Solved How realistic are my goals?

[Cedric62]

I did OS reinstalls back on Win98/XP and didn't have a backup drive or large storage

I remember having to stay up late to reinstall Win 95 on our home PC way back when, but the only problem with doing a reinstallation is that during the time when you are doing the installation, your computer cannot do anything else until the install process is complete, and sometimes it was not always so easy to setup everything exactly as it was before the last reinstallation. Also, I discovered xxcopy during the Windows 98 era, and I used to use xxcopy to clone my primary master to a second hard drive I had installed secondary slave drive. (There was a way to hide the second hard-drive, but I don't remember how I did it anymore.) It was not a very efficient way of doing things, but it worked pretty well. In my view, it was better than doing a new installation and trying to find all of the diskettes for the video, audio, modem, and so on. I have a real phobia of doing complete reinstallations (os, drivers, settings, and software) and I guess that I was traumatized by having to reinstall Windows 95 some many times in the mid-1990s.

 

[Maturin]

I remember having to stay up late to reinstall Win 95 on our home PC way back when, but the only problem with doing a reinstallation is that during the time when you are doing the installation, your computer cannot do anything else until the install process is complete,

It was not only that your computer was unvailable for hours.
It was the installation process itself, and what came afterwards, that drived one nuts.

You had to sit by it the whole time: 'ok', 'ok', 'yes', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes' - Windows basic installation finished. Then the installation of drivers started: 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'yes', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot, 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', 'ok', 'ok', 'no' (I don't want to take the 'tour'), 'ok' (I recognized, I can start the tour anytime again.)
If there weren't any more drivers to install besides USB, graphics card, keyboard, mouse, sound, printer and network. Else add one 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', change disk, 'yes', 'yes', 'ok', reboot and 15 to 20 minutes for each driver.
Hours! Depending on the amount of coffee-, cigarette- and pee brakes you took, while those the machine also took a break waiting for another 'ok' or 'yes' by you.

During all this process you've stared many times on that MS self advertisment screen saying,
'With Windows 95 the work at the computer now is more fun.'
When you "worked" with this shit for quite a while, at the latest when reinstalled Windows the 3rd time, and you know all that feared waiting for the next crash, already knowing the next reinstallation will be unavoidble, that's just cynical.
And apart from that it shows Microsoft has no idea about an operating system.
If I want to have fun with my computer I start a computer game, watch a video, or something else. But I don't expect no fun by the OS. Particulary not during work. Work at the computer has to be done as efficiently as possible. That's the original idea of computers at all after all: Improve the work efficiency, not bringing fun into work.
Especially not that kind of "fun" Windows brings. Must be some kind of sick masochists enjoying that kind of fun.

Then the configuration and clean up started: bring the desktop icons into order, black background picture, deinstall all the unwanted Windows features, and above all switch off all the useless and only annoying fiddle-faddle, above all the Windows sound, make this shit shut tf up. Later Windows XP brought one of the most valuabe new features of all new Windowses features ever: The additional option under sound profile to make it all shut up with a single click. But under Win95/98 there still wasn't that option. So, you had to go through the whole list and have to check off every single hook. When after ten minutes at the latest using this shit you got one *beep*, *boing*, *burp* or *fart* you missed one.
The clean up continued: Remove all the garbage from the desktop, all this AOL test access advertisment crap etc: 'yes', 'ok', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes' for each of it.
'empty garbage bin', 'yes', 'ok', 'yes', 'yes'
Finally: A fresh installed, virgin Win95/98.
The term 'virgin' shall point out that Windows (in fact its holy registry) messed up over time by just using the computer. You already knew another full reinstallation - repeating this whole shit again - at a certain point one day will become unavoidable, because eventually the shit will be so fokked up again, the machine simply wasn't really usable anymore: too slow, too many hangs, crashes, bluescreens. How long this took until this was neccessary again depended on two factors: The amount of new installed and deinstalled apps, and how many bluescreens per day you accept. Could last 9 months up to one year, if you used some "registry cleaning" tool, or if you were interested in software packages, looked at some, tested a few, maybe after 6 months, maybe after 4 or even sooner a complete full new installation was needed again.
But at the moment there only is Windows.
All the progs, applications, and games also again all needed to be reinstalled, of course. ('yes', 'ok', 'ok', reboot,...)
And after that all the files in "My Documents" and on "Desktop" also needed to be copied from the backup devices to their places again.
*sigh*

All together at least one whole saturday, 8 large cups of coffee, one medium sized bag of cookies, 4 medium beers, one frozen pizza and one and a half packages of cigarettes were needed for that marathon.
And then, if you did not made any mistake, highly probable but not certain for sure, you had a usable working machine again. For a couple of months.

