It’s fiber internet and I am the only person who has used this IP address for 2+ years and I guarantee you it isn’t ddos.

No VPN here, just my ISP

It used to be a quick trick to find good forum responses but since google doesn’t care about any forums but reddit anymore it doesn’t really work like it used to.

Yeah, this time was pure frustration, especially due to all the top and AI responses being from before microsoft dropped their display.cpl.

Literally zero answers across google, bing, yahoo, and ddg, just google was the only search engine shitty enough to block be for it.

It doesn’t though, and trust me when I say that between my career and interests, I probably use google more than 98% of the population and this is the first time it has ever happened.

I can guarantee you’d be at least warm for the rest of your life!

You’d be cooked by the radiation emitted by the accretion disk,

edit: It would be a VERY tiny accretion disk but it would still act like a cracked out microwave magnetron

I miss that world so much…

You’re not in IT, are you?

Do you know what microcode patching even is and why it is in many ways superior to simple file patching?

There is no effort. You just sign up for an account and install their systray program. It’s as easy to set up as a subscription VPN service. All the patching is done live in memory first and in 4 years I’ve needed to reboot exactly twice.

I have a huge stack of retro games and code projects that work very poorly on Win10, as well as the fact that my Win7 version is Ultimate so I make a lot of use of XP mode virtual machine and booting from virtual disk on bare metal for my moderately older games (something I can’t do with my win10 home license). Can’t even get win10 drivers for half of my hardware on that box.

Also kind of annoyed by your hostility so you’re blocked now.

apparently I picked up a few comment stalkers earlier, frankly I didn’t even know downvoting was an option here.

Mainly because of the lack of ATF oversight and their FUCKING MASSIVE operations budget.

If people really understood what they have done in the past, that agency would be dissolved overnight.

If you’ve ever had to deal with the ATF you know why this is a magnificently terrible idea.

FDA all the way.

It seems to be a trend that any service that claims not to be evil is just waiting for the right moment to drop that pretense.

There is a company called 0patch that makes microcode patches for legacy Win systems.

I pay about $30 a year for microcode patching on my WIn7 partition and have had zero problems despite it being always internet connected.

Plan on doing the same once win10 goes end of life for my everyday driver.

Full disclosure: Not paid for this, they are a legit digital wonder.

Win11’s telemetry load is significantly higher than already outrageous win10’s to the point I feel it is a legitimate security risk.

Things like passing off your wifi passwords in plaintext to MS servers is really only the tip of the iceberg.

When w10 goes End of Life, I’ll be buying 3rd party microcode patching from 0patch.

Screw w11 with every fiber of my being.

I know of an older couple running 3.11, wife is a writer and she refuses to use anything other than wordperfect.

No internet, and just a printer.

Every time they call me out to service it they treat me like a long lost grandson with food and the occasional knitted gift so I don’t mind despite the fact that just keeping their (no joke) Pentium II (the edge slot version) alive is frankly one of the hardest projects I’ve ever had in my career. And I’ve had to service government software…

in the early 00s there were a few companies that made building services panels based on embedded XP kiosk partitions, things like HVAC and lighting.

It has been my genuine hellish curse to have to work on two of them.

It was just doing its job as the ‘every other version of windows is terrible’ sacrifice.

If Vista was a person, it would be a hot looking drunk tourist that gives you crabs after a one night stand and steals your change bowl when they sneak out in the early morning.

XP’s stability was a wonder at the time. Not many people remember how unstable Windows 2000, ME, and ALL the predecessors were.

Win98 meant rebooting a minimum of four times a day.

IT person here: this is absolutely correct. I know of two buildings in a ridiculously expensive zip code known for international trade that their entire HVAC system is run by a grey case XP box that MUST always have internet connection.

It was considered a cost saving method at the time as opposed to real building services control panels and the company that wrote and sold the software to the local companies went out of business in 2001. There are more businesses in this position just these are the only two I’ve personally been called to service.

In both cases neither machine had been allowed to reboot for more than a decade because of the legitimate fear that the hard drive bearings would fail if they were allowed to spin down.

And neither were interested in replacing it