Irfanview: http://www.irfanview.com/

7zip: http://www.7-zip.org/

Linux: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org

Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/

I can make some observations about your post (I retired from 30 years of mainframe programming after y2k).

1) I believe some reasons for the difficulty with the newer versions is the inability to maintain the older versions. I'm not trying to toot an old horn here, but, these older versions of software evolved from a free-for-all wild-west type of programming environment, which saw a lot of worthless and impossible programs die off (thankfully), but, also, saw some extra-ordinarily useful and functional programs come into full maturity (one example would be the various flavors of insurance processing programs).

These "legacy" (the term used in the software industry for older programs for which few, if any, knowledgeble programmers can be found) programs are usually not structured, involve some very clever "tricks" (very hard to decipher without a heads-up from someone in the know), and are sometimes referred to as "spaghetti code" (indicating an impossible mesh of branches, instruction modifications, even illegal instructions, and nearly unintelligeble maze of coding slights-of-hand).

Sometimes even the source code (from which the executables are compiled) has been lost, so, it is hopeless to think of updating or maintaining them. More than once during my last few years, I was involved in efforts to rewrite legacy code, using modern techniques, usually focused around so-called "object oriented programming", or what we would call "with classes". Since the original code was usually unstructured, it became a totally new rewrite, involving even going back to a formal set of requirements.

Often times, these legacy programs had specialty functions that only experienced customers knew about, and the newer programmers and code designers were ignorant about (I got bit myself with that on one of my rewrites).

You wind up getting code that fits well with object oriented thinking, but, some processes just don't fit well into this philosophy. Even as I retired, there were still some legacy programs that had been written as early as the mid-70's that were deemed too expensive to rewrite, as no one fully understood all the functions involved, nevermind trying to decipher the code.

Another reason, related, is that programming bosses (and company owners) do not like having only a handful of programmers capable of maintaining their legacy code - that frightens them, and they are always seeking to "generalize" thier software in such a way that they can hire programmers from any where to maintain thier software - one of my relatives, an excellent assembly language low-level programmer, finally got feed up with such an effort by his bosses and just walked out, leaving the company unable to maintain his legacy code.

Another reason is the cost of programming - when I first started, I was getting about $4 per hour, and some of the very best programming done was for these modest wages - no one can dare hope to compete these days offering only modest wages (just like the classic movie era, when the line workers and actors got paid only reasonable wages for such excellent work).

Today's pay scale, and the heavy use of "packaged programming philosophies" (such as object oriented) mean that some of the excellent offerings of the past are just not affordable today (think about the original notator/creator by atari).

But some of the programs being offered today are truly amazing, such as the modern 3d and PC video programs. I am still amazed at Microsoft's Virtual Globe, and I am betting that it was done with classes. It all depends on the structurability of the application involved.

Except for my last few years, we always had strong and vigorous input from the customer base, so that, the kind of usability and nifty functions you mentioned were made integral to our designs. The motto was always not to make it easy to code, but easy to use. That all changed as y2k approached, and, nowadays (I'm guessing here), there is probably little concern for widespread user input. Another important aspect is documentation - we always considered the cost of a software product to be 1/3 programming, 1/3 documentation, and 1/3 administrative. That also changed, and, by the looks of what I see as a customer, documentation is probably a begrudged afterthought.

this whole 'object oriented programming' and the gobblety gook jargon of the computer programming industry smacks of the orwellian weird double speak, the communist obfuscation of everyday words that used to mean something. everytime I read a computer book i'm left with one over-riding thought, 'WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT?'
I remember when BASIC was a language you could actually write a program in, without memorizing commands like {*^*&%a$AdBil. Totally fucking absurd. And dont' tell me this isn't intentional, it absolutely is. They don't want the masses to know how to write programs or mess with computers.
I understand how computer languages are compiled, a programming word simply stands for the machine commads, they can make the commands to be whatever they want, they could make them simple, clear english words, instead everything is counter-intuitive jargon, just like communist propoganda, designed to rob the mind of it's ability to think clearly.

