Quest for the Packard Bell - Chapter X: (Post #23)

 Quest for the Packard Bell

Chapter X

Free Parking

  On the one hand, I'm feeling a little bit braindead and literally want to put someone on blast for then saying that a peaceful world might not be as free as it seems. Like, every form of paradise has its price. There never was, and there never is going to be, any such thing as a free lunch where nobody has to pay anything, because even if money and currency cease to exist as concepts - other ways of payment will become the new standard in time. Namely, the standard of divine obedience, to the point where no one will be allowed to make the same error in judgment that Adam and Eve had made in the Garden of E'den. 

 

  Now, before you worry this blog is becoming a religious sermon, and start wanting to help me pack and have my ass run to that outport I've often said that I would move to to spend the rest of my life in should any irrecoverable damage be inflicted upon my character reputation, my intention is not to bring "religion" to this argument or discussion. In fact, quite the opposite. My intention with this series of blog posts, as well as blog posts past and present, have they been in Nerdz In Space (defunct blog), Ramen Pirate (defunct blog), or any of the past computer build blogs (Project Claymore & Emulation Station Mini-Build are also defunct blogs), is to present interesting perspectives on stuff I'm generally interested in, while "religion" and its turning back the clock on societal process little hands are kept as far away from the words on the screen as I possibly can keep them. 

 

  This is probably almost as bad as some of the new "Berenstain" or "Berenstein" bears (For years, I still am unsure of the spelling) books being published that have religious themes in them. I mean, I don't think I will buy them. Also, if I get given them for a gift, no sooner than I have them taken out of the gift box, I will not be putting my name anywhere where there is a "This book belongs to" cover. In fact, they will remain in the gift box, or immediately be taken to an used book store, while I say, "Out of this house!" at first, and then, "Out of the car!" when I make it back to the town where the book store is, while I still carry the book, but only doing it three times in the parking lot until I'm absolutely sure I'm out of the car with it. "Out of my life" I will only say when I make it to the book store and trade that book away for something else that in the very Marie Kondo spirit that I will believe brings joy to my life instead. So, if anyone decides I need something for a gift, don't give me any "Berenstain" or "Berenstein" bears books. I'll appreciate it if you don't give me any such thing for my gift.

    In fact, I've often felt that despite what my parents might say, whether I do/don't need certain things, I already have a feeling I'm probably going to be spending a lot of the months going forward to where my month-end bank balance is going to be equal to 0. I mean, when I go for coffee at my somewhat more local to home going west-bound from Kingston/Greenwood area Robins Donuts, (Which is the Brooklyn St. Market in Middleofnowhereton), I have managed to spend less than $10.00 on what I get there, on average.) This means if say, I want to buy a pallet of Amazon returns someday in the near-ish future, my budget should supposedly have just a little bit of wiggle room despite my need of doing a "Bread-and-Milk" run. I mean, Grocery Items like that, despite how crazy inflation has become now, can't be all THAT expensive.

     Now, some may be scratching their heads and wondering why I don't want to use Windows 11 in the first place. Well, while it's good & all being able to emulate games from the Atari 2600 era all the way to the Sony PlayStation 2 era on here directly using the frontend called Retrobat (I wouldn't try Xbox games, and I am talking about OG Xbox - after a while the scrape just quit working on it mysteriously [?]) Windows 11 is the absolute latest in the CeMeNT Windows architecture. 

 

    Many features from Windows NT 4.0, CE, Windows 2000 and XP, as well as Vista, and in some cases 8 and 8.1 (I think HomeGroup died with Windows 7), have persisted to Windows 10, and even in some cases right up into Windows 11. True, the sound that plays whenever you boot the computer up from cold (which should not be done more than once or twice a day), is a nice, welcome touch, but one of the greatest flaws of Windows 11, (apart from the Windows Store, but I've pretty much also ripped it enough a new asshole that I don't need to anymore) is that it pretty much bloats just as much (if not worse) than Windows 10. I had to tell the computer to remove Windows Update cleanup files plus a few other garbage collection data. I could have indeed taken some of the files that were in my own personal "Downloads" folder directory off the computer too, however, I don't have a USB-plug-in only hard drive with enough free space at the moment (and not serving another purpose) to do that. I guess when my Dad goes to Wal-Mart (and takes me with because I assumed that his nearly 76-year old brain can't process the concept of external storage beyond flash drives maybe) I'll probably buy myself a hard drive, and pick my Dad's hard drive myself so that he has to do the minimum amount of thinking as absolutely possible. 

 

    Oh, and another thing? NTFS is a terribly inefficient filesystem. I mean, the storage on this computer supposedly is 256.0Gigabytes, but, the actual reported capacity by Microsoft Windows is somewhere in the ballpark of 237. So, I'm wondering where did the other 19 Gigabytes go? I suppose it could've been pre-allocated to the manufacturer's recovery partition (A Hewlett-Packard laptop that I got from the then in-business in Canada Future Shop did something similar.) but I still cannot help but feel somewhat ripped off. I have used Linux before, and during the OS setup, it's often reported 100.0% (sometimes 1% more) of what was reported on the internal hard drive's label. 

 

   Not that I'm suggesting everyone go back to FAT16 or FAT32. (I'm not making that 2.0Gigabytes be the limit for local storage on hard drive.) Technology has evolved since the 1990s. Quite a lot. We did gain quite a lot over the years - but I can't help what think about what we lost. 

 

    Such as: 

 

- Program Manager being the default Windows UI environment (From Windows 98 onwards - possibly worth doing a little bit of research on that later.) 

- The Storm (VGA) color scheme - (From Windows Vista onwards. There are ways to add that back to other versions of Microsoft Windows up to the present, but most people never pick that color scheme.) 

- CD Drives from computers (Meh. If I need to have that capability back, I can always just use an external one.) 

- Real-Mode DOS (Not a terrible loss, I think it probably may be possible to emulate "some" of that using DOSBox - but I also believe that I may be needing to do some research - probably due to Millennium Edition having DOS mode completely removed.) 

 

    And newer is never always better. Even when things circumstance in this world are compared between old vs. new.