That's when I started to do full drive backups (first with clonezilla, I guess [can't remember the first tool], then with Gparted-Live.) I had at least two clones of my Windows system partition: 'virgin' vanilla, and one with all progs and apps installed. The latter one needed to be "updated" from time to time.
So I made the HDD-jockey a lot back in my Windows days, since there was/is no real useful way to backup Windows but doing full partition or drive clones on additional drives. Under Unix there are just files only. Files can be handled with the filesystem: cp, mv, rm. But under Windows there are also such things like "registries" and "objects", and not even God knows what else; also files, you simply cannot delete even when you are administrator with full rights.
But this way of just cloning back, a "new full installation" lasted only 1..3 hours, and above all it could ran without any surveillance. Once started it completely ran by its own, e.g. overnight or while I'm doing the groceries. Just cloning back one of the backupped partitions.

All this shit finally stopped completely since I run FreeBSD.
HEAVEN!
I still do have some old Gparted-Live DVDs and flashdrives somewhere, but I need to think hard, when I cloned my last drive with those (6 years?) If needed I'd do it with dd. But I don't need it anymore.

...so many tears...so much ...all those wasted years...(and we actually even payed money for that!)

I am so thankful there is something like FreeBSD.
And that I am using it, being here.
And that I don't depend on Windows anymore.

But this whole Windows HDD-cloning thing had one benefit:
This way I got a bunch of HDDs, for which I had no use for anymore, when I switched to FreeBSD.
Those became the start to build my first NAS with a ZFS raidz2 pool, where I also do my local backups to.
Runs FreeBSD, of course.
What else?
Windows?

 

[Cedric62]

all those wasted years...(and we actually even payed money for that!)

Yes, you are right about that. Microsoft Windows was not a cheap product, even back in the mid 1990s. I think that I had to pay around $200 for the full installation version, because my sons had given the disk which came with our PC to one of their friends. Also on top of paying the exorbitant price for a Windows 95 CD, we still had the problem of having to deal with a PC that was down at least 20% of the time due to a registry error, or some other type of configuration error which the average home user couldn't fix, so the only option was doing another installation. I don't know how Microslop got away with doing what they did back then. Can you imagine if a automobile factory produced a high priced car which was inoperable 20% of the time due to defects? They would have been shutdown, but somehow Microslop continues.

 

[Maturin]

I don't know how Microslop got away with doing what

That's the biggest trick they pulled their whole business is built on.

Since MS DOS and later MS Windows was, and still is today included with (almost) every new computer you buy, people just swallowed it as given. Plus people are used long since to take it as given that consumer products always have flaws and need to be replaced frequently.
There are only very few people seeing that Windows is not included for free, but the license is priced in (way lower than you pay for it when you buy it without a new computer, but still not for free), or even asking and looking for computers without any Windows (Back in those days, the only way to get one was to build your own.)
Once the majority is using it, the majority uses it, because the majority uses it, not asking many questions. Following the masses not only feels right, but is way more comfortable. Walking alternative paths was always way more effort.
In this case this wasn't that very hard to gain it. Since back in the days of MS-DOS, Windows 3.11 and internet was a strange thing only some few "nerds" had, there still were no free to use OS, or even if, they were mostly unkown to the vast majority, and even if known, by far not that mature and usable for the people as they are today, so also only for a small group of interested "nerds" with access to the internet.
While other alternatives (Unix, CP/M) were exclusively for machines only, that cost twice if not four times or more than you could got a computer at a supermarket. Also a lot of companies decided to buy machines with MS OS, because it's a difference if you pay 1k to 2k or 3k to 6k for one computer.
This also accelerated software production for that OS, so already very soon there were not almost all the other machine's software available for MS OS but even way more at all - plus games.
My personal theory: The system providing the most games will be the OS of the future. What is the crucial point for a decision what computer to buy for youngsters? Games, of course. What computer system will they use when they grow up and start using the machine for more serious stuff? The system they already know, of course.
Plus eyecandy sells. We see it a lot here in the forums: open source newbies, Windows dropouts on detox primarily need to face the fact they need to abstain from lots of eyecandy, need to learn that's just useless crap, but still looking for how to get it. In this point MS is exemplary. Not only providing wasteful amounts of that crap, which does not only just pleases the eye and lead to addiction, but also covers and distracts from flaws, suggests easy and pleasing usage, covering the fact that's in fact a very inefficient working environment the users are confronted with. And with every new version of Windows MS provides even more, and above all new, fresh, more modern looking eyecandy, so it feeds the greed and addiciton for it.
Plus creating eyecandy is by far less development effort than to develop efficient structures.

