This sounds very much like an ad for grok than a report of any actual incident.

I agree on trying the live boot first. I played around with the live boot for a week, and ended up installing mint as dual boot when I got frustrated about not being able to save files, save settings etc. I was barely using Windows at that point.

MS Office Picture manager? I have to use 2-3 photo editing tools to do the same job now. Also, powerpoint from MS office 2007.