A friend of mine when I was 12/13 downloaded some hacks for Combat Arms (a free FPS back in the day) and made his windows unusable (with "noob" as the time).
Good memories
First thing I do is unhide file types now since I grew up in the limewire era.
The fact that Windows hides file extensions by default is just absolute insanity to me.
It fits the overall spyware OS thing though.
Another fucking stupid default
It's fine for the type of user windows is targeting by default.
Most people don't give a shit if it's xls, xlsx, xlsm, or xlsb, so long as they can open it in Excel and punch in numbers, and there are mechanisms to prevent these people from getting infected easily.
You make a good point, I just hate it. I feel like there's a lot of examples where this is more relevant but admit I'm struggling for examples (TXT, log, inf, etc) by really it's only video files bay have quite different content of structure despite the same extension - this is why everyone uses VLC because it handles everything you throw at it
Another is not underlining the keyboard indicators.
These were both on by default in the early releases of windows (far as i remember) and some bunch of smooth brains decided to remove meaningful information from the interface. It should be clear and detailed in a user interface, not implied
Yeah it's honestly way more likely for someone to change the file type and break the file while renaming it, than it is for malware to get past Defender.
Undo?
So dumb that windows hides the file extension as default.
Especially since it only associates by file extension.
I feel like that's long been a trend- instead of trying to lift users up and educate them, let's just give up and hide things.
It's really easy to over estimate the Windows user base. I have a family member who has gotten so pissed that the start menu moved from the left to the center that she refuses to use it. Functionality is more or less the same but apparently that's enough for her to not want to use Windows 11.
And no she won't use Linux.
She hates when Facebook changes it's UI and stopped using that a few years ago (probably a good thing).
I have a family member that's similar - they get really mad at inconsequential changes on the computer. But they also refuse to learn anything, so they're just mad all the time. They also treat their phone like a capricious deity- they're afraid to touch anything.
On the other hand, I have another family member that spends a lot of his time tinkering with linux. Years ago I got fed up fixing his windows machine I slapped xubuntu on his machine, and he took to it. He's done several updates and fresh installs since.
Both of them are retired, so it's not like they're hurting for free time.
Heh, that sounds like... me.
Yeah, I know it can be moved. But what I missed more was fullscreen start menu. Then again, my favorite Windows version is 8.1.
I was also postponing updates (for months) when there was a switch from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6. And I wish I could have kept it for a while on Arch, but partial upgrades always eventually catch up on me.
my favorite Windows version is 8.1.
8.1, not 8.
8.1 had a regular desktop as well, but it was really well optimized.
I tried it on some really old laptop, and it even beat Windows XP and Linux Mint in speed. Probably because it was mostly meant for stuff like tablets.
A trend with Windows. Mac and Linux have no problem showing you what you’re saving. Literally every other operating system that I know of has better decision making than Windows. Hell, even the file storage on an iPhone shows you the extension.
When i was a windows user, setting it to show file extensions was one of the first things that i would do after a installation
Given that I have worked with people who got confused when the start button stopped having the word “Start” on it I am going to disagree with you.
I can totally see somebody putting in a ticket because “it kept adding letters to the end of the file name when they saved”.
you know what's even dumber is that windows never learnt to identify files apart from its extension. every other modern operating system (e.g. everything unixlike) knows how to identify files even without file extensions
Yeah but then I can't tell what filetypes they are. Having the type directly in the name is an awesome convention. And theoretically, it prevents the os from having to read every file's contents. And it's good for not having to use thumbnails. So you can have more condensed file browsing. It's also better for proprietary filetypes and new things since the os doesn't need to know wtf something is.
Your logic reminds me of using nondescript variable names in programming. Yes, the system will probably know, but I'm the user, I'm the person this is all for. And it's good convention to have good naming convention. File extensions are nice to have and good convention.
When I was a kid I visited my grandparents and since there was still only Internet Explorer on their terrible computer I decided to install Firefox.
Unfortunately the computer power supply died right after I did.
Therefore my Firefox installation was determined to be the root cause of the computer being ruined.
So yeah, Firefox apparently kills power supplies in some folklore.
