Posting this from XP on my ThinkPad T42 hehe

I'm kinda surprised how decent a 1.7GHz Pentium M can hold up for web browsing these days (using the Mypal browser), even Discord can run on this thing even if it kinda chugs (but hey, at least it runs better than my Atom netbook, which just freezes)



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Originally posted by ひりゅう

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Even the File History has been mostly neutered. It will only back up the profile folders. Nothing else. So if you really want to use that to backup you will have to copy folders to your profile because it will not be configurable otherwise

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Oh my god really?? I used to use File History to back up files on my PC (thankfully I've switched away since though), and I had manually added a lot of folders to it so that it would actually be useful

Originally posted by Kaj

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i've found that StartAllBack is a godsend for making 11 function more like the past 25 years of windows, at least in terms of the shell anyway. it is a one-time payment of $5 after 30 days, though, but the trial seems easy to reset

i'll likely be sticking with windows 10 until 2025 or later since i figure 11 will be more stable by then, but i don't plan on using LTSC since i actually use the microsoft store

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Oh this seems pretty handy, thanks for linking it! If I'm ever forced to use 11, this will be very useful to make it actually feel usable again

Not that I plan on switching any time soon though, I even specifically have the TPM turned off in my PC so that I'm unable to upgrade to it lmao, I also probably won't use LTSC myself, not because of the Microsoft Store but because driver support is overall worse

Though honestly, I think I'd sooner make the full switch to Linux than upgrade to Windows 11 hehe,

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It might not be strictly speaking the cheapest option that can run a web browser, but honestly I think a great option for a cheap internet system these days would be a used Chromebook from a few years ago and installing Linux, I just got this used ThinkPad Chromebook 11e for very cheap on eBay and despite it having a somewhat old Celeron, it's plenty capable of modern web browsing on my Arch Linux install, even with somewhat heavy stuff like Discord (why is Discord so heavy though wtf)

It makes that Acer netbook I posted about a while ago in this thread look like a joke, that thing can't handle the modern web at all (Discord literally freezes it), and a Chromebook like this can often be had for cheaper too, probably thanks to schools offloading them in large numbers

You probably don't have to install Linux on one of these of course, but Chrome OS often no longer gets updates on these Chromebooks anymore because of their age (even though they still work fine...), and of course it's better if you wanna do anything that isn't just running Chrome, like if you use Firefox like me, or wanna use something like LibreOffice offline instead of Google Docs



Oh yeah, it can also be a bit annoying that a number of these Chromebooks only have 16GB of storage built-in, but most Linux distros don't fill up that much anyway (*cough* unlike Windows *cough*), and also btrfs filesystem compression is very handy on these, it saves quite a bit of space if you can get it set up

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Honestly (though I might be biased because I'm an Arch user hehe), at this point I feel like Windows is the more of a pain in the ass to troubleshoot and fix than Linux if anything goes wrong, which seems a lot more common these days than it did back in the Win7 era or so, Windows has more GUIs for administration but not only are these often very confusing especially because of their age compared to the rest of the system, but it's also not that much better if you need an in-depth guide to fix a problem anyway, which is also annoying on Windows because you often don't even know what to look up (at least on Linux there's usually helpful error messages to look up)

Ironically, I feel like a decent simple distro like Mint is better for your average computer-illiterate user than Windows is at this point, like it's much more suited as a "grandma" OS for the people who just need to browse the web and maybe do basic office tasks, which seems supported by some anecdotes I've seen from people who installed it on their parent's/grandparent's PC and had it work better. It also helps that it runs a lot better, which often saves people from what would otherwise be a required hardware upgrade when their PCs get slow

I don't know much about the needs of businesses when it comes to PCs, but for your average person's home PC, I think Linux has become a very viable option, especially because there often isn't any hassle with installing drivers, since you still have to do that manually on a fresh Windows install (because Windows Update usually hurts more than helps when it comes to auto-installing drivers from what I can tell)

Windows has gotten really crappy and unreliable in recent years, especially thanks to Win10 moving to a Software as a Service model and gutting the QA team in favor of volunteer "Insiders", I feel like its issues are a big reason why stuff like Chrome OS has been overshadowing it in so many spaces lately, because most people just want an OS that "just works"

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I like that forum posts and threads are flexible enough that you can make both really short and really long posts and have a place for them, unlike on social media where you can basically only make tiny quips that everyone will forget about a few seconds after they read it

I think I've had a tendency to make long posts lately, hope nobody minds hehe,

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Originally posted by ひりゅう

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(snip image)
I'll just count whatever I have left at this point.