But above all they convinced people about two things:
With Windows they can use a computer without any learning effort.
And any other OS is extremely complicated, very strenous to learn and use.

That they underline with doing it all their own way, using own terms for all the stuff the common user comes in touch with, and producing Star Trek like cryptical pseudo computer talk BS messages a user cannot and shall not understand, but just humbly nod it through.
Back in my Windows days (95/98, 2000, NT, XP and 7) I sometimes took me my time to dissect, actually trying to really understand what those things actually say. I never found any real usable content whatsover at all in those complicated pseudo computer term BS word construction monsters.
I don't know if it's true, but somewhere I read that the guys who translated that things into japanese figured out, it was all just useless garbage, so instead of translating it they exchanged those with japanese proverbs. So instead of "the severe exception error occurred at..." you may get "the early bird catches the worm" or something like this.
It's my favorite by the way. Because that BS actually means, that errors is just normal operation.

Plus they change all that crap with every new Windows version. So with with every new Windows version the user needs to relearn many things again he already learned. So deep down he feels, continous learning ain't not completely unavoidable with computers. What the user not sees is the contradiction against the silent promise, no learning was needed, and above all, on unix[like] operatins systems learning is not a pointless nuisance, because the basics you only need to learn once. They didn't really change in fifty years. And it's seldom you need to relearn things you've already learned. No, if the common Windows user looks at another OS, he does not see BSD, Linux, even MacOS when you use the shell, in usage look all pretty similar, the user sees a boring, eyecandyless, mostly text based system that looks completely strange, seeing only a giant burden of learning, plus the need to leave the comfy zone.

So, like any lazy individuum the user rather stays in the zone he/she is already used to, rather bite the bulltes the system occasionally throws at her/him, and trusting "the authorities" will take care enough for her/him instead of him-/herself.
That's a core difference between humans: The majority stays in their comfy zone as long as the pain and the effort to leave it seems bigger than the inconviences to pay for staying, while only a minority sees, the longer one poises the harder it gets to move, and when change is unavoidably, just a question of time, better start to move sooner than later.
Long time users of opens source OS already know that.
The majority don't.

 

[Cedric62]

With Windows they can use a computer without any learning effort.

But if you're going to use Windows on your home computer, then you are going to have to learn how to do a complete reinstallation of the operating system at least once a week. At least, that is the way it was during the mid 1990s.

Here is something interesting to think about. I'm well into my sixties, and so are most of the people I associate with. I have noticed that when I visit the homes of many of my friends, that they often have an old computer sitting in the front room of their house. But these computers are no longer being used, they just sit there as if they are on display in a museum. When I ask my friends why they no longer use their computers they would say, "Oh, I forgot my password", or "It got infected with malware, and now it doesn't boot up anymore". When I tell my friends that I could probably fix their machines by reinstalling a new operating system on it, they will say "Oh, that is okay, we really don't need that anymore, we can use our phones to access Facebook".

Wow, isn't that depressing? A lot of these people never really understood that there are other things on the Internet besides Facebook, and now for a lot of people, having a broken computer in their living room is like having an antique spinning wheel sitting in the corner. Someone cleans it and dusts it once in a while, but no one knows how to fix it or how to use it, and to them it is just a sentimental relic of when their children lived at home.

 

[kpedersen]

Someone cleans it and dusts it once in a while, but no one knows how to fix it or how to use it, and to them it is just a sentimental relic of when their children lived at home.

The old family shared PC concept is such a cozy idea. The user-centric software, the cheesy mouse themes, the fun little icons, the rich wooden desk and CD trays.

There is something there that computing lost along the way. I just can't quite identify exactly what it was. Perhaps excitement or optimism for something that had the potential of improving our day-to-day lives?

Personally, I would also keep it there. Dusting it occasionally too

 

[Maturin]

The old family shared PC concept is such a cozy idea. The user-centric software, the cheesy mouse themes, the fun little icons, the rich wooden desk and CD trays.

