Some Notes on the Machines

Try it. https://www.betterbird.eu/. The Thunderbird team has been ignoring huge quantities of bugs and usability issues for decades. They kicked out a profoundly gifted developer several years ago, who has been leading Betterbird, a careful “soft fork” of Thunderbird, which maintains all helpful interoperability while fixing many, many bugs. Betterbird is lighter and faster, it does CardDav address books natively to Gmail and other providers, it has a far better HTML email composer, and much, more more!

This works well as of this writing. I imagine the URL will change in the future.

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = "tls12, tls11, tls"
md -Path $env:temp\edgeinstall -erroraction SilentlyContinue | Out-Null
$Download = join-path $env:temp\edgeinstall MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi
Invoke-WebRequest 'https://msedge.sf.dl.delivery.mp.microsoft.com/filestreamingservice/files/a2662b5b-97d0-4312-8946-598355851b3b/MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi'  -OutFile $Download
Start-Process "$Download" -ArgumentList "/quiet"

Lots and lots of interesting apps can be installed easily, and across distros, with Snapcraft:

snapcraft.io/store

Recently a Microsoft page on the subject went missing, and the replacement doesn’t seem to work in any browser. Here’s a regularly updated one from ZDNet with just Windows and Office:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-will-microsoft-pull-the-plug-on-your-version-of-windows-or-office/

This one is very good:
http://lucidchart.com

This page appears a bit outdated, but it should still work:

https://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

Looking rather interesting so far; it is very multiplatform:

http://www.qupzilla.com

Here’s Flash Player:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

and here’s Reader:

http://get.adobe.com/reader/enterprise/

Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213904

that this is due to accumulating cell format IDs over time, when Excel documents have been used and updated over and over again. Microsoft says that this can be prevented in new Excel files by keeping Excel up to date, but does not give an automatic solution this way. Instead, when the problem is seen, we have to run a utility on the Excel file throwing the error. I found a very small binary in the SkyDrive account referred-to in the article above, called XLCleaner; this works quite well. I did not choose any of the checkboxes in my testing, they look like they might alter spreadsheet contents, and they did not appear to be necessary.