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On the bright side, at least the oceans aren't dead yet, so at least it's not that bad yet lol

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Originally posted by ひりゅう

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It's a lost art. Most things anymore are 280char from Twitter that you're basically expected to explain something that you're wanting to discuss like it was a five-second sound bite.

Ironic that posting like that is now the new norm when it used to be that spammy attitudes like that could get you banned from social places. Now it just tends to get you more followers.

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Right? I think what especially bothers me even more is that, with the popularity of Discord replacing bigger sites like forums instead of just stuff like IRC, there's becoming almost no place on the internet for longer-form content for communities, everything is being watered down to real-time, short-form messages where nobody can keep up with the scrolling feed and nobody cares to, and where you can't try to talk about anything serious without being constantly interrupted by random people posting memes

...Sometimes I just really don't like the internet hehe,

I'm glad this place is a nice lil safe haven away from it all

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Been messing around with Win11 in a VM so that I could try out StartAllBack, it really does make such a huge difference, I can actually sort of tolerate using it now Honestly, with how it brings back the Win7 start menu and Explorer command bar, I think it's making me enjoy the UI more than 10's

I do appreciate the new consistency to the UI, it's something that Windows 10 has gotten really bad at, especially with all of its years of updates... there's still plenty of things I hate about it, but having StartAllBack is making me wonder if I really should upgrade after all

...Though honestly, if I do, I'm tempted to try a fresh install? I really don't want to go through that process, but it's been so long since I last installed Windows that there's so much crap I'd like to wipe away by starting fresh, one of the most major things being how my user folder still uses my deadname and can't be changed... I wish it was as easy as on Linux though, on there you can just move your entire home folder over to a clean install and get back a large chunk of your configs and data, but it's much more of a pain on Windows, especially because of the Registry

Though at the same time, I kinda feel like, if I'm doing a fresh install anyway, I should just use that as an excuse to switch my main PC to Linux? But since it's my only PC running (current) Windows anymore, I do kinda need to keep it on there for various apps and games that don't run in Wine/Proton or are just too inconvenient in there, and dual-booting is a tricky situation that I'm unsure if I have the space for unless I pick up yet another SSD (not to mention how much Windows likes to screw with dual-boot setups after updates)

I'm still really not a fan of how Windows is basically spyware at this point though, and I don't currently know what tools are best for reducing that on Win11, so I won't upgrade in general until I can figure that out anyway

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Picked up two ThinkPads on eBay, been messing around with them a lot lately, wrote a decently long blog post about them on my website if you're interested


(click to view full size)

I enjoy them a lot, especially the T42

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Originally posted by ひりゅう

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It was an A22m and a few T61p's. So not quite.

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Oh those are pretty awesome too! I'd love to see them if you have any pics

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Oh those are really cool, thanks for sharing

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Yeah, I don't really get it either

The convenience of cloud storage is a nice draw, but it's not much different than uploading a .doc to your Google Drive, the rest of the convenience just comes down to vertical integration, though admittedly for schools there's also the ease of control and administration

The other main benefit is being able to use it on devices that have a web browser but no offline office suite, like Chromebooks... but that's only a problem because these devices are overly locked down for no good reason. As I mentioned in another thread, I've installed Linux on a Chromebook, and that thing runs LibreOffice great, probably better than Google Docs would honestly (though I haven't tested it, I spent as little time with ChromeOS on there as possible hehe,)

I used to use Google Docs a lot years ago, but these days I much prefer offline software, hell I've been using Word 2003 a lot lately and that runs great on anything lol, office software hasn't gotten that much better in the past two decades despite the ballooning performance requirements

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Originally posted by rokken

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A lot of the alleged uselessness of older PCs online is manufactured, and some percentage more is just poorly optimized web pages and libraries.

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Definitely gotta agree there, I've been using this T42 for web browsing a lot lately using Mypal and it makes it pretty clear that most of the problem with using older PCs online is because of sites being way more intense than they have any right to, which unfortunately includes a lot of sites I use, mainly social media

Like, assuming you're not actively in a call, Discord is basically just a fancy chat app with more images, so why does it run so painfully slow?? There's a third-party native app called Ripcord that runs great on anything including an Atom netbook I have that can't even handle the web version, but it only runs on 64-bit Windows 7 (and Linux) and higher so it's not an option on my T42 running XP, which is a shame because I rely on it a lot and if I could use Discord on here (at least without slowing down everything else) it'd mean I could just entirely put away my more modern devices when using this thing