Floppy disk boxes!
Just like as parents, kids and even teachers were told those crappy BASIC on homecomputer's ROM was good to learn computering, it was the marketing concept from the 80s and early 90s to bring computers into private households by selling them as a family thing. For sure you remember those ads with pictures showing a boy sitting in front of a computer playing a game while his little sister besides him has fun watching him, and his parents behind him smiling with pride. Which proves: Ads are BS. In reality brother and sister had a brawl about who plays now, and the parents weren't for sure not smiling with pride while their childs play some shooter.
But the marketing concept worked, even if the ads did not name any tangible thing what a family could actually use a computer for, because there was nothing. Before the WWW was available in every household, there was only either gaming, or serious learning about computers, programming, application software you could use on the job. But that was done only by a few really interested ones. Not really a family thing.
(see "Married... with Children", S3 E20 "The Computer Show", USA 1989)

Interesting thing btw: You still get those computer desks in furniture shops - not only in that cheap ugly 80's wood-like decor.

There is something there that computing lost along the way. I just can't quite identify exactly what it was. Perhaps excitement or optimism for something that had the potential of improving our day-to-day lives?

It was the idea had changed.
In the 80s it was clear to everybody it was the dawn of something revolutionary, the beginning of something really big. But nobody had a real idea where the journey will actually lead to. The deciding milestone finally became the availability of internet access for the masses.
Originally designed by scientists the internet (Arpanet) were for to get long distance (world wide 24/7) collaboration. This is already still the case, but it became just a minor part of it, since the masses and the commercial interests joined, the largest major part became just a new kind of "Telephone + TV 2.0".
Most of today's Websites are designed as interactive TV advertising spots.

The ideas and euphoria 90's computer people had to gain a world of creating freedom by providing free knowledge, exchanging ideas on a higher level etc. disappeared. Money took over.
For centuries rulers tried to keep knowledge secret, because they feared to lose control over their inferiors. Now look what happens when all the knowledge is available for everybody for free - you don't even have to move your ass into a library anymore. Everything is available directly in their own hands for (almost) free. Do today's people have more knowledge, more wisdom, do they read more, learn more? No. People prefer to watch the most stupid BS even bad movies in the early 1920s didn't dare to produce such as comedy. People prefer fake news. People prefer BS. People prefer emotions over facts. Emotions sell. Any emotion. Good emotions are expensive. Bad emotions are almost for free. It's pretty easy to outrage anybody. But to make somebody smile cost effort.
And so here we are. The original idea of freedom and knowledge has turned into an instrument of power, surveillance and control, addict people instead of freeing them, and make them even more stupid instead to make them smarter.
And the worst part is, since this all happens by free will, most of the times in free democracies, there is no chance to free them. The only way is they free themselves. For that they need to understand - a lot of things.
But understanding, asking critical questions, even asking questions at all, is something that seems to get lost soon.
That's the real problem.

Wow, isn't that depressing? A lot of these people never really understood that there are other things on the Internet besides Facebook, and now for a lot of people, having a broken computer in their living room is like having an antique spinning wheel sitting in the corner.

Yes.
What I also see is many people restart all over, when they get a new computer. I recently said to a friend of mine, 'You should have a copy of that file. I sent it to you.' He answered, 'Ooh, that's on my old computer.'
I observed that several times: One day they buy a new machine, and all data they had on the former one just stays on the old one. Even if you offer your help with such "freaky hardcore hacker stuff" like copying files from one machine to another, they don't want it. Well, the porn collection, if there is any, indeed can get lost. But GBs of PDFs, music, videos, letters, documents, work,...hundreds, if not thousands of pictures of birthdays, family reunions,...- on a vacation they all permanentely run with a camera lens infront of their faces, to save everything of that money spent for eternity - ...doesn't matter. They just don't care.
My father always was a passionate hobby photographer. He had a very good camera and a good eye for motifs. After vacations he assembled one box for a slide show, where the whole family or friends came, had an evening together. Since digital cameras he presents his pictures only by the camera's display, not even placing the SD card into the TV set. And since he has a smart phone, even the small digital camera became a dust collector. Comfort always wins.
They realize, they don't really need it. Sure it's depressing, when you look at the potential what all could be done with it. But so are many other things, like books bought and not read. Many (most?) of the things people buy just to satisfy the feeling to have it. They were convinced "everybody now has it. So need you." While in fact they have no need for it at all.
Whole households are stuffed with such junk. That's our economy is based on. All that lack of resources and environmental pollution is stored in form of consumer junk in attics, garages, basement storeys, wardrobes, guest rooms, living rooms ... and also bellies.
Everywhere I see people only fumbling bored with some touchscreen looking for fun, while the most important job of that display is to tell them, fun is what they need to buy next.