Your post quotes mine. But, it appears before my post! This is a time paradox! Call Galifrey immediately!
Also,
A great CD filled with Windows games came with a compute my Dad bought in 1993 or so. Besides shareware and freeware, there were home versions of popular video games. Then, somehow I lost the CD. I spent roughly 15 years searching my apartment for it and mourning its loss. Then, a friend found it at his place. He apologized and returned the unharmed CD. It was great to play all those games again. Home CD burners had become available. I quickly made several copies. It was bliss.
Then, Windows upgraded again and now none of the games will work. Possibly a friend could set up a partition on my hard drive and install the necessary version of Windows. Possibly I could do it myself with a little help. I am still angry that it is necessary.
With Windows 11, so many of the classic games are freely available.
With ads.
Of course, you can pay to suppress the ads. I have not looked into this, because I refuse, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s a monthly subscription fee forever, because that seems to be the model now: you can never buy anything, but must rent it and not be able to control it. Sigh.
As of January tenth, they will no longer accept online payments. They are transitioning to a new software. You must now pay by personal chec. The message says that the check must be made out to the correct payee, but does not say who that is. It does not say if they mean only payments made this month or if they mean all payments from now on.
Of course, I paid my rent (through the management web site) on the first. Still, I am less than happy with their general incompetence.
The metal trash can my beloved found on Amazon arrived. It is now in my kitchen. If not completely rodent proof, it will still be much harder for them to get into.
ParallelLines sent me a web cam, which also arrived today. Now that there is no more risk of fire or explosion, I plan to keep it pointed at the kitchen to monitor vermin activity.
It is, but it depends on what you’re migrating to and from. For me the transition from Windows XP to Windows 7 was exceptionally painful, in large part because I had been using XP for so long and had so many entrenched applications that turned out not to be compatible with Win 7. The process was greatly eased by having a “sandbox” laptop in which I spent months trying out different things until I finally had a satisfactory suite of applications ready to go on Win 7.
I expect the new Win 11 laptop to serve the same purpose – a migration platform and testbed, as well as immediately allowing me to file my 2024 tax return in the usual way. Meanwhile, I will continue using my wonderful Optiplex system with Windows 7 for most activities as usual. Man, I love that computer. Among its many fine attributes is that the Intel Core i7 CPU, which also contains the graphics processor, is cooled via an enormous but slow-moving fan, so that the thing is so quiet you literally cannot tell that it’s on, even though it’s sitting right next to me at desktop height.
I haven’t opened the box yet. Partly because I’m just savouring it like Christmas morning, and partly because I know that it will be the beginning of months of challenges and non-working bullshit. So glad that no matter what happens, I have my lovely reliable desktop computer here in front of me, running good ol’ Windows 7!
No, it can’t. Because this now-wonderful Dell Optiplex that I love so much came pre-jinxed. Right off the bat, it failed to recognize the Dell Ultrasharp monitor and could not be coaxed into supporting the native high resolution. The problem turned out to be the cable, which oddly had worked just fine with the old computer. Then I had issues with drivers and Microsoft updates and lots of other bullshit. It was weeks before I had a stable, usable system.
This is why I’m looking at the still-unopened box containing my new computer with a mixture of anticipation and dread, and consuming an early martini.
If you are proficient enough, and have Windows 10, if you do a google search, there’s one simple registry change that will let you update any computer to Windows 11. I’ve used it multiple times.
My PC went tits to the topside. Upon booting it states it can’t find the HD even though both drives come up. It also will not in any way even think about connecting to the intertubez. It’s not like I don’t have a new one already sitting here in the box, just haven’t had the time to do the necessary to convert over. Just to be sure I’m copying everything over to the backup drive, not just the deltas & trying to go thru & figure out what downloaded software is on the machine so I can setup the new one 'zactly like the existing one. Pain in the tuccas, I tells ya!
Because of this, & being sick, I haven’t done anything productively with said computer in days. I really need to go thru pix that I took & clean out the cards in the camera as I have a shoot next week, & I kinda wanted to get some winter/snow pix tomorrow, but that would pretty much be an all day thing, & adding more pix that I need to get thru instead of reducing the backlog.
Yeah, when you’re sick you are fighting like crazy on the inside. Even when it looks like nothing is being done, your energy is being used up invisibly. Doing stuff externally, especially stuff that adds stress, is just using up energy you need to get better.
I was going to put this in the workplace rants thread, but I never miss a chance to share my tale of Windows woe.
As briefly as possible: the machine that would turn out to be my final PC shipped with Windows 8, which I immediately upgraded to 8.1. Not a bad OS, in my opinion; I really enjoyed the themes for the Start menu. (I did nearly lose all of my files since Windows Recovery on 8/8.1 couldn’t read Windows Recovery files created in Windows 7…) Then came the upgrade to Windows 10. Again, not bad. I did notice a tendency for the Start button to stop working after updates, but this was solved with a simple restart…until one day, it just didn’t work. Nothing in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article describing my exact issue - a database corruption resulting from a recent update - would work. I spent two weeks working from the command line trying to fix that damned computer. When I realized I would have to reinstall Windows, I drove to the Apple store and came home with an iMac. The PC is now a dual-boot system with Ubuntu on one hard drive and Windows 10 on the other.
Of course, I have no choice in the PC I use at work. It’s a godforsaken Dell Optiplex running Windows 11 that was working fine until last week, when a BIOS update apparently attempted installation at the wrong time. I came into work Monday morning to giant blue screens demanding my BitLocker code. WTF. Corporate IT managed to locate my code, but apparently I selected the wrong volume for startup (there were only two, both labeled “Windows 11” with no timestamps), because the damn thing just doesn’t work right. It takes nearly an hour to boot, icons randomly disappear from the taskbar, desktop themes no longer work, Teams may or may not be installed (it’s listed in the Start menu but can’t be launched), and the whole system seems to grind to a halt when using virtual desktops. I lost pretty much all of Monday dealing with this; I really don’t have time to call IT again.
If you are Canuckistani (as I am) you can use WealthSimple for Tax Prep, they’re on a pay what you want (yes, even $0) system as of last year and they support efile and you can go do it all through your browser.
Thanks for the suggestion. The software I’ve been using for many years is StudioTax. As I mentioned earlier, it’s an Ottawa-based company that gets most of its revenues from tax consulting services and used to provide its tax software free for personal filings. Now they charge a nominal fee, but it’s waived if your taxable income is below a certain threshold.
Anyway, digging deep into my motivations, I think I was just looking for an excuse to buy a new toy laptop! Plus the fact that the transition to Windows 11 and onwards is, unfortunately, inevitable. The other issue motivating all this is that even browser-based filing will eventually cease because major browsers are no longer being supported on old versions of Windows.
I used to use StudioTax meself until they went to pay-to-play (I make too much to have the fees waived) and I fundamentally dislike paying to figure out my taxes (did it with pen and paper for many years as well). I’ll pay for the WealthSimple because of the audit support that comes with punting a few bucks their way, and they already have some of my taxable accounts (and the accompanying tax forms) and can import the various slips from other income providers via the CRA to speed up the data entry.
Ugh, our power keeps going off and on, for an hour or so at a time. The electrical infrastructure is still pretty fragile after the hurricane, and this ice storm has done everything no good at all. I can’t be mad at the power co, they’re doing the best that they can, but I just want either cold/dark/generator noise or bright, warm(ing), and HVAC noise. We’ve been bouncing between the two for 3 hours.
We’re currently without power, so I think
I’m going to finish my soup (that I pulled out of the nuke just before we went dark again) and just go to bed.
Hrmpf.