JustARegularNerd

Oh, would've been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters' soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn't handle it.

It would be some time before I was gifted an Acer Aspire with dedicated graphics and a busted screen that I could play 1NSANE again

Colobot - don't think it was "shareware" but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.

Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)

I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.

I still have mine as a secondary work phone. Love the size and format of it in general, although I think I'd still prefer a phone slightly bigger (~10%) and with a higher resolution (1080p?) display, mainly for media consumption.

Outside of that, I second the slow and buggy comment (although in my experience this has been mostly with Microsoft Teams, which is a buggy mess regardless)

Been a moderate user of Excel but started a new budget in LibreOffice Calc recently and so far it seems 1:1, including using commands like VLOOKUP and SUMIF

There is still not a neat replacement for wmic in PowerShell. If I want to do the equivalent of wmic product where name="some shitware" call uninstall it looks like this:

$instance = Get-CimInstance win32_process -Filter "Name = 'powershell_ise.exe'" $instance | Invoke-CimMethod -MethodName 'Terminate'

Like how the hell is that easier to understand Microsoft? Everything else in PowerShell follows a general pattern of Upper Camelcase.

That's just one instance of what I've found working with pwsh at work that leaves me thinking wtf

Windows 8 was actually a big cleanup over 7. We got a much improved task manager, Explorer got a ribbon, copy operations now showed a graph, and performance was very similar to Win7. It was just that Microsoft overshadowed these improvements with the UI disaster and telemetry.

Am I safe in guessing Queensland?

anything decent with an RJ-45 port

Not sure if the current generation still has it, but work issued us techs with ThinkPad L14 Gen 3 laptops and I've been happy with it as a work device. It has an RJ-45 (was considered a requirement when they procured the laptops for techs) and mine has a Ryzen 5 Pro 5675U. Only complaints I would have for it is soldered USB-C connectors (which double as the only power source for the machine) and keyboard isn't as nice as my personal T480 although definitely still fine.

I would caution against the 12th gen Intel i7 ThinkPads, we've had multiple internally have overheating issues or stuck in connected standby. My colleague wishes he never replaced his original work issue (same as mine).

I love how that video has aged even better by the fact the guy's using Windows 8

"disable AI" checkbox

They're not that nice, if they did it, it would just be "Reduce AI experiences"

I meant it in the sense of using an obscure operating system to be less likely to be targeted by a threat actor.

Or to be more general, using obscure software for increased security, over actually correctly configuring and using secure software.

Viruses already exist for Linux and have for a long time. They are less prevalent than Windows but this obviously shouldn't be the primary defense strategy for your device.

...security by obscurity? Guess when Linux finally explodes in popularity, you'll see me over on FreeBSD instead