On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 8:44:25 AM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"Clare Snyder" wrote in message
...

Windows 10 may be "designed for touch screen and cell phone" but it is
a pretty kick-ass desktop OS as well. I was a XP man. Perhaps the
solidest MS OS ever by the time SP3 had rolled out - then the Win7 and
Win8 abortions came along.
Win10 brought back the reliability and functionality of XP, in my
opinion. It's different than XP, but I actually - after a short time,
found it to be an even better desktop OS.

Unless I had an app that would NOT run on 10, or specialized equipment
that wouldn't talk to 10, there's no way I'd go back to 7 or XP.

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My policy is to assign risky tasks to the least valuable computer that can
handle them. My Win 10 laptop goes online for updates but not general
browsing.

Some of the performance improvement over W7 is due to having an i5 CPU
instead of a Core 2 Duo although the clock speeds aren't much different, 2.4
and 2.8 GHz.

Most of the time, I'm sitting in front of a high-end i7 machine with 64G of ram running Windows 10. I have VMWare virtual machines with various operating systems for doing tests and developing inter-computer applications. One of the VMs is specifically for doing the more "dangerous" tasks. This PC has a 55" quad definition monitor attached, so all those vm processes have healthy sized windows to run in - a single 55" is equivalent to four 26" screens.

On the list of things to get is an optically isolated USB cable - I ONCE made a nasty mistake and let some smoke out of my laptop while connected to a large machine I was repairing. Somehow, the USB port on the laptop was not 480V compliant ;-
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As for desoldering, I have a Pace MBT which makes plenty of heat for through holes and an Aoyue hot-air rework station. For particularly stubborn through-hole parts or for multi-sided surface mount parts, Chipquik makes a very low melting point alloy that you can add to the joint making it much easier to melt https://www.chipquik.com/datasheets/SMD16.pdf