WINDOWS 7 and HOLDING

SCANNERMAN777 said:

I loved my old Sony VAIO. It was a sad day when I finally put her to rest. Mind, I got that unit WAY back in the Windows "Mistake Edition" era. There really wasn't much in the way of hardware I could salvage from it in 2012. The days of IDE were done.

Well, I thought so too, till I found two old IDE drives, that I salvaged from dead PC's a few years ago.
I plugged one into my old eMachine, (the only PC I own with IDE ports on the Motherboard) and proceeded to install Win-8.1/Pro/x86 on it. And it boots up and runs just fine, if you discount the humming, clattering and chattering!!!
And to think, back in the day that was as good as it got.
Remember, formatting a MFM drive? That was a tricky process. Or, parking the read/write heads before turning off your PC? Oh yes, I have my memories, painful as they may be.
Thank God and technology for the SSD!

Hey no cussin' in the forums! You said MFM. Oh, *snap* now I just said it too. Well do I remember the days of parking the drive in the trusty and handy Tandy but at least it was a step up from the infamously famous Commodore 64. TBH I rather miss that dear old comforting sound of the IDE drives chattering away. I still have a PC with an onboard IDE port but never got around to hooking up the HD because it also accommodates SATA. I probably still have a few of those IDE drives kicking around somewhere. That unit also sports an internal floppy and every time I boot it up I smile because there is nothing quite so comforting as the sound of an internal floppy drive booting.

The Floppotron 3.0 - Computer Hardware Orchestra - YouTube

Now, don't y'all be badmouthing the little C-64. My first one launched me into the C-64 business.
I rewrote the Kernel (OS ) ROM, to make the C-64 faster and more efficient. I developed a "Quiet Stop" for the C-1541 disk drive, to quiet it down and lengthen it's life. I'd even put a toggle switch on a drive, to change its drive letter from 8 to 9, and another switch to disable the Write Protect Tab, so the user could format and use the back side of the disk, without cutting a new notch in the disk.
I gave seminars to C-64 Clubs, all over the Mid-West. It was a wild ride!

Then Commodore declared bankruptcy, and closed up production, and the days of the great little C-64 were over.
The last of the C-64's sold at "Toys R Us", for $99 ea.
I reluctantly built my first IBM XT Clone, and the rest is history. That first PC, launched me into the PC building and repair business. More history.

Son and I had a blast on our family C-64. We were PacMan fiends. This is where he also got his first hand experience with coding. Later on, we moved on over to Tandy. I'd never dis a C-64. Too many good memories :)

I just saw a C-64 for sale on Goodwill's website. Already had flea bids on it. LOL So, instead I bid on and won an old Regency 1970s crystal controlled "police" scanner. I put "police" in quotes because you can hear planes, trains and automobiles or anything else over the unencrypted airwaves on a scanner. Today's scanners are far and away not for the faint of heart. Though today they have a model or two where you just enter a flipping zip code or connect a GPS and it'll scan what you like in your area. Short of most police though. Since everything is going or has gone digital it's easy to throw the encryption switch. I wrote about that BS on my website here. (Note: if you're using a VPN or whatever, chances are you're not getting in).

Yup. Said "authorities" don't like being monitored but they sure don't mind monitoring we, the plebs. I have a vintage Realistic 3020 programmable that runs beside me just for old time's sake. I don't get much on it anymore but it does make for an interesting conversation piece.

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I just recently received a catastrophic system crash that cost me 20+ TB worth of data lost. The system and network has been running perfectly fine until Win 8.1 EOL. It was running well for years. Two days after official EOL for Win 8.1 the issues started coming and they have not stopped. The only thing that didn't crash and get messed up is the OS I'm typing on right now: Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Windows 7 will be the saviour of the rest of what I manage to salvage. So glad I kept Windows 7 up and running.

Intel(R) SSD 660p Series Product Brief

*Warning to those who are using Optane based QLC NVMe. There is an exploit/bug/issue that will remove your IaNVMe.sys file. If you try to restore any drives from this silicon without this particular file you will risk having all your drives, operating systems, data drives, external drives and internal written over with fresh partitions. I suspect my Windows 7 is still running is because it never required restoration and does not require this file. Although some might reason that Optane is "dead" I'm quite sure some folks are still using it. I would hate to see what just happened to me happen to anyone else. I have no backups left because my 660P backup took out all my other backups in addition to TBs of precious user data.

It's why I backup data to other air gaped drives and clone the drives and those cloned drives are air gaped. I never keep the secondary backups attached.

Even more humiliating is the fact that I set up all these data drives to be manually switched on and off as I desired. I was in a bit of a rush and a bit too careless to restore my Win 8.1, thinking it to be just another MS EOL mind game. So I was a bit annoyed and immediately proceeded with yet another recovery of Win 8.1. To be fair, on my PC, I had not done a recovery of Win 8.1 for three years but I've done many on other PCs and for other people. I've run back ups off the 660P Intel series before without a hitch. Recoveries were quick. My carelessness was also accelerated by the idea that since I was going to cease using Win 8.1 anyway, as long as got it booted up I could strip it of the data I needed and upgrade it. 8.1 was dying all over the network at the time. Fortunately enough for those PCs, they were running dual and triple boots with Win 10 and/or 11. It didn't take much to get them up and running again. Still, my daughters were not too pleased as some of their favourite games were excluded to Win 8.1. Yeah, with four females to answer to in the house you might say this old geek was under pressure. I should have known better.

The only way I can think of to top air gapped is cold storage (which is just another form of the same thing) although not quite as convenient. I do have some cold storage, but it's been a few years since I updated it. I still lost a lot of data. Forensics will recover some of it but not all of it. Really never expected external backups to get zapped. Lesson learned.

I'll never run Win 10 on my Work Station as a matter of principle and I'm a bit sorry I even ran 8.1 on it. Win 11 telemetry doesn't seem as nasty, but even with Microsoft's instructions on how to install it with TPM1.2 I really don't have a lot of confidence in it as they state that they don't endorse it (although they tell you how). That leaves me Win 7 and Linux. I might just have to remain contented with that.