And that's what the fire in firefox means
When I came home for summer break after my freshman year of college I had to use my mom's car to get around. Well my mom is the absolute worst person when it comes to auto maintenance. The 3rd day I was home and driving her car her engine blew a piston rod because the piston ceased in the cylinder. Turns out my mom never changed the oil. Like never ever. But because it happened while I was driving it was all my fault. I "must have been racing or doing something that caused the problem". 25 years later she still thinks it was something I did.
When I was buying my last car I overheard a couple huffing and making a big show of walking out over the trade-in offer they were given for their vehicle. The sales person responded they could have offered a lot more if the oil had ever been changed in the vehicle
My mother is like this but worse. Some sort of tech in the house doesn't behave as she expects? It's obviously caused by that time I used it 3 months ago. It doesn't matter that it worked just fine between then and now, everything is my fault.
I can't wait until she's finally dead.
No need to be suspicious, it's just a self extracting zip file. Convenient and downloads faster!
It flashed a command prompt, that's how you know it worked!
rick_astley_never_gonna_give_you_up.mp3.exe
I never fell for mp3.exe, but I did install Real Player and use the built in browser once.
I learned how to remove a Trojan virus that copy pastes itself into a few directories before mom got home from work at 9 years old.
People wonder why I know so much about computers, a large part was fucking up the expensive family PC repeatedly.
I feel like that's the case for a lot of our generation
How times have changed. I used to have print outs in my filing cabinet with virus removal guides from all the various times I contracted digitally transmitted diseases online.
That's how we all learned it back then. Shear necessity.
Most boomers were too far into old age to learn it effectively. X and Z were raised in it. Now the tech has changed dramatically and you don't need anywhere near the skill anymore, there's a lot of younger generation that have no clue again. They can run the shit out of an iPad though.
Limewire is the new beans on Lemmy or something? This is the 7th Limewire post in 2 days...
Lemmy is in danger of growing stale. We're taking it to strange new places.
Mate, you've only been here for 14 days.
I repartitioned the hard drive to install Linux.
Unbeknownst to me, my brother had stored the photos he took of our grandparents 50th wedding anniversary on that drive. There was no backup.
There are two types of people who do back ups:
It's only paranoia if it's unwarranted.
My favourite was when people would then use limewire to pirate limewire pro and double up on the malware
linkinpark_paparoach_korn.exe
That was truly a banger, really infectious!
I still remember bricking my mom’s gateway computer while downloading eps of love hina, blade 2 soundtrack and next door Nikki videos off of limewire…sorry mom.
E machines for me. Xp sp1 lol. 512mb ram.
Lol I remember eMachines. Integrated graphics on a desktop tower and the thing sounded like a leafblower under load. Also I believe it wouldn't support a dedicated GPU either.
Man... I had that thing humming trying to run Sims 2. But diablo 1 rand like a champ. I cooked that thing so many times, it's what taught me how to rebuild windows. Eventually my family gave up on saving files to the computer.
I never really got into file sharing early on, I somehow jumped onto torrents instead and soon after migrated to Linux distro hopping for a while.
All the while I kept fixing PCs for family and friends.
Almost all of them were worn down, infected and affected by the 12 year old in the house who tried to download anything and everything they could find. Their only limiting factor was hard drive space, otherwise they would have downloaded the internet if given the chance.
I remember starting up a Windows PC I volunteered to fix, waiting half an hour for it to finish its start up routine, go into it's start up programs and discover a list of 200 weird items that came on at every start up ..... delete or remove all of them ... restart, wait again and now there were 100 items at start up ... research how to remove things, rinse repeat for about two days and finally gain back normal control of everything. Then move, back up or just delete a bunch of junk to take back hard drive space.
Hand it back to the owner who put it back in their home office and their 12 year old would start downloading things again.
It would take me days to fix it and the kid would take hours to ruin it all.
Then the parents would blame shitty software or hardware and go out and buy a new faster system.
The only side benefit to all this was that I ended up collecting a bunch of old systems, laptops and tablets that I fixed or used as Linux test systems and learned a lot from.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
