Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 4th, 2022

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  • Millennium Edition would have done more damage, tbh. Vista was fine if you already had next-gen hardware; the issue was people upgrading to it from XP on older machines that didn’t have ballsy video acceleration capabilities* that could render the desktop transparency effects that were presumably meant to stress-test your power supply. …It also helped to disable some of the goofy-ass “features” that they bundled in, but yeah, it was basically just 7 with an even smaller kernel footprint. Desktop widgets sounded like a good idea at the time; too bad the reality was like “we described RainMeter to a literal Neanderthal who had never even seen a computer, let alone a GUI, and this is what they came up with.”

    (*Edit: or a 64-bit system that could break the 4 GB RAM addressing barrier; people love to forget that Win 7 ran like ass on 2-4 GB, and Vista was the same code)

    Windows ME, on the other hand, would just randomly corrupt system files in the name of disk “optimization” because they tried to shoehorn something similar to NTFS auto-defrag into FAT32 and half-assed the journaling implementation, so occasionally it would try to physically relocate something important (e.g., kernel32.dll or a hardware driver), fail, and your next reboot would take you into the Cool Zone™️.






  • Ten jobs plus one like 6-week temp gig over the course of 25 years or so. That includes two sales associate jobs at different Radio Shacks, the teenage grocery bagging gig that I got fired from after dismembering and trying to melt plastic army men in the breakroom, and an extremely shady electronics salvage/reclamation job that I am pretty sure was a front for a coke smuggler, but said front looked legit enough that the Department of Defense contracted us as a vendor for some workstation PCs at one point.

    Edit: At the aforementioned electronics salvage place, I did score a pair of early 1970’s Fender tube amps for like $20 out of the warehouse where we were storing all of the old monochrome CRT terminal monitors awaiting teardown. A Princeton Reverb and a Bassman combo; both silverface-era, and both with varying degrees of bird shit on them. The Bassman never did work right, so I wound up selling it to a friend in college. I just finally did a full refurb and a couple of mods on the Princeton about 12 years ago. (I replaced the ground select switch with a standby toggle, and I replaced the AC plug on the chassis with a pair of bias test points, along with adding a trim pot in the power amp bias circuit itself so that I don’t have to dick around with resoldering resistors every time I swap out those 6V6 power tubes.)