you will take the spam, and you will say thank you can i have another.

Kidding aside:  Check into Tiny11 instead of screwing with your laptop. You basically download a clean ISO from Microsoft, run a script and gives you a stripped down ISO, including removing some of the requirements like TPM and CPU family as well as getting rid of most of the crap that gets installed automatically normally.     its out on github. ->  https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

Mon Mar 17 2025 17:03:17 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

omg, it's intolerable! Constant notifications to do things, try things, constantly getting in your face.

I've got to try some other things. FreeBSD with a desktop might do the trick if that doesn't make it lock up. Something with LXDE maybe ... although I'm skeptical that'll work because I got lockups on both X11 and Wayland based versions of both GNOME and KDE. But anything's going to be better than this.

Worst case scenario, I guess, would be I clone my work laptop and clean it off to get a pirated copy of 'doze 11 Pro. But this machine's a little small for it.

Oh forgot and, while ill get eggs tossed at me: try Flex.  Its just Debian with a different window manager, might be more stable than X11 or (ick) wayalnd. 

OR OpenFyde if you want to stay as far away from Google as possible. Its just the 'free and open' parts of ChromumOS. 

NomadBSD booted up and didn't lock up.  And it actually looked pretty good.   Unfortunately, the network interfaces were not recognized.

So I found a really good solution: I ripped out the parts I put into it and threw the damn thing in the garbage.  I spent way too much time trying to breathe life into a machine that was already low spec when it was built a decade ago.

Networking with *bsd has always been an issue. ( as far as drivers, not actual networking )

it was one of the 2 reasons i left that camp decades ago, the other being video drivers, specifically CUDA related.  I prefer BSD, but if i cant use it for a major use-case, its academic.  

Fri Mar 21 2025 02:19:34 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

NomadBSD booted up and didn't lock up.  And it actually looked pretty good.   Unfortunately, the network interfaces were not recognized.

So I found a really good solution: I ripped out the parts I put into it and threw the damn thing in the garbage.  I spent way too much time trying to breathe life into a machine that was already low spec when it was built a decade ago.

By Lester Hacksmith, 25 March 2025

In a scene straight out of a tech revenge fantasy, Bill Gates, erstwhile Microsoft overlord and perennial punching bag for nerd rage, met his maker today—shredded to bits in an industrial wood chipper. The sentence, handed down by a shadowy tribunal of sysadmins and retro computing enthusiasts, was the climax of decades-long fury over his alleged quip: "640K ought to be enough for anyone." The billionaire’s demise marks a bloody full stop to a saga that, in the eyes of his executioners, saw him single-handedly kneecap the digital age.

The execution, broadcast live on a glitchy 480p stream (a nod to the memory-starved era Gates supposedly championed), took place at an undisclosed junkyard littered with beige PCs and floppy disks. Gates, 69, clad in a vintage MS-DOS t-shirt, reportedly muttered, “I still think Windows 3.1 was fine,” before being unceremoniously fed into the whirring maw of a 1997 Timberwolf 5000. Witnesses—mostly neckbeards clutching Amiga manuals—cheered as the machine spat out a confetti of billionaire bits, later collected as "relics" for eBay.

The case against Gates hinged on that infamous 640K line, long debated but here treated as gospel. Prosecutors, led by a wild-eyed coder in a “Free BSD” hoodie, claimed Gates didn’t just say it—he enforced it. In their alternate history, he bullied IBM, bribed regulators, and sabotaged memory makers to cap PCs at 640 kilobytes through the '80s and '90s. The result? A world where Tetris ran fine but Photoshop choked, where the internet stalled at Gopher, and where humanity languished in a purgatory of 8-bit purgatory. “He stole our gigabytes, our dreams, our Counter-Strike LAN parties!” bellowed one juror, brandishing a 286 motherboard as evidence.

Gates’ defense—delivered via a grainy Zoom call (bandwidth limits, naturally)—was predictably lame. “It was a hardware limit, not my policy,” he whined, adjusting his specs. “We shipped Windows 95 with 4MB minimum!” The tribunal wasn’t buying it. Exhibits included a doctored memo from 1981, “Gates to R&D: 641K is communism,” and a tearful testimony from a Commodore 64 that “could’ve been so much more.” The verdict: guilty of “crimes against computing progress.” The sentence: wood chipper, because “it’s the only way to defrag a legacy that toxic.”

Tech historians—those not busy selling Gates-shred souvenirs—called it poetic justice. “He capped memory, so we capped him,” quipped Dr. Ada Bytewell of MIT, sipping a Jolt Cola. Others noted the irony: the chipper’s control software, running on a modern 64-bit OS, owed its existence to the post-640K world Gates unwittingly enabled. Microsoft, now a trillion-dollar AI behemoth, issued a terse statement: “Bill’s contributions speak for themselves. Also, buy Copilot.”

As the dust (and Gates) settled, the crowd dispersed to tinker with Raspberry Pis and mourn the megabytes that never were. Whether the 640K quote was real or apocryphal hardly mattered—decades of blue screens and Clippy had sealed his fate. Somewhere, a TRS-80 beeped in approval.

Comments are disabled because our server’s still running on a 386.

(yes, it was generated by Grok, but the results were too good not to share.)

Not sure which is worse, gates or Musk.  ( since you used his product )

Tue Mar 25 2025 22:38:05 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Bill Gates Meets Gruesome End in Wood Chipper for '640K Debacle'

(yes, it was generated by Grok, but the results were too good not to share.)

Id prefer to see both of those hypocritical elitist scumbags in the public square. Hanging from a rope after the standard stoning has taken place. And since we are speaking family in other rooms, add their family to it.  Wipe out the entire line before it can grow and fester more.

Then after some time on display to serve as a warning to others, they can be turned into fertilizer, and all of their business and homes are burnt to the ground and reclaimed for crops and trees.  ( and any farmland they stole, which they both have, returned back to the farmers )

And yes, i'm actually serious. 

Let God get a hold of Musk. At least he recognizes the original command God gave: "Be fruitful, multiply and cover the earth." :)

Sorry its a cop-out to invoke the magic octopus.  People need to take action while they are alive.  With luck, those ***** push too far, someone snaps, and they find out what happens.

Wed Mar 26 2025 17:29:34 UTC from SamuraiCrow

Let God get a hold of Musk. At least he recognizes the original command God gave: "Be fruitful, multiply and cover the earth." :)

Well, isn't that just nice of them.

"Microsoft has confirmed that it's removing a popular command line that allowed users to bypass connecting to the internet and signing into a Microsoft Account when setting up a new Windows 11 PC."

Apple was like that the last time i had to deal with it.  No machine to do MFA on since the device had to be replaced and it was the only registered device on the account, " we will call you in 3 weeks with a recovery code"  ..  um, the device was my phone..  

Ended up not bothering, just turned in the new phone and went with getting a reimbursement for using my own phone, which was not apple.