Yesterday, I "fixed" a two-year-old Windows 10 notebook computer. It's a cheaper model with one physical CPU core. As far as I could tell, there was no actual

Yesterday, I "fixed" a two-year-old Windows 10 notebook computer. It's a cheaper model with one physical CPU core. As far as I could tell, there was no actual malware on it, just Windows and some terrible antivirus package that came with the machine. It hadn't been used all that heavily. Nonetheless, it took 15 minutes to boot and another 15 to present a usable desktop. Even with the AV disabled, the system was still basically unusable. I fixed it by installing Arch with XFCE. (It's in my household, so I'm not worried about the perils of nontechnical users failing to maintain the install.) I'm disgusted by this situation. This was supposed to be a simple email-checker. But without anybody making any serious mistakes in its administration, (terrible AV software notwithstanding) it had degraded to the point of uselessness in two years and was headed for the dumpster. (There was still plenty of space on the hard disk, and as I said, no evidence of malware.) I could only conclude that the computer was behaving exactly as it was designed to. Under Linux, this computer remains perfectly suitable for its purpose. It's quite responsive even when running a modern web browser, and I have a whole separate rant about how insane web browsers have become. At any rate, it's quite sensible that people don't apply updates, when updates literally make the computer impossible to use. This being Windows 10, there was no avoiding updates, but I can see why Windows 7 users wouldn't bother with them. Edit: punctuation