Thread by @HoarseWisperer

So, as a break from the firehose of today’s hearings, a story about my laptop.

It blue-screened today and now seems stubbornly disinterested in doing any computing.

That’s ungood.

1/

Way back a bunch of years ago, my laptop melted down. Not the hard drive. The graphics card or something. It was shot.

So I went and bought a new one.

However, since I had a solid $2k invested in all of the software trapped on the dead one, I set out to port it all over.

2/

Bought a new laptop.

The old one had Windows 7. The new one had Windows 10.

That seemed like a problem so I took both new and old to a computer place.

Told them I wanted to completely overwrite the new one with everything on the old one. Even the operating system.

3/

They literally threw their heads back and laughed.

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not. It’s just 1’s and 0’s. Why can’t you overwrite everything?”

“Because you can’t.That’s why.”

Now, I’m a person of great stubbornness when confronted with impossibilities I don’t wish to accept.

Unfortunately, I am also a person with none of the requisite skills to even attempt to do what I thought should be theoretically possible based on no actual expertise on the subject.

So, I went home and started Googling and watching YouTube videos.

5/

Thought I had figured it out and then ran into a roadblock. Over and over and over. New problem. Research. Solve it. New problem.

By Day Three, I had grown a full beard and was surrounded by printouts and the guts of my old laptop.

6/

The final hurdle:

Microsoft wrote some code write into the chipset meant to thwart people like me from doing exactly the kinda thing I was trying to do.

Hours of online spelunking later, I figured out how to rewrite the chip code and defeat the roadblock.

Presto! I did it!!!

I literally duped my old broken laptop over to my new one. Every single bit and byte.

Booted it up and it was like turning on my old machine. Right down to the wallpaper.

They said it was impossible.

Oh, sweet fancy Moses, I was proud of myself.

And I saved $2k in software.

Now that machine, my happy little achievement of stubborn tenacity and brief technical competence, appears to have gone to the big recycling bin in the sky.

Aside from not having the corn for a new machine and software replacement, I’m loathe to see it go.

Alas, the old/new laptop was running Windows 7 which Microsoft is dropping support for altogether.

The time has come to say goodbye.

I will miss you, Franken-laptop.

We had good times.

May your eternal rest by free of system updates and malware.

You deserve that.