That’s it, thanks.
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I think I actually have an example of technology making my life easier 
A couple of months ago I bought a reMarkable, which is an e-ink writing tablet that is specifically marketed as being “distraction free”. I find that I retain information much better if I hand write it rather than type notes or just listen to someone speaking, but I also quickly end up carting around multiple notebooks, papers, diaries, etc. And then I can’t find anything. So now I have all my uni/work/personal scribblings in the same place, backed up, and searchable 
While I was researching writing tablet options I encountered quite a lot of “just buy an iPad” advice. This being where the “distraction free” part comes in… If I want to focus properly I have to leave my phone in a different room + use a really vicious app blocker + make it really hard to disable said app blocker, so anything that allows you to do anything other than writing was a non-starter.
Is it a very expensive, glorified notebook? Yes
Do I regret buying it? Nope.
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Which model do you have. Because I read this and yelled vaguely in the direction of my partner’s office. “hey listen, have you heard of remarkable… sounds like the thing you’ve been looking for all the time”
And he has heard of it but hasn’t really researched it…
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I have a remarkable 2. There are a few e-ink tablets around and it’s at the cheaper end (relatively speaking). There’s a YouTube channel called my deep guide which has loads of very in-depth reviews and comparisons between different brands that I found really helpful.
I kept the cost down a little by buying a refurbished tablet and a third-party case and stylus.
Edit: it also runs Linux, if that makes any difference 
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This things sounds magic. Would it be easy to do a Mind Map on this machine?
A subtler, but more dangerous exploit has been published.
And exploits of the .zip domain are already happening.
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In the sense that you can draw a mind map on piece of paper, yes. It doesn’t have built-in tools for diagramming specifically. I use Miro if I want to draw fancy diagrams.
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I have now spent at least 8 hours trying to recover my dad’s windows … I know entirely too much about diskpart, EFI boot, tools to repair boot files and NONE of it worked.
Also Dell Support does not work on week-ends (just like me but when they work, I have work as well). Self-service recovery image download fails… the computer is 5 years old and it just plain sucks. I am sure if I let him take it to some repair shop they’ll just delete his data partition. I don’t trust those shops. In my experience, the guys there think everyone besides them is an idiot.
I don’t even want to reinstall windows as this is a digital license for which he has no key and I have no idea–without talking to support–if I can access that at all through “normal” installation. He has of course NOT linked the license to his microsoft account–which I also failed to do for my own computer when I tried this week.
I am just griping. I normally do not do this level of hardware support for family. But this kind of issue also has not happened before. I mean I could just re-install and hope I can fix it in post… 
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As an update to the last one: I installed a new windows 11 from the usb boot medium I made previously and it was absolutely easy. I had used a tool named Rufus.ie that allowed me to preconfigure some stuff and I ended up with a really clean and quick installation. And preserved the big data partition on the 2nd drive. My dad was quite happy about it.
Now my sister’s 7 year old computer is failing. She lives too far away for me to go have a look. Her budget for new hardware was around 300€. First she was going to by a refurbished Dell thing that was an older generation than her current computer–we told her that looked like a scam. We tried to convince her to let us build her a NUC (this was the cheapest variant we could come up with at that moment). She needs a PC with windows (reasons) and doesn’t want a laptop.
We couldn’t find her anything cheap enough that we would have approved, so now it is some cheap thing she found on amazon that is probably riddled with spyware. We’re now hoping that it is going to be so bad she’ll return it (the reviews stated it couldn’t even run multiple browser tabs despite the hardware being just the previous generation which is why we think spyware et al)
If you had relatives asking for advice how to get the cheapest possible windows hardware, what would you tell them?
PS: I used to be really good at off-loading the tech support elsewhere… I don’t know when that changed. I blame chatGPT.
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I feel guilty saying it, but that’s in the “too hard” basket for me. I no longer understand Windows, and I don’t think I understand the requirements of people who want Windows. So I really don’t know what to recommend, and I couldn’t troubleshoot anything for them unless I was there in person. I know my brother has helped Mum and Dad change computers before, and it’s been a genuine relief to me that I haven’t had to be involved. Inevitably I sometimes wind up doing some tech support when I visit, but that’s less stressful than trying to figure out what they should be buying. (Not that I wouldn’t figure something out if it was left to me, but I’m quite glad that thus far it hasn’t been.)
Edit: Now having flashbacks about the time I spent all day dealing with backups and restoration for them one time, involving a PC which had all of Mum’s old research on it, which existed nowhere else. She hadn’t switched it on in years, had never backed it up, was assuming that all her work was safely stored on it in perpetuity, and assured me that it would be catastrophic if any of it was lost. Fun times.
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Neither do I. As I said: I blame chatGPT. That said I am working on a windows machine. I am too lazy to run Linux for work because everyone is using windows for work at the last 3 places I did projects at. And if I am the only one using Linux all problems are suddenly “me problems”. Also I like gaming on my computer every once in a while and I am also too lazy to try and get games to run even though I suppose these days it is a bit easier than it used to be way back when I last went to the trouble…
In any case. Windows is quite power hungry. So we went with 8 better 16GB RAM and 512GB SDD. And well not a 7 year old processor generation. But maybe one from the last 2-3 years? But prices for hardware on the cheap end are around 600,- for a new desktop or maybe 500,- for a laptop. €€€ 
My dad is pretty good with backups–all manual but they exist–and has already bragged to my sister that we promised he would get some space on our NAS when we move.
