Two of my family members are still rocking machines of this vintage. Get a Vishera-based (8300 series) FX CPU if you can find it cheap, so you at least have x86-64-v2 instruction set. It helps. You probably have (Realtek?) gigabit networking onboard, but an Intel gigabit card will improve networking performance.

When streaming, you’re running the game and encoding video at the same time. This will make the PC double as a space heater, which might be OK if you’re in the northern hemisphere and approaching winter! 😉

Someone should create CoPirate for Linux, that saves a DRM-free local copy of everyone else’s data that goes through your machine. For training purposes, of course.

StarTropics for NES had a “letter from your uncle” in the manual, that you had to soak in water to reveal the submarine’s activation code when you reached Chapter 4. I think that was the only time we used the Nintendo tip line, because of a lost manual!

Some games let you keep playing without the correct code… until the difficulty automatically ramped up to impossible levels.

It splices into the live power cord and supplies the same voltage in parallel. When the connection is verified good, the PC is powered from battery and can be unplugged from the wall.

I have seen the use of such a device by gov’t agencies; basically a large UPS that clips onto the AC plug’s prongs so that a running server or desktop PC can be confiscated without power being interrupted.

If you are running Android Open Source Project without Google Play Services, Google has no control. However, manufacturers could be pressured into locking bootloaders and then no one gets AOSP or GrapheneOS at all.

I run a GTX 980 Ti; Maxwell architecture is still supported for three years. Older than that: Kepler support ended last year and Fermi support ended in 2023, and they won’t play nice with kernels released since then.

My Motorola has this by default, buried in Settings > Security > More security settings > Network protection.

I had a boomer drop off a laptop after Win7 got updated to 8. Post-it note read: “I’m used to Windows with the “e”. Is Windows even on here?”

Use Reader View in Firefox. I never accepted the cookies. 😉

You have packages held.

Debian user: shudders

I saw one Microsoft help page in which the customer service agent recommended to cut power to the PC during the Windows 8 or 10 boot process, three times! After three failed boots, newer Windows will bring up the UEFI boot options dialog.

My Sharp PC-7000 has a Setup key on the keyboard.

Sometimes this works. Sometimes it makes the PC speaker beep for two minutes straight while it slowly makes its way through the keyboard buffer.

That’s funny! If someone was trying to infect my PC via e-mail, I would expect them to be sending pdf files.

Also check out ELKS for your even older CPUs.

I’m thinking of old text adventure games where it would repeat your invalid command back to you.

>eat pussy

I can't "eat" a "pussy" right now!

>fuck yourself

I can't "fuck" a "yourself" right now!

No problem. I think in my case only Wine/Proton games were doing it and native Linux games were fine. I shake my fist at Nvidia and carry on. 😂

Try this setting: Display Configuration > Screen tearing: Allow in fullscreen windows. Whatever it’s set to, try the other setting. I had a similar issue once and this fixed it. The issue came back a long time later and switching it again fixed it. 🤷‍♂️

It’s a difficult issue to pin down. I’ve also read about video stuttering while trying to stay synched to pipewire audio which is having buffer underruns, even if your audio sounds fine. To check the audio buffer, you install and run pw-top and then watch it while you are having the video problem.