Windows Windows costs more (ransom) money

*Runs and hides in UNIX*

 

You know what, they really haven't thought this through, because paying for a decent third-party security package like Kaspersky is about £15 a year if you buy the license from a third-party reseller like Amazon each time.

I'm super salty because I've been saying for years, "I hate phones becoming obsolete through software abandonment, just give me an annual fee to maintain support and I'll happily pay it!" Security patches and updates are an ongoing cost, so it makes perfect sense to pass that cost on to the customer rather than forcing them to change hardware all the time. But Microsoft, in true Microsoft fashion, are passing the cost on and slipping on the keypad along the way, accidentally quadrupling the price. And this doubling cost ****? That's just transparently predatory, it doesn't cost more to keep doing support for the same platform, it costs more to train and develop support staff for new platforms! By definition, most of the relevant vulnerabilities and exploits are found and leveraged early in a product's life, not late on.

Not to mention, the whole justification for transitioning to app stores, metadata aggregation, telemetry **** and all that was that, once somebody has the OS, they're a constant source of revenue. That was why Microsoft had an undeclared tolerance for people scamming themselves into free Windows 10 upgrades using old w7 keys - it was one more trapped customer to harvest data from and throw adverts at.

But now they're tired of just eating their cake and having it too, they want a third thing. Sell the OS (who else even sells an OS any more for ****'s sake), cram advertising into the OS, harvest user data from the OS, skim off the top of app sales and microtransactions in the OS, AND charge to keep releasing patches for the OS.

Just...more money, please. More money for the money machine. Our business model is flying by the seat of its pants, we're so close to broke, guys!

Satya Nadella is running out of money to pay his yacht butler, for god's sake!

C|_|nts.

 

If you had a phone number, I'd ring you and we could enrage things about stuff for many long times. I feel you.

 

I held off from w11 for as long as I could, I dunno why, out of some weird principle. I finally gave in, and it's really not that bad/different. You can move the start button to the left!

 

Well I ran it by the OH and she's happy with moving to Linux so long as I make it a bit windowsy and just work.

She's used to libreoffice and such already so I reckon Mint will do her.

Unless of course she needs a new laptop by then, then I guess we'll see what's what.

 

Isn't there a Discord or something for Bit-Tech? That's what the kids use now instead of phone calls, I'm told.

 

Hacked it onto a sandbridge laptop and it works fine after an initial 2-3mins of seemingly nothing booting at the start. Only have 1 machine, a GPD Win 3, that supports windows 11 and been holding off upgrading as I see no point in doing so, plus why upgrade when I have a Ryzen 5 3600, Ryzen 5 2500U laptop and Ryzen 3 2200g machine I use on a daily basis and can't upgrade for no reason beyond M$ being a bunch of ragin c**ts.

I would rather go back to Windows 7 than pay for windows 10. Honestly don't see what MS have brought to the table since Windows 7 apart from shitty interfaces. If I'm F***ed I might as well lube up.

 

Mate... sit down... take a breath...

Honestly, none of this is new for Microsoft. It has always been a shitty company since its inception.

Bill's Mommy sat on IBM's board and convinced the remaining board members to choose her son's company to deliver an OS for their shiny new computer. "MicroSoft" didn't even write the original version of MS-DOS which fulfilled that contract, they bought it for an absolute pittance. They paid Seattle Computer Products (which was basically one guy) the paltry sum of $75,000 USD for 86-DOS, slapped their own label on it, and proceeded to make a fortune. $75,000 in 1981 is worth roughly $260,000 in today's money - the IBM contract was worth $430,000, which is $1,477,478 adjusted for inflation.

Today, Microsoft makes its money from Azure. Home users are such a laughably small portion of their revenue that they can literally afford to do whatever the hell they want and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. And lest thou thinketh that Azure is based on some mythical incantations from wise and learnèd scholars at Microsoft.... it ain't. It's built on open source tech from the ground up. What was once described as "cancer" is now the foundation of their business. When Windows Subsystem for Linux appeared I thought, for the briefest of moments, that a major turning point had been reached, that we'd reached a point of inflection for home operating systems. But... er... no, actually... WSL was released in order to make it easier to develop Linux-based stuff, because Linux powers the Azure empire.

