No Java

My laptop computer is getting on in years and I think the memory upgrade I got was faulty because sometimes the computer will just die, usually when it is asleep. It starts back up again, but that can’t be good. The other day something happened where if I tried to open a document in Excel, the program would stop working and then quit. I tried reinstalling Microsoft Office to get rid of the problem and I think it was still doing it. I had recently installed a Java update, and while it seemed highly unlikely that would be the problem, I wanted to roll back that update. I think I did a Windows restore to an earlier date and that actually solved the problem. But Java had me worried. And there are multiple versions of Java installed, plus it is always updating, and if you do the update wrong then it installs a toolbar in your browser. I know Java was a big deal at one time, but I’m not sure a lot of websites use it anymore. We have some Oracle web apps at work that use it, but I couldn’t think of any sites at home, so I looked around on the web to see if I really needed Java. One site said that most computer users didn’t need it. So that was enough for me. I uninstalled the 4 or 5 different Java flavors that had been installed over the years (Microsoft does the same kind of thing with its .NET framework which has multiple versions and one of them went bad, preventing me from installing two .NET updates, but then reminding me every day to install the updates, which would fail again; solution: uninstall and reinstall all the different .NET versions).

It has been about a week and so far no problems.