I remember in the original 1990’s NASCAR Racing game, I discovered a glitch where if I managed hit an AI car into the outer wall a certain way while driving backwards, it would launch said AI car backwards at some incredible rate of speed which could make for some spectacular wrecks.

Anyhow, that’s what I spent most of time doing.

Does Encarta count as owning an encyclopedia?

I’d at least start them with something simple like Paint or Notepad. Once they have that down, then you can throw the disaster that is the MS Office file save dialog at them.

With the N64, it helps if you can hook it up to a TV from around that era too. Games like Goldeneye look terrible on a modern LCD. I had that experience myself - “Man, I know I’m used to modern games now, but I don’t remember these games looking this shitty”. Then I dragged out my old CRT and hooked it up, and instantly it was “Now this is how I remember these games looking like”.

I’m not saying that old hardware is useless. I make good use out of old hardware too. I have an old i5 Dell from about 2012 running ZoneMinder, a Phenom II system from around 2009 that I use a Linux server, an even older Core 2 Duo system that’s a glorified MP3 player, and even a very early 2000’s Pentium III that I use for a router (sadly I’m going to have to retire it from these duties soon - it can barely handle a 100 mbps DSL connection, and it’s too old and outdated to run the modern router distributions).

However, for every one of those computers I have another one like it sitting in a closet plus a few extras. All the geeks and tinkerers I know are also swimming in old hardware. If I really wanted to get rid of this stuff, I’d have a hard time giving it away. Economically, this stuff is worthless. The supply greatly exceeds the demand(*)

(*) well, except maybe the Pentium III… it’s old enough now that retro gamers may be interested…

If all she uses the computer for is playing Sims 4, another option is just let her continue to use Windows 10. If she’s running it through Steam she’s probably got another 3-4 years before that stops working.

That’s true, but the supply vastly outstrips the demand. They may make great Linux machines, but the majority of 10-15 year old computers have little to no economic value.

I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.

I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.

The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.

Admittedly XFCE isn’t perfect either, but it’s much better behaved than modern Windows.

Rock n’ Roll Racing.

Challenger had a fleck of paint damage one of its windows on an early mission.

I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.

Why not use gvim on Windows? That’s my “IDE” on Windows. Though with modern versions of Windows, trying to run vim in the Command Prompt isn’t a complete disaster like it was in the past.

“IDE” in quotes because I consider vim a text editor, and I don’t try to make it an IDE with a bunch of plugins.

I managed to get this: How to Fire a Gun.

So it’s at least plausible.

“I’ll show you the photos once I get them developed.”

That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.

I’ve been wanting to play that. Considering it already takes me something like 30-40 hours to launch a rocket in base game, I’m anticipating that getting through the DLC is going to keep me busy a while.

I did the same thing, but mostly because my computer worked, did what I needed it to do, and I was too lazy to replace it until I was basically forced to.

After building a new PC and switching over to Linux I was like “why didn’t I do this a long time ago?”

Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.

Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.

It’s also an edition thing. The Home version is the worst, the Pro version is much the same, but the corporate Enterprise version cuts out a lot of the crap.