Honestly... I have tried to make Linux work as my first choice, for quite literally decades. I started tinkering with Linux back in '97, or maybe '98... Back then you had to manually write out modelines in the xorg config file, unless you were fortunate enough to have a monitor that another Linux user had used. If you got it wrong you blew your monitor - and I don't just mean "accidentally crashed the video driver", I mean "physically destroyed your monitor by trying to run it at unsupported resolutions or vertical/horizontal sync frequencies".

But we come back to gaming. It's "getting there" on Linux, but these days I want sh!t to work. None of us are getting any younger, and I have far more important things to worry about. My days of tinkering in config files, compatibility layers, third-party hacks or patches, etc, etc, are long behind me.

The likes of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Alphabet/Google, Meta, etc, wield considerable power to shape the market in exactly the way that suits them, and there are important principles at stake that are worth fighting for. But I've been holding this banner for quite a while and it's getting pretty heavy, I think it's time for someone else to carry it into battle.

 

For my 'gaming' pc (loose term as that 1080 needs upgrading) this is my issue.

I can see there may be a mixture in my house in the future.

I may try W11 out on my backup pc, I've seen a few articles on setting up with a local account and ridding of telemetry.

I'm just not looking forward to it, I found it annoying for some reason the time I did use it for any period of time but if I'll only end up using it on the gaming pc it may be easier to ignore.

E: Side question. Can anyone tell me why no matter what usb 3 fobs I try I can only ever get installations to work if I use an old usb 2 fob to do it?

 

As you'll know from my many inane posts about mostly simple issues, I'm not the best person to ask for tech support, but is this the driver thing? I know W7 had no USB 3 support out of the box because I couldn't install it on my Maximus IV board properly (had to use the CD drive), so is it possible it's reading the USB sticks as incompatible and just sulking?

 

Dunno, this has been with W10 installs, not tried a W11 one.

I have a couple of spare crucial usb 2.0's that I've now slapped W10 and W11 on anyway.

I could try a W11 install on a usb 3 but I'm not sure I can be even bothered tbh lol, it has just been something that has puzzled me.

Even using usb 3 fobs in a usb 2 slot on the mobos it wouldn't have it. Odd.

 

I add a new brick on this wall...

https://www.xda-developers.com/windows-11-wont-boot-on-unsupported-old-cpus/

This is even more worrying than the security update thing, it means that this new Windows 11 update requires the POPCNT CPU feature, making it impossible to run on super-old PCs.
PCs older than fifteen years will be affected by this change and won't be able to boot

 

I just saw this as well.

Anything labelled POPCNT doesn't sound beneficial.

Microsoft actively trying to add to electronics waste.

Edit: I also read that hardware that can run W11 but not capable of running the AI component they're planning on will have a permanent watermark.

 

Yeah, saw that too on Reddit, we're entering in a new era where everything is gonna be boring complicated and compulsory
Luckily there are other ways to get out of this, like using a Linux OS or tweaking Windows 10 or 11 like I do, stopping all updates, removing blotwares, the tracking and telemetry and all the usefulness candycrush, blocking the thousand of Microsoft sites who collect data anonymously from your computer every days, installing no antivirus at all, but the Malwarebytes suite and Malwarebytes firewall-control, running the browser in a sandbox and be connected to the net with a VPN, I myself never had any issues but well...
I also want to mention that after those tweakings, I can even go to Utube and watch videos in a row without any commercials

 

I dunno man, I love wailing on m$ as much as the next guy. But I can't remember the last time I paid anything for Windows, pretty sure 7 migrated to 10 and 10 migrated to 11 without having to hand over any cash, and I use it every day for hours on end. Dare I say it seems like pretty good value *runs*

 

Better question: Why does it also randomly corrupt the install USB, and why can they only be restored/un-f*cked on a XP OS machine?

 

Oooh, not had that one. I think MS may gear them to mess about with us in our individual way.

 

Ah ? really, you mean installing what? , W10 or W11 using a USB 3.0 sticks is causing issues ?? honestly, i install Windows pretty often and all my sticks are USB 3...I don't understand

 

Yeah I don't understand either.

I've tried different usb 3 for W10 installs using different sticks in usb 3 and usb 2 slots on different computers and they've always got stuck early on.

The same creation tool downloaded on usb 2 sticks work every time.

It's just odd.

 

Yes, odd, perhaps it depends of the MB firmware, some of them may have enough code to run any kind of gen, or passing threw 3.0 to 2.0 without we can notice, all my gigabyte MB have been installed with 3.0 sticks without issues, but I use an old 2.0 stick of 2 go when I flash BIOS