Uncle Tom Loudon – Canada’s rowing coach at the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games – Click on image for source

Okay, bear with me folks. I have a lot of old computers kicking around the home and like to test out different types of operating systems as a kind of hobby.

As a kid I was an avid boater—motorboats and sailboats, so it’s not a huge jump for me to compare PCs to water ‘vehicles’ that can take you somewhere. For me, smaller boats are a better analogy than autos because boats really slow down when you add a load to them. And cars, well yeah you can feel the difference but not as much.

So we had this small tin boat with a 7.5 Evinrude on the back. I loved it. My great uncle Tommy Loudon purchased the engine waaay back, and unlike today’s motors, it actually sounded nice. Melodious.

In my cartoon, I wrote MERC (for Mercury outboard engines) simply because I couldn’t fit EVINRUDE in the small space. ☺️ We eventually got a Merc too but that was for an even smaller boat that I hardly ever operated.

So to continue with my analogy, I am testing out a very inexpensive laptop that has a bottom-of-the-line Celeron processor, 64 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM. It cost about the same as a cheap tablet and that is primarily what I plan to use it for.

The PC came with Windows 11 S which is a joke if you like the Google ecosystem. So I changed to Windows 11. Here’s how it felt:

There are so many things I do not like about Windows 11, especially with this small ‘boat’ of a laptop. You can see all the junk added on (the blue and white boxes in my masterpiece 😂). Junk I don’t need or want. I can hardly see past it and it is definitely in the way—Almost 10 GB of extra SSD space and about half a GB more RAM usage than Windows 10.

So here we have Windows 10, which I switched to. Windows 10 has a reasonable amount of stuff and still some room to expand (almost 10 GB less on the SSD and about half a GB less RAM usage).

The thing is, not everyone will know how to go back to Windows 10 to maximize performance. So I imagine there will be many returns from disappointed buyers with this cheapie item!