Screen and Shout

Shortly after I received my new work laptop, I became extremely frustrated with Microsoft OneDrive, which wanted me to save everything to the cloud. It seemed impossible to save any documents to the hard drive. After a few hours of searching for solutions, I uninstalled OneDrive, which many an internet commentator strongly warned against. I felt I had to do something, and it did somewhat solve the problem: now I can save and open files on my computer (even though I still must click through four pointless windows to do so). Without the storage software, though, things are very, very wonky. Microsoft Word crashes constantly, and it opens a slew of random documents when it restarts. Of course, it’s not just Microsoft. Every time I open a PDF, Adobe tells me it looks like a long document, so do I want its AI to summarize it for me? As someone who makes his living reading and writing, I couldn’t imagine a more insulting question for my computer to ask me.

Thankfully...