October, 2025:

Well, it’s over. I think I have the damn thing wrestled to the mat. The big time-sink this time was peculiar: When I tried to save out an email attachment from inside Thunderbird…nothing happened. I tried again. Same thing. I tried another email attachment, as a test. Same thing. I tried yet another attachment, a silly picture of a kid in a very clever Halloween costume. And…it was saved to where I save things, the Downloads library.

Huh? It drove me nuts. Some things were saved but most weren’t. I tried to save them to different folders, like Documents and others, no good. I searched online and found a number of suggestions when Thunderbird won’t save an attachment file to disk. None of them seemed pertinent. Then someone suggested looking at the AV program. I’ve used Windows Defender for years with good results, and it never gave me grief about saving attachments.

Then it hit me: McAfee AV had been pre-installed on the new Dell machine. I didn’t register it and didn’t think it was functioning. But when I uninstalled McAfee, alluvasudden Thunderbird saved out attachments without a fight, right where I wanted them.

Bingo. My guess at this point is that the picture of the kid in a costume was a .jpg, whereas all the others were Word .docx files. You can insert macros into Word documents, and I think that’s what McAfee was worried about. I looked at all the .docx files I tried to save out, and none contained macros.

And with that, the war was over. Oh, I expect to run into an occasional Win 11 setting or somesuch that goes against logic. So far so good.

Yes, I know, attachments can contain malware. C’mon, I’ve been in this business for a long, long time. I’ve disabled macros in Office documents. I don’t save or open attachments from people I don’t know until I can scan them or in some other way figure out what they are. Most of the time I just delete them.

Again, because I spend nearly all my time in Windows looking at software other than Windows, the switch really isn’t that radical. So I’m on to other things, like a new release of FreePascal from Square One, which I’ll be writing up in the next day or two.

Like it says. After a few days of looking at different Dell machines online, I went out and bought a Dell ECT1250 mini-tower. Once I got it home and set it up, it took an hour or two to update its pre-installed Windows 11. No big deal. The big deal was that it had no trouble with my Samsung 214T, which is no longer my primary monitor and is now on my tinkering desk and not my computer table. The ECT1250 detected the 1600 X 1200 resolution and set it as its display resolution.

So what happened before? I don’t know. Really. There may have been something wrong with the first machine I brought home. It doesn’t matter. I have the 27” widescreen now and the 214T will soon be in the closet as a spare.

I did backups on my main machine and Carol’s machine, and then took a deep breath, found the Windows Update link on her machine, and clicked it. Again, it took a few hours to download the new Windows and configure it. But this time, it detected Carol’s 4:3 monitor without any fuss. Her monitor is the slightly older Samsung 213T, which I bought in 2006 and used for a year or so before I bought the 214T. Apart from the 213T being made of a different color plastic, the two monitors are functionally identical.

So why did the smaller Dell machine not talk to the 214T? I have only one theory: I raised the 214T from the dead ten or twelve years ago when several of its its electrolytic capacitors croaked. This was not an isolated problem. (Does anybody else remember it?) I thought I was out a monitor, then after doing some research online, bought a capacitor repair kit and literally replaced all the monitor’s electrolytics. This didn’t seem to have any adverse effects on the 214T, but it’s possible that I winged something on the main circuit board while soldering in all those caps.

Or maybe it was evil spirits. Who knows? Doesn’t matter. The 214T may or may not ever be used again.

There’s one additional element in our move to Win 11: Open Shell. This is (now) an open-source utility that makes the Start menu look more like the one on Windows 7. It used to be called “Classic Shell” but then its original creator open-sourced it. Carol’s machine had Open Shell installed, and upgrading her desktop to Win 11 magically updated Open Shell to its latest release, which has no trouble with Win 11.

So although I’m no fan of Windows 11, I think of it as a solid product (security and performance-wise) in a bad wrapper. Most of the time I use Windows I’m not looking at the wrapper, but at the software that I use to do what I have to do on a daily basis. I got used to Win 10. I may grumble but I’ll get used to 11 as well. And it was a good excuse to buy a better machine.