“Digital librarian”

Feels like a “render unto Caesar” non problem

I’m not sure the corporate lockdown will allow that, but I’ll look into it thanks.

My desktop isn’t a problem, but the Dell laptop issued by my employer is a pain. It can take over an hour to load the models I work on, so I only shut down over the weekend and sleep it weeknights. Every time some BS, probably hidden behind admin credentials by IBM will wake it up within 20 minutes. Luckily I’ve discovered pulling the power and leaving it in battery keeps it asleep.

When I had my house reinsulated last year I took the opportunity to run cables from every room to a small closet, and then a run from that closet to the router. Had some… experience, learning how to wire in the sockets, and right now only my office is connected with a bit of patch instead of the switch I’ll eventually need to get the other rooms live, but it’s so much more reliable than it was with WiFi or poweline. Not to mention that those technologies only just kept up with the 36Mb VDSL I’ve been stuck on for the last 10 years. Having ethernet means I’ll actually be able to get the most out of the 500Mb FttP I’m getting next month.

Same! I installed W10 in 2016 too, when I built a new Intel 6th Gen system. Just kept on working until earlier this year when the motherboard died. Got a new 12th Gen chip and motherboard from a different vendor, stuck my seven year old boot drive in, entered the bitlocker key, and… it just worked. New drivers installed once I was back online and I just carried on as before. It genuinely surprised me how robust 10 is.

Eventually I ruined things this summer by accepting the 11 upgrade. I was tempted by windows subsystem for android.
11 worked ok and I found the UI changes tolerable, but after a month I started getting bluescreens I couldn’t fix, so this week I finally gave in and wiped my antique install from the boot drive and installed a fresh copy.
It bluescreened pretty quickly, I figured the issue was almost certainly due to a particular piece of software I used. Removed that and it’s been stable since. I could probably just restore my last backup, remove the problem program and continue. But I guess I was due a clean install, and while it wasn’t laggy or slow before, it does feel a little snappier.