Also, the new version of Windows media player is dumb as hell, no time display on how long the clip is, no 'back forward' to play previous clip, alot of good, common sense commands/features gone, it's all about churning out shit that has the latest sales feature, like media player 11 has an MTV plug in, and of course, all the newer versions run like TSR's, viruses, always running in the background, gobbling your memory, doing uploads once a day. If i didn't disable all programs with msconfig at start up, i'd have about 15 TSR's from all these fucking programs, and my computer would run so slow it would be useless.

In fact, the FBI had to scrap it's Carnivore program because of precisely this kind of shit, it took them two hours to send shit to their printers, because XP and everything is so fucked up.

That's what you get for outsourcing all this programming to foreign countries, jesus christ, they don't want your computers to work.

Ever heard of AppleScript? I haven't used it myself, but it looks darned simple.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/

javascript is almost doable, but just look at how needlessly complicated even applescript is. Like instead of just typing the command 'display', as you would in basic, you have to type 'set the result to display dialogue', it's counterintuitive. It's like German or something. English and Hebrew are SVO languages, Subject , Verb, Object. They are more logical, intuitive. Other languages have the verb, the subject then the object, that is stupid. they're rewritten the languages more like VSO, all fucked up in my opinion.

Let those foreigners follow us, we invented the damn computers. Use plain fucking english, SVO, SUBJECT, VERB OBJECT.

Another gem gone crapware is Winamp. Used to be short and sweet, now its a monster. All the music has crackles in it.

The new MS Excel is also extremely screwed up.

You can't even copy/paste anymore, because it tries to re-write formulas whenever you do this. You spend so much time going back and trying to find out all the formulas that got fucked up and trying to figure out what they are supposed to be that you are better off just typing out the new info instead of copy/paste. The old versions did not have this problem.

There are numerous other examples that I can't think of right now of this program trying to be 'smart' and guess what you want done and do it, which just screws up the spreadsheet.

AIM Triton is also retarded. Nothing new that is actually useful, just makes the computer lag more when starting up, and many of the features that you actually use are now impossible to find.

There are numerous other examples that I can't think of right now of this program trying to be 'smart' and guess what you want done and do it, which just screws up the spreadsheet.

I had scanner software that was trying to be "smart" where the picture was changed to become "straight". And you couldn't turn that off.

what is really pissing me off, too, is since there's been no government regulation or prosecution, nearly every program installs TSR's on your computer now. TSR means 'terminate and stay resident', which is another way of saying, it's still running, even when you exit it, lurking, doing things, slowing your computer down. AOL is the worst, if i didn't disable half of them I"d have 4 or 5 AOL tsr's running in memory. when you click 'task manager'(cntrl+alt+delete), the TSR's are the 'processes'. About 85% of programs now leave processes running after you close them out, or worse, run them at start up. Really pushy and annoying shit. Plus, on a high speed connection they can be uploading megabytes of info on what you're doing and you'd never have a clue.

I have no idea why people insist on using Micro$oft windows when they could download Linux off the internet free of charge or even better yet throw their PC’s in the garbage and buy a Mac.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

I have no idea why people insist on using Micro$oft windows when they could download Linux off the internet free of charge or even better yet throw their PC’s in the garbage and buy a Mac.

Mac Users all think they're some kind of trendy, sporty, superior geeky whatever. Or maybe that's just computer users in general. I've used Macs, don't really see a big difference, IBM's are better.

this constant harassment for updates is outta line. I see processes running, slogging down my computer on a daily basis under the ruse of 'updates'. Jesus christ, how often do all my programs need to be checked for updates? My hard drive is grinding for 20 minutes, like it does when i'm downloading at one meg per second on the file sharing software, these fucking programs could be uploading my entire harddrive for all I know.

I have no idea why people insist on using Micro$oft windows when they could download Linux off the internet free of charge or even better yet throw their PC’s in the garbage and buy a Mac.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/

The new Macs will allow you to run OS X, Windows, and Linux on the same machine, since they are now Intel based. That's pretty cool.

Also, Microsoft Virtual PC is now free:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx
It allows you to run other operating sytems on top of Windows, such as older versions of of Windows or even Linux. I have used it for Knoppix running on Windows 2000. So you can keep your Windows system and use Linux at the same time.

The fucking Media Player for Windows XP pisses me off royally. With 98, you could open any number of the players and watch different clips at the same time; not with the New Improved XP, oh no.

Goddam Gates....