Still on UA... because one moron is buying a new machine and asks something about moving to an SSD, partitioning etc. Nina has finished doing that on Raja's box in one night, and the discussion here is going on for five days now.
Nowadays the antivirus may be harder to exterminate than any virus. Over the last 20 years, I had just one mild infestation (on the IIS which I didn't even turn on, it came up by default in then W2k), but had situations where the AV or firewall would be so ingrained in the system that it took some serious voodoo to get rid of. Daughter had a combo FW+AV and turned off the AV, which then came to a conclusion that it was tampered with, so it locked two of her disks. Took her days to recover.
One advantage to buying the parts and assembling the system yourself is that you've much better control over the components within. Downside of course is that not all parts will work with other parts. Computer technology changes at such a rate that it's almost like dealing with the Haggunenons (an alien race from Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy -- "Their tendency to evolve almost instantaneously has the downside of discarding one deficiency for another. For example, when they reach for sugar for their coffee, they may evolve into something with far longer arms, but which is probably quite incapable of drinking the coffee." ). With jut the CPU socket, you're apt to find that new layouts seem to be introduced every 2-3 years (meaning that if you're sourcing the parts over an extended period of time, you could run the risk of having *competely incompatible* parts -- not just eletrically, but physically as the connectors aren't even the same -- something that some self-builders learned the hard way when they discovered that the CPU they bought doesn't match the corresponding socket on the motherboard).
I was lucky that I had to buy only a new power source, because the new board wanted two more power wires - six instead of four, and bringing the two extra manually didn't work. Most of the time, though, the most expensive part of the operation is the five days it takes to learn what's available and which features are useful, what kind of memory is en vogue, which level of USB/SATA/whatever is a must and which is just too early to adopt (and may actually go nowhere, like microchannel) etc etc. My strategy was always to just explain to a hw guru what I do with my machine, and he'd tell me what to buy - with actual links to NewEgg, most of the time. These guys are getting lost now - two of them were sons-in-law (one divorced, one deceased), a guy from another forum (from which I went into a forever)(the forum, not the guy, but would be hard to find him now). The one hardware shop where they had someone who can assemble a box by my specs has closed, and there's now just one left.
Which means I'm now on hardware which is partially five years old (board, processor, memory, power), four years (video card, SSD, the huge cooler with 2x120mm fan), six (one disk), nine (other disk), eleven (the disk in the outer box), seven (monitors), two (keyboard), twenty one (case, from Comp USA, can use it as step ladder) and four months (mouse). Too bad I ditched the old nVidia, it served about fourteen years, survived five monitors.
procrastination was invented much later
Ed Leafe replied to my email about Dabo - ah, I downloaded the master branch, which is rather obsolete. Dabo3 is the one to take.
Went to the old house before lunch to mow and to finish reshooting the first notebook of my old diary. That should cover 1969 and maybe some of 1970.
In the afternoon an email came from one of the oldwave members that another member has died. Phew. Old as we may call ourselves, we had only one guy die so far, and he way at least ten years older than me. This guy was probably younger, eyeballably 6-7 years younger than me. Actually, I should be the oldest of the gang. He tried his best to live cleanly - went vegan, microbiotics and whatnot. I remember he did so even back then in Niš in 2012. Well, so it goes.
We finally went with the girls, on bicycles, downtown. Feels like sunday (though it's a thursday, but we don't work...). The main street is full of tables for cafes and cakeshops, the physical distancing is kept in queues (the serekeš in vodotoranj, Telenor's shop), the shops claim they'll allow only two ("nr. 2" the clip says) customers at a time, but only about 5% of people wear masks and there's a general feeling that the captivity is over. As someone said on burundi, "from full tilt strictest curfew etc measures in all of Europe to fully relaxed in just one week, speed unseen".