Tripredacus

There is no right to reimage OEM installations.

Not a conspiracy unless it can be proven to be illegal. There is certainly collusion occuring in the industry. If you think Microsoft just decided to do things this way out of the blue, you're dreaming.

It seems to be that Feodor2 only provides MPL2 on the repo and nothing in addition. MPL2 FAQ doesn't seem to say anything about redist of old binaries in particular. So as long as the the person who is going/wants to share the old version has not modified the files they can link to it here. If they have modified the files, then they must meet requirements of MPL2 to link to it. If the original author requests content removal and proves that MPL2 has been violated then we will of course remove the link afterwards. https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68/blob/main/LICENSE https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/FAQ/

Dark theme used to be have a following by people who thought it was cool, dating back to the "High Contrast Black" days of 3.x and NT. It wasn't originally meant to be anything other than an accessibility option. Then sometime during the late 90s some studies were run and it was found that using the dark themes (the High Contrast Black OS theme) was beneficial to CRT display longevity and even became a recommendation in computing magazines (and even in web design) up through the mid 2000s. However the thing that changed was the move away from CRT to LCD panels and it was learned that the dark themes had no benefit any longer. Unfortunately it was too late to remove the people's want of a dark theme they didn't actually need any longer and we still have it as an option to this day.

40 GB for Win7/8 OS install is fine but only if you are going to be managing space/data by using other drives. On physical I never use smaller than 80 GB disks but for a few VMs I've used 40 GB without an issue for the server-based equivalents. I can't really answer the 7 or 8 question. I use DOS programs multiple times a week on my Win7 but I use DOSBox for it.

Flash will never be dead. I still use it daily.

I don't. Server needs maximum uptime and can't afford restarting due to updates whenever it feels like it.

The Windows product development lifecycle is based on the Enterprise Channel primarily. Obviously there is some disconnect as the UX is certainly not designed for Enterprise.

Non-critical file removal is all that is needed. Even newer versions of Rufus can do it for you. https://i12bretro.github.io/tutorials/0635.html But it may be a matter of time before this is patched out. Such as maybe they will make Setup or Windows have an error if that file is missing. In regards to if Win 10 is the new 98... you think in 20 years from now there will be an active Windows 10 modding community like there is for Windows 98?

Fast Startup has no possibility of increasing boot time. Boot being the key word here, implies that the computer is off. Fast Startup only increases time to resume from hibernation.

Link removed. User is too new to let a link be posted in a thread like this.

Well the topic got to 13 pages by now, that is a lot better than something that is too much for most people.

From what I understand regarding the different NAND types, it gets worse over time. Meaning the newer types are not as good as the older types, but the newer types have higher capacity and lower price. Look on page 2 of this PDF which has a short description of the 4 main types: https://business.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/ncsa/en-us/business/memory/asset/KIOXIA_SSD_NAND_Endurance_Tech_Brief.pdf But it has always been the case with SSDs that you want to minimise the amount of writes that are made. With Windows, that is difficult to control without using RAM overlay. The best I could figure is to disable indexing and using a spindle disk as a dedicated page file/vmem location. With Windows also you can choose to install programs on another disk, but most programs are still going to be writing a lot to AppData and in the user profile, I wish there was a way to redirect those write without modifying Windows to store User folder on another disk, which causes many problems with just Windows.

New car smell is actually toxic fumes.

The performance falloff can be fast for TLC NAND (which this disk of yours is) especially if there are many write operations. It has been known for a long time about this issue with NAND and it is not a magical cure to data storage as compared to spindle disks. It depends on what your "use" of the disk is, whether or not it would have been expected that the ssd got slower or not.

Name changed

Another gripe I'm not sure I mentioned: the borderless windows. Since by default the explorer windows are white, now with no borders, there is no way to know where one stops and another begins. I am getting confused when having multiple windows open and having to resort to Alt+Tab to navigate them and not being able to use the mouse.

Well the camera in the MS-163K isn't great but for a video conference rarely is it required to have good picture quality. Now you talking about streaming, meaning you are broadcasting/recording instead of watching, then that is an entirely different situation. I'd say you need a quad core + HT and 16 GB RAM minimum. Not sure about what video card would be needed. Also many people use a separate PC to handle the streaming aspects in order to reduce overhead on the system actually playing the game. Just looking now, you can find an older 4 GB Radeon for under $300 on Newegg.

Is it a discrete graphics controller or add-on?

I found the answer myself https://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI#UEFI_class_0-3_and_CSM Calling it UEFI class 3 is incorrect, as it clearly indicates a class 0 is BIOS and thus cannot be UEFI. I don't see why it would matter. Vista SP1 x64 should support a Class 3 system. Just use boot menu and see if the DVD has the UEFI prefix.

Can you explain what you mean by class 3? UEFI spec is still on version 2.

Presuming the working dir for the program isn't System32, you can be safe but you put the "newer" file into the program's working dir. Typically the working dir is where the .exe is, unless launched from a shortcut that indicates the working dir is somewhere else. Windows depends search order is in your favor as the working dir is often the first place Windows will look for a file with System32 being last, which is a compatibility shim that dates back to the 9x days. BUT the caveat is that this only works if the binary uses relative paths to find files and may not work if the binary uses absolute paths or paths with env vars. At least it doesn't hurt to try using the working dir method as you aren't changing anything with the OS.

Done

If you expect nothing, you can't be disappointed.

I must not have saved the original PCB or had taken a picture of it. IIRC there was a burn mark on it and one of the components was missing.