XP was kind of a F up for MS, they gave us a really decent OS that raised our expectations. People ran that for almost 2 decades because no one wanted the new OS’s MS was putting out like ME and Vista. Win 8 was out when XP support fully ended and many people chose to go with the older Win 7 because it was less intrusive and more like a PC OS instead of trying to become like a Apple/phone/tablet interface. XP>Win 7>Win 10>Win 11 imo and all the unmentioned weren’t worth upgrading for, but I don’t use my phone for the internet and I’ve been using a PC for over 40 years. We like what’s familiar and we can use without having to think too much about the tool used to achieve what we’re doing. I have Win 11 on a laptop and I have to jump through a lot more hoops to control my desktop, who can pull my info, what can install, what can run in the background. And every update I have to do it again because they add shit back in again along with new stuff I don’t want or need. Win 10 professional at least minimized how often they’d add new stuff or change my existing settings. Win 11 Pro doesn’t seem nearly as friendly.

I recently added a printer to my PC. Having to launch that antique spooler window from like Windows 3.1 to print is a bit hilarious

Odd. I’m able to listen to music there still

Not all of my Ad On’s are for YT, but yes I run a JS blocker and also block video’s and sound on all sites except YT

I run uOrigin, flashblock, JS disabled, No Overlays, and DDG’s privacy ad on’s and I have no problems with YT

I have some weird rabbit hole ideas about Reddit doing what it did and when. I think all public spaces are being restricted if it can’t be controlled as wanted by the powers that be, Reddit was outside that power and WB may be the biggest example and how stocks were played out there did not follow the designed path which was disliked by those who could restrict or stop it. I resisted leaving Reddit because I almost felt like it was designed to get us to leave the public space. But I was really spending too much time there and I feel a lot better by not arguing about issues instead of discussing them.

I actually do have an MSI laptop. I forgot I had read so many negative reviews of the Asus that I went the other direction. After posting that I got on my laptop and realized my mistake and remembered the negative reviews about them

For desktop motherboards I’ve usually gone MSI but my gaming laptop is an Asus and is a little over a year old. It’s worked perfect since I got it and I’ve had zero problems with it. The Nvidia GPU and laptop fans sure do sing when I’m playing games though

I got my first notification on my Win10 Pro box today about support ending too

The spell options and classes in Palladium, Rolemaster and Swords and Sorcery had a lot more flexibility. For the most part any class can learn some magic. For fighters it’s more observation or stealth type stuff unless it’s barbarian type classes that may get more bard type skills and there are like 5 different types of thieves/rogues/burglars, etc. like most other classes. When I ran a group we used a lot of different rule books. Some offered better detail for hit location and armor by location, some had better control of weapon type and how it’s used like bash, pierce, slash, and as noted above, the magic in other rules had so much flexibility. I gave my players a lot of options as to how they built their character and having 4 or 5 rules books of different skills, classes, races, etc really opened up variety. An accountant may be a really good burglar with attention to detail and noticing patterns

Those pop up pages that prevent you from seeing the underlying page. It doesn’t happen as often anymore but it’s nice to have a way to remove them

So it’s like going to the hospital. Arghh

I’m an old fart but we learned a lot of languages in school from simple Basic to Cobol, to RPG for corporate reporting, then Pascal and Fortran for engineering, and finally C for the future. And then of course I ended up hired and placed on a DB team to write SQL for years after being hired as a C programmer. But I do feel my years in Liberal Arts majors helped me in many ways through my career and gave me a lot of flexibility to keep finding a niche as the corporate entity changed goals and methods. I trained engineering sw for about half my career and couldn’t have done that without my non computer education

I also run disabling addons for java script and flash as well as an overlay remover in Firefox