"I want to say my laptop's also from 2008, but I honestly don't know. All I know about its age was that it was refurbished when I got it at an auction in '09. It still does what I want it to do, and that's fine with me."
That's what is important.
I still have a CD with Windows 3.11 on it... Sure, I have nothing that actually runs Windows 3.11 at the moment, but I could.
Over the years i have found that sooner or later, you ALWAYS need some of the "old" stuff. And so, while it would take me a few minutes to connect my previous WinXP system, it would only take slightly longer to hook up my preceeding W98 or W2k systems, though to get at my W95 system, i had to disassemble it at one point, so it would take an hour or two after i dig it out of the closet, while either of my DOS 3.30 286s should run the moment i hook them up(after remembering where i buried them, hehe).
Right now, it's probably the longest between times i've
had to start up one of my old systems, over 3 years, but that's as much thanks to stuff like DosBox and other similar programs making it easier to get around as anything else.
Amen. I'll stick with Win7, thank you, and if they force me out of it, I'll head on over to Linux. Bought a Raspberry Pi 4 to keep me in practice with Linux. Nice little machine, though I doubt I'll do any video editing on it.
Aye, i've had similar thoughts myself, but problem is that some of my most used stuff are very finicky with Linux, if not for that and the fact that i've never got around to really use it for myself, so my experience with it is mostly just helping people out despite having zero knowledge about it (just being able to read the instructions properly and some basic logic), i would probably be looking at a complete switch along with my next full system purchase.
And those Raspberries, it is quite frankly quite horrible to see how well they can run so much, yeah, video editing they will definitely not do well, but it feels rather painful when you look at one browsing internet pages FASTER than a high end desktop system. Just because they DONT run windows.
And WX, *shudder*, just the forced "updates" is a horrorshow all by itself. It's just last week someone on a techforum wailed about how a recent update killed the soundcards on all the over 100 systems he was responsible for. For the 3rd time in 6 months. Completely weird stuff, connect something with a functional sound out, via network to them, and it worked fine to play media files on them, but locally, the soundcards had completely lost any and all output, they were literally as if they were dead, even checking with test equipment showed absolutely no signal from any output port.
Only thing that worked was to remove the soundcard, physically replace them with a different soundcard(too close in type and it just became as dead when installed as the original), then after rebooting until the new card has sound, remove it and put back the orignal one and randomly reboot several times.
A 20-30+ minutes procedure per system due to the reboots required. For over a hundred, wheee, so happy he was, oh yay a week of time wasted...