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Originally posted by Kaj

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did you guys know that a lot of teenagers these days only know chromebooks and use google slides as the most advanced image editor they can find

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It really makes me sad how many people these days are growing up with practically zero computer literacy thanks to smartphones and Chromebooks and the like, things are so abstracted these days so that the biggest companies can keep you locked into their cloud services and walled gardens, I really don't like that

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Been thinking a lot tonight about how I kinda really don't like smartphones and their UIs much lately

...A bit weird to be thinking that since most of my UI design skill is pretty specialized around mobile app design (I was always something of a Material Design diehard), but there's a lot I don't like about modern smartphones, especially with how I've been spending so much time on an old PC lately and giving a lot of thought to things that older software used to do right that you don't get these days

I also feel like we kinda lost something when everything moved to capacitive touchscreens, UI density has to inherently be pretty low (even as our phones keep getting bigger and bigger) to account for how big and imprecise our fingers are compared to a stylus, so while really basic tasks are mostly okay to an extent, anything more in-depth (even just something like typing notes) can be a real pain in the ass

I think at some point I'd like to try making a design mockup of my idea of what a Windows Mobile-inspired mobile OS targeting stylus input could be like, mixing together UI concepts I like from pretty much every mobile OS I know and maybe trying to work in desktop UI elements, I really want to design a concept that really shouts "pocket PC" that strikes a good balance between functionality and intuitive design without overly abstracting things like modern smartphones

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Been using a fresh install of Windows 11 for the past few days, thanks to StartAllBack I haven't been hating it as much as I was expecting, StartAllBack actually makes it usable and adds back some of the UI features from 7 that I really like as well as fixing the UI stuff that Win11 changed for the worse (btw thanks Kaj for recommending it, I really appreciate that!)

So now it's basically just a more consistent-looking Windows 10 but with a new style and some Win7 elements, I've really grown to hate 10's horrible inconsistency as a UI nerd so it's nice that 11 actually makes things more consistent and that StartAllBack blends in so well with the OS's style

It sure is the most "nothing" Windows version yet though, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either I guess, and it makes sense since it literally wasn't going to be a new OS, they just took an upcoming Windows 10 update and slapped on the redesigned UI from the cancelled Windows 10X that they were working on

I'm planning on picking up an extra SATA SSD to put in my PC though that I can have a separate Arch Linux on, since I'm much more at home with Arch than with any other OS, I still need Windows for a variety of things but I'm a huge Arch fan at this point and honestly most of what I do on my PC can be done just fine on Linux at this point aside from specific games and some esoteric software, but even for gaming there's plenty that runs fine on Linux these days

I do have to admit I'm pretty biased though, I'm definitely a power user when it comes to this sort of stuff and I even run Arch on my website's server, so I have a lot of experience with it even though I've only been using it for around half a year, and I'm someone who generally enjoys working on computers as a hobby project in itself so I don't mind tinkering around a bunch with an OS

...Though I'm like that with Windows too, and honestly with Windows I feel like I can't get it to a usable state without tinkering with something, whereas with something like Manjaro KDE I'm basically good to go the moment it's installed after changing the theme and moving some panel elements around a little (but even then, that's just because I'm a UI nerd, most people would be fine with the defaults)

And hell, when I installed Windows 11 on here, I still had to deal with the "helpful" Windows Update auto-installing various drivers just to leave me with half-broken and outdated drivers as well as missing some things, meanwhile I still just find that any good Linux distro requires no additional driver setup on any of my systems

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Originally posted by rokken

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Three words: Sunbeam Radiant Control.

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YES, god I need to get one of those eventually, they're just so neat and I'd love to have one

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Cute!! Also, stripey shirts are so good hehe

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We used to have a handed-down 486 all-in-one (I miss that CRT) that I think a coworker of my mom gave us like 20 years ago when I was a little kid, we also had a big book about learning MS-DOS, so even though it was very much past its time I still ended up learning a lot about it and getting a lot of appreciation for the era and some of its games

It's sadly been dead for years, I finally opened it up recently, turns out a barrel capacitor leaked all over the board, and it was like that long enough to be pretty toast (it was probably like that for the better part of a decade) and had even corroded the metal at the back of the case, so we just ended up getting rid of it since it very much would've been beyond my repair ability... I'm really hoping my parents didn't throw away the good Sound Blaster I took out of it though, I really wanted to keep that in case I ever get another system to replace it

I miss that computer a lot, it was very fun to mess with, there's something about old DOS machines that I feel like you don't get when using an emulator



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