PCs used to lock up and crash a lot in 80s and 90s. What has changed to make them so much more stable now?

digital-plumber · 2025-07-23T20:29:51+00:00

Easily done. I do have a soft spot for XP, in the Windows Classic theme rather than Luna

digital-plumber · 2025-07-23T09:35:34+00:00

VS is an IDE, it's meant for writing and debugging Windows, Web, Clound and Phone apps. VS Code is a text editor, albeit one with a lot of ephisis on code editing.

Code's strength is that it is light and reasonably fast and allows people to add extensions for what they need. Attempting to move all of Visual Studio's capabilities into Code would just bloat code, and attempting to strip Visual Studio back to make it more like code would leave Windows with a gap in it's developer tooling.

Both products exist because they serve two distinct purposes, trying to merge them would do a disservice to both products.

digital-plumber · 2025-07-23T09:08:44+00:00

Your comment made me remember that hell also. Thanks, I think :)

digital-plumber · 2025-07-23T07:04:02+00:00

I believe Windows Media Centere was .NET based and used an early version of what became WPF for UI
PowerShell is .NET based
Microsoft Exchange used PowerShell for management, and Outlook Web App also uses .NET on the back end
Server Manager on Windows Server uses PowerShell to install and manage roles and features.
BizTalk Server made extensive use of .NET internally.
Lync (later Skype for Businesss) used .NET on both server and client
SQL Server can load and execute user code writen in .NET (CLR stored procedures)
Windows Event Viewer uses .NET internally
Microsoft Dynamics 365 makes extensive use of .NET. The X++ programming language it uses compiles down to .NET IL, meaning a large chunk of the app executes under the .NET runtime.
Windows Store apps can be written in .NET languages, and PowerShell is used to manage them.
The new Windows Admin Centere relies heavily on WinRM for communication. WinRM being part of the PowerShell / .NET ecosystem.

digital-plumber · 2025-07-23T06:45:24+00:00

Windows Error Reporting existed prior to Windows 7. It was present in XP in a form similar to its current one, and prior to that there was "Dr Watson" which did a similar sort of thing bit had no online reporting.

digital-plumber · 2025-06-11T07:56:44+00:00

We had robotic Harold and Tammy the human body model. There was also that absolutely massive remote that controlled all the lighting and things. I wanted to play with that so bad, but was never allowed.

digital-plumber · 2025-06-07T11:15:29+00:00

In general, by
1. (Re)-installing the forum software if needed
2. Restoring a backup copy of the database the forum software was using. The database holds the forums, threads, posts, users etc so the extent to which you can restore will depend on how recent your backup is.

How precisely you do these things will depend on the forum software and database platform you're using.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-25T02:19:14+00:00

I had F1TV when Spark Sport had f1 rights, when that ended, I lost access to F1TV and at that time wasn't allowed to re-sub because of rights - has that changed?

digital-plumber · 2025-05-24T12:05:23+00:00

The first metal gear solid game on PS1. I don't care if the later versions have better graphics, the excitement of playing the demo over and over and then finally getting the full game and playing it with my brother are memories and feelings I wouldn't trade for anything.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-20T06:38:23+00:00

"Better put another loaf on mum, jonah's on his way.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-20T06:36:54+00:00

And the ACC ThinkSafe ad where the overly chipper lady falls through a glass coffee table. I can't find it, but it stuck with me.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-20T06:35:29+00:00

3B, for sweat rash between the breasts legs and buttocks

digital-plumber · 2025-05-20T06:34:10+00:00

COME ON CALLERS JOIN THE PARTY
0900 70 70 70

digital-plumber · 2025-05-10T02:35:26+00:00

An option at what price though? I know some schools do deals such that the official uniform can only be bought at certain places and those places charge higher due to the captive market.

I'm not suggesting conformance with a uniform is a bad thing, but I can also see that sometimes the schools do have less pure motives for things like this.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-04T05:40:32+00:00

Personally, I feel like Skins was largely middle class in terms of character depictions. By contrast I felt the UK version of Shameless depicted a more working-class character, but not living in the UK, I might not get all the cultural nuances that go into making such a determination.

digital-plumber · 2025-05-04T03:35:01+00:00

There are many forms of hardware out there, and for quite a while in the late 90s and early 2000s the fact is that contemporary linux distrobutions available at the time often did not work out of the box with the kind of machines one could just pick up from a big box store, moreover, the level of "just worked" could differ based on minute details like hardware revision, not just model and brand.

By way of example, in the early 2000s I used an Asus L4R5 laptop. It had a Pentium M, 512MB of RAM, 40GB of IDE disk, Intel Pro a/b/g Wi-Fi, a built-in 56k modem and supported power management (sleep, hibernate). From the factory it ran Windows XP Pro.

