beginner on minesweeper

The problem I have with Minesweeper is that there's too narrow a window between, on the one hand, so few mines that you don't get to figure out anything clever, and on the other hand so many mines that most games are provably impossible (i.e. reduced to guesswork). When I played the RiscOS version, I tended to use about 20%-25% mines, which IIRC is more than the hardest level in Windows Minesweeper.

Automated solution of Minesweeper is easy, if computationally intensive, if attacked by brute force: enumerate all combinations of mine/blank along the frontier. The RiscOS one did this (if you held down various magic keys) and coloured the squares black for definitely-mine, white for definitely-blank, and shades of grey proportional to the likelihood if several mine-blank combinations fulfilled the boundary conditions.

I spent hours on KDE Sokoban, though. And I must give FX-Repton a try someday...

Peter