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I tell them what I charge an hour to do work with windows (a number that is roughly five times what my day job pays. , and they go ask someone else, or buy a Mac. Messing around with stupid computers is what I do for a living, I am not doing it in my free time. I particularly don’t want to touch windows, because it’s crap, it’s excessively complicated, and it’s not what I do. I can get away with that partly because my immediate family, and most of my friends, use apple stuff, which requires less fussing with. My wife’s family are mostly cheapskates who buy crap, but fortunately, they are not close enough to ask often, and there are a couple of windows people closer.
People who buy cheap crap are hard to reason with. They won’t spend more to not get cheap crap, even if they can afford it. ( I have sympathy for “can’t afford anything else”, but not “won’t take advice on how to maximize the value they get”).
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My desktop computer’s ups died. Yay.
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I am reasonably sure she could afford to spend 500€. But not much more than that.
I am not even sure why she asked. Because she didn’t listen to a thing we said except to not buy the refurbished thing.
Buying cheap means buying twice
We managed to switch my dad from cheapskate Aldi computers to Dell. They do decent enough hardware at okay prices and the support is ok. Since he he switched to Dell he seems to have far less trouble.
This time I think we might be to blame because there were a lot of power outages during the renovations and he didn’t know that he should disconnect his desktop from the power outlet when he leaves for 3 weeks so those power outages do not turn his computer on accidentally (stupid configuration in BIOS). Repeated accidental starts and windows/bios updates are my theory as to what happened to his computer.
In a few years my nephew can do his mother’s tech support and we’ll be living right next to my dad. So… that will be easy.
and another edit: what might have turned my sister away from Dell is that the same model costs 100€ more on the French online shop than the German one. Seeing that directly might piss her off enough to not want one of those. And the other brand name computers I could think of were also more expensive than Dell even here. Which is why we offered to buy parts and build one for her. My dad will be visiting soon enough and could have taken it to her
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My parents always go for the cheapest laptops they can get from a big brick and mortar chain in the UK.
They at least have sense to buy the same model as each other.
Any warnings I have about cheapness or specs just go unheaded.
Inevitably my mum will end up disappointed because it’s not powerful enough to play some of the games she wants to play.
In a handful of years the laptops will die and need to be replaced or have surgery conducted on them (by me).
Rinse and repeat.
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“I don’t do Windows. If you want to run Linux on a laptop, get a Thinkpad – it must have ‘Thinkpad’ in the name, not other Lenovo machines – and I’ll sort you out.” 
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While I’m sure all you programmers have very important Reasons for eschewing Windows, I would absolutely default to recommending Windows to any family members who aren’t tech savvy.
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That’s one of the awkward parts, as I wouldn’t want to recommend any Unix-y systems to anyone who was enough of a technophobe to be needing the help in the first place. I think Windows and MacOS probably are the sound choices for those people. It’s just that I don’t know those systems (they have changed a lot since I last used either of them).
So the OSs I can help with, I wouldn’t recommend; and the OSs that I’d recommend, I can’t help with. (So far as the particular people I have in mind are concerned, at any rate.)
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Since you asked—sorry for the rant it‘s been some time since I last debated the respective merits of Linux and Windows and it seems I miss that …
Just like every other comp science student I disdained windows because it is a terrible inconvenient system to play around with. Everything is convoluted and „klicki-bunti“ meaning I can‘t use a terminal to configure things but need to click on some graphic UI to do things. In Linux everything is text-based and I like text. Linux has awesome shells that are very powerful and can be automated easily. Windows introduced more of those features over the years—first powershell and now they even have WSL—the windows linux subsystem. Even just SSH which many devs need all the time was a hassle to deal with on Windows.
And Windows is closed source and in Linux everything is open. You can get at every little part of it …
Add to that that many of us write software that need to run on servers and nobody in their right mind runs windows as a server. And so I need to write software that runs on Linux and so I really need to test in that environment and… how do I best do that? By writing it in that environment. Or else I get a lot of „works on my machine“ issues.
And most of us here on the forums are a similar age and Microsoft were the bad guys back in the day. Not just the bad guys, they practically invented being the bad guys in the realm of software. I admit they got a little better … (after being slapped with fines and told to open up their APIs)
The windows code base didn‘t get better. It is still really difficult to find out what is happening where Linux just provides you with handy logfiles for everything. And there are still the dreaded BSODs and you still need to reboot when a driver updates and… windows software updates are still awful (there are tools now that profess to be better but I have tried installing one and … didn‘t finish the process.
At least the virus scanning is somewhat less of an issue now that the windows included one suffices. Mostly. (Linux has a different kind of Virus problem which is called php)
So yeah devs disdain for windows… has various reasons.
And all the things that make it great to use for devs make it a bad choice for my dad. That which you can configure easily you can break easily.
Personally, I have not run Linux on a desktop/laptop for many years now, I work on Windows with much grinding of teeth when it fails me but for the most part it is okay enough to use and with WSL I can even develop software on it without hating every minute of it. Too much software runs on Windows because the graphical part of the OS is not Linux‘ strong suit and people who write programs for end-users tend to want that and so Lightroom/Photoshop, my tax software and lots of games run on Windows. Yes there are open source alternatives to some and some stuff would run in Wine… but and it is easier integrating the text-based features of Linux into Windows via WSL than it is running graphical UIs in Wine (Windows-Emulator) on a Linux machine—caveat: this may have changed, as stated I haven‘t run a desktop Linux in a while. Due to the nature of Windows and Linux respectively work computers are easier controlled and administered by IT if they run Windows and so lots of companies use Windows as their work system for devs even if the software written runs on Linux servers. Which is the final reason I am running Windows these days.
PS: also I know a lot of devs who don‘t love linux as much as the average on this forum seems to. So you are also getting just a tiny sample of the dev community.
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My point is more, I have no idea how to secure or de-spyware modern Windows, so I won’t be able to help with it.
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