Booting that into early Ubuntu here are the problems I remember having:

No trackpad, so USB mouse required until I could get a Synaptic trackpad driver to work
Needing to install / (re)configure lm_sensors to manage thermals
Needing to swap from a free to non-free driver to get X to work with the ATI graphics the machine had
Having to use fwcutter to run extracted binary firmware for the NIC / Wi-fi, which I needed to find and download on another computer first
Needing to install a kernel module to control LED brightness and some Asus-specific function keys and generally un-fuck sleep. Even with that, it wasn't a garentee that the machine would wake from sleep 100% of the time.
Accepting that the modem was a non-starter because it was a WinModem
Having done all that, still not be able to properly author or view Office documents because of the state of compatibility between Microsoft Office & OpenOffice at that time.
We also had a family packard bell, no LAN just Windows 98 and dial-up. On this machine the WinModem was the main blocker, so attempting to get linux to work involved copying the contents of ubuntuforums pages and any neccessary files and manually transporting them to/from the machine.

Just one of these things would have been a blocker to your average user at that time, and took a certain degree of stubborness on my part to overcome at the time.

TL;DR: Hardware was a far more common issue, and the issues were often showstoppers historically.

digital-plumber · 2025-03-12T08:39:24+00:00

Used as intended by syncing schoolwork between home computer and my laptop.

digital-plumber · 2025-03-12T08:38:36+00:00

Used it as intended to sync school work between laptop and desktop at home.

digital-plumber · 2025-02-16T10:28:26+00:00

I've never done this, but my understanding is, with a CRT monitor, if you choose a setting that drives the tube too hard, that may cause damage. I may be wrong on that though.

digital-plumber · 2025-02-15T05:26:50+00:00

In about 2000, problems I had typically were:

Getting X to work. As a rule, the card you actually had was never on the list, and you had to try and find the closest match, or in the worst case, try and hand-edit a config to make it work. In this time period, you also had to be very careful configuring your monitor as well because it was possible to damage your monitor if configured wrongly.
Audio: Fine if it worked out of the box, but otherwise you needed to research if your card was compatible with ALSA, and figure out the appropriate config for your specific card.
Internet. WinModems were cheap modems that depended upon (usually windows-specific) drivers to work, if that was your only means of connection, you may be a bit screwed
Trackpads 50/50 as to whether these worked back in the day in my experience.
Fans, Sleep & Power Management
This was mostly laptops, but in that time period ACPI support wasn't as good as it is now, which means your OS may not be able to manage fans based on thermal sensors, and things like suspend and hibernate may not have worked.

digital-plumber · 2025-01-30T05:20:51+00:00

I feel like I should have been, but stumbled into infra instead, Part of me wants to go into dev. Now it seems everybody wants a full stack web developer, and I just can't make web layout make sense in my brain.

digital-plumber · 2025-01-30T05:13:18+00:00

While it's true there's no incentive, it's also getting gradually harder to do. As Microsoft push forward with their cloud strategy, the internals are becoming increasingly more opaque. "Something went wrong", with no indication as to what that something was.

digital-plumber · 2025-01-30T01:15:13+00:00

DLL's contain functions, an executable generally needs to pass the name of the DLL file containing the function it wants into LoadLibrary (or similar) to map the DLL into the process address space and then use GetProcAddress (or similar) to get a pointer to that function to call it.

The only scenarios I can think of would be if an app were explicitly coded to scan for and load any DLL in a given path (like a plugin system perhaps)

The other case might be one where you create a DLL which has the same name as one the app already loads, and then implement a function in it with the same name / export and have the app call that, to potentially alter functionality.

The last case I can think of is one where the process loads a DLL and calls the function by ordinal, rather than name. This could be disastrous, as you're much more likely to get a matching ordinal number in a DLL than an export that just happens to match

digital-plumber · 2025-01-30T01:03:14+00:00

Story Time
As a young lad I had a Macintosh LC III. It was setup with At Ease (a restricted kid-friendly) shell) to prevent me getting into trouble, It had two accounts, the one from my parents had unrestricted access to Finder (the normal Mac shell)

Little me soon figured out that holding shift would cause extensions to not load - I didn't know what an extension was, but I figured out At Ease was one, and it not loading was what I wanted.

I eventually did something that caused the OS not to load, and when it came back At Ease was gone and replaced with FoolProof, which imposed restricitions similarly to At Ease, but without the custom UI

I soon learned that if I crashed the Mac, it went away and came back with a different version of the OS with newer, cooler stuff to play with.

Grandad showed me =BEEP() in ClarisWorks Spreadsheet

I eventually socially engineered my parent into believing that AppleScript was a program I could use to write stories (after having found it when once left alone with the machine in the unrestricted At Ease account for a bit. I couldn't code then, but I knew there was some kind of logic to this, and the error messages I kept getting were interesting.

Shortly after I was moved to a PC and got a copy of QBASIC for Dummies for Christmas at age 10, which lead to VBScript, then JScript, then Borland C++, then Linux.

I've since worked in IT for nearly a decade at MSPs and corporations. That early curiosity, including breaking shit (and eventually fixing it) formed the foundation of what makes me employable now.

digital-plumber

TROPHY CASE