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.