How does one boot from the recovery partition, some special key combination I assume? I can never remember the boot up key combinations except for booting from CD, which is why I went that route.
In the end I managed to track down the main cause of grief with Yosemite, and so I don't feel any need to install the 10.10.4 upgrade at the moment. By all accounts, the bug that was causing my problems hasn't been fixed in 10.10.4 anyway.
Since installing Yosemite, everything on my Macbook was running very slowly, and a lot of things were crashing. I also noticed that something seemed to be hogging a lot of CPU time, because within a few minutes after booting the computer, the CPU fan would start running at top speed, and the computer case was getting so hot you could feel the heat radiating off it. So, I ran Activity Monitor and found that it was Folder Actions Dispatcher that was hogging the CPU. That led me to this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6466590?start=0&tstart=0Since I'm not currently using any folder actions, I just disabled it, and things are back to normal, speedwise.
There are still a number of useless so-called "features" that I'm slowly working my way through, and getting turned off, such as the automatic spelling miscorrector, the backwards scrolling, and the thing that's constantly popping annoying messages up on the screen. I'm still puzzled why the dictionary dashboard app defaults to Japanese. Its menu choices are Japanese, Russian, and Japanese<>English, but no English. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that Yosemite was more of an elaborate April Fools gag, than an operating system. It reminds me of the time that one of my co-workers sabotaged another co-worker's computer by changing all of the control panel settings.
The whole premise behind Yosemite appears to be to turn a Mac computer into an iPad. I don't understand why anyone would want to dumb down their computer to that extent. There are a number of features that were in 10.6.8, and not in 10.10.x that I miss.
As for switching to a Windows machine, that was of course an idle threat made before I had cooled down. Every few years, I say to myself, "Hey, MS has had decades to copy the features of the Mac. They must have figured it out by now." And then I actually try to use one, and I find that they still haven't even managed to get copy and paste to work between applications.
