own words. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was quite capable of writing that just to mock people who did it.

Given all that, I sometimes get grumpy when people use ‘literally’ in what I consider the wrong sense. An example: someone has fallen into a river and is in danger of dying. He is literally drowning. On the other hand, someone is overburdened with work. He might well say “Oh dear, I am drowning under the pressure of work.” This is a metaphorical use of the word drowning. But nowadays I hear more and more people saying things like “I am literally drowning in work” or “I could literally murder a coffee”.

So I feel rather pleased with myself, and perhaps slightly superior, that I use literally in what I consider the correct way.

But pride before a fall, and a strong dose of cognitive dissonance. Looking the Oxford English Dictionary online gives the meaning: “In a literal, exact, or actual sense; not figuratively, allegorically, etc.” I would agree with that. But it also gives a colloquial meaning: “Used to indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense: ‘virtually, as good as’; (also) ‘completely, utterly, absolutely’.” So you can literally murder a cup of coffee and claim the OED in defence. Mind you, the OED does add: “Now one of the most common uses, although often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’).”

And this is not a new usage. In 1876 Mark Twain, writing about Tom Sawyer, said: ” And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.”

But I still feel uncomfortable about that usage of ‘literally’ and I would slap my hand if I found myself saying it.

Postscript: I realise how long it is since I last blogged. Life has been getting in the way, mainly in the shape of Windows 10. But that is another story.