A reader told us he was glad he installed the free Windows 10. Then his digital world crashed. He couldn’t find Picasa, the program he uses for editing his family photos. He asked us to organize a search party. Here’s what the posse found:
The first time we used the new Windows 10 search bar at the bottom of our screen and typed “Picasa,” it searched for it on the web. We had to click the “my stuff” category and scroll through a lot of possibilities to find it. After that, however, Windows 10 got to know us and found programs easily.
Another way is to click “start,” and then “all apps.” They’re listed alphabetically. “All apps” is much like the “all programs” list in Windows 7, but there are games, news, weather and other stuff off to the right in those colorful tiles you either love or hate.
By the way, if you’re in the market for a new computer and find a good deal on a Windows 8 machine, go ahead and get it. You can always upgrade to Windows 10 for free, just by clicking the Windows flag in the right-hand corner of your screen.
Here are some reasons you might not want to upgrade to Windows 10:
- Your computer works fine. (Follow the old farmer’s rule: if it aint broke, don’t fix it.)
- You use the Windows Media Center to record TV shows and stream shows to other devices. Windows Media Center is not available in Windows 10; they killed it. (Ours not to reason why, ours but to go out and buy.)
- In Windows 10, updates will roll out automatically unless you’re a Windows Pro user, in which case you can choose which updates you want. Some people are wary of updates after Microsoft messed up a few of them in the past. Despite that, we went ahead and did the upgrade to Win 10. (If you can’t trust Microsoft, who can you trust? Don’t answer that.)
By the way, our reader wrote back that he had sent his wife out to kill the fatted calf to celebrate having Picasa and his photos back. (Isn’t there an ordinance against fatted calves in a residential zone?)