Crazy computer problems

I'm suffering from some very annoying computer problems.  I suppose this is what happens when you hang onto computers past their normal lifespan -- 3 or so years now!  Actually, I still have an ancient computer (2006 or so!), which I only haul out every once in a while.  It is set up for only two things -- to read Region 2 DVDs (at one point I had amassed quite a few of these from Amazon.co.uk) and to record music from a turn table.  I must admit that I haven't used it in a long time, and I do have three LPs to convert, so I probably should dust it off, set it up and cross my fingers!

But my main computer is from 2013-4.  It got so annoying with the automatic updates messing around with my remaining hard drive space (which I do keep far too low) that I set it up so I am notified but have to accept the updates.  I then realized that Defender updates its anti-virus definitions basically every 30 hours, so it is continually updating.  I'll probably give up and switch back to automatic updates for Defender at least.  The world has definitely changed from when anti-virus updates were more or less a weekly thing.

Nonetheless, it is extremely annoying to watch as the 1-2 GB of hard drive space I painstakingly freed up gets eaten up by some unknown process, and I have to restart the machine.  This is basically a daily process* in and of itself.  It takes almost as much time to deal with this as if I actually had a computer virus, aside from the fact that the computer is just very slow and can't really handle multiple processes.

A slightly less serious problem from a security perspective, but still unbelievably annoying, is that the various updates to Firefox or Chrome throw other applications out of whack.  For some reason, Hoopla will not play at all any more.  I suspect this means I have to completely update Firefox and cross my fingers.  However, I had intentionally frozen Firefox to an old version, since it was the last version that would support this cool ePub reader I used.  I suppose I have to lose this feature and upgrade Firefox (and then move to a stand-alone non-browser based reader), but I am still so annoyed that Firefox doesn't support the classic ePub reader any longer (the new version is quite terrible in fact).   It's these annoying incompatibilities that make people wonder why upgrades almost always seem to be a step backwards in terms of just using the programs that you already know and are used to.  Certainly there are very few upgrades that I can recall actually making my computing experience better.  I realize these are all first world problems, but, given the amount of time I spend on computers, it does impact my life on a daily basis.  Sigh...


* And don't get me started on how often Java and Adobe Flash want to be updated!  Fortunately more and more players have moved away from Flash, but there are still some streaming sites that require it.