Windows 8, Dell Laptops with faulty RAM, Petty IT Class Teachers, and an Autistic 10/11 Year Old with VirtualBox
It is some time after the 26th of October 2012, perhaps a few months, and 10 or 11 year old me is home on the "family" laptop which, at this point, was essentially mine in all-but-name at that point.
Now a decent chunk before that point the Youtube recommendation algorithm at some point changed from recommending a mixture of VSauce, Shoop da whoop, and DVD players, and instead recommended videos of programming stuff in <i>Windows Batch Script</i>.
It was probably me watching UXWILL now that I think about it. Thanks William! You're video of that DVD player with a bad power supply, and then all those computers you trashpicked, helped lead me to today where I'm combing through the RAM dumps of ancient Qualcomm BREW flip phones in Ghidra!
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely grateful! Show some love to danooct1 for his videos too.
Even if the fact I first learned programming via <b>fucking Windows Batch Script</b> gives me self embarrassment just thinking about it.
Despite now using Linux, I don't know a lick of BASH scripting short of piping and using command line utilities. I do know a bit of Makefile scripting! I suppose some things don't change.
First learned Javascript here! Some might argue that's somehow even worse, and I might be one of those very people in question.
Anyway 🌈aaaaalllll of this🌈 on that school issued iPad 2 eventually lead me to messing around with Virtual Machines on that Dell Inspiron 1501. Don't remember how, other then having to shuffle the installer and various ISOs via USB flash drives because I didn't know how to setup a WIFI password in Windows Vista. I just know I eventually got there.
Oh shit yeah! I was setting up virtual machines before I properly knew how to connect to a WIFI network lmfao. How.... How does that even happen!? Was playing hoodamath flash games on that laptop but then the WIFI SSID changed or something. Ended up being a year or two before that machine connected to the internet again, and it was <i>our then neighbors next door.</i>
Screw that mystery function light switch with a neon indicator above it in the basement stairwell of my now-nonexistent childhood home, I want to know how all THAT nonsense even happened!
<i>Trying</i> to keep on topic, Windows 8 launched and I eventually watched this classic video from back in the day: https://youtu.be/WTYet-qf1jo?si=by3baE1ww0xHOdME; "Windows 8: The Animated Evaluation" by @blogphilofilms
Because <i>autism</i> I ended up watching that video many MANY times. Tbf the guy has just.... The humor is great! It's a good video!
And because <i>autistic 10/11 year old</i> the whole hate fixation thing happened. Which makes the fact I installed <i>Windows 8 inside a VM on top of Windows Vista on a Turion TL-50 with 1GiB of RAM</i> quite baffling to me.
The fact it even ran is baffling too. That laptop had faulty RAM!
Anyway I grabbed the ISO off some sketchy website., loaded it up in VirtualBox, waited what was probably a good few hours for it to install as the whole thing was decently slow from all that overhead (which the copious amounts of sketchy software including literal malware I installed on the machine wouldn't of helped with), and.... Just messed around with the OG Windows 8.
It was slow, but I wasn't surprised by that. Thought Windows 8 was fine tbh. I generally knew my way around the OS on account of all those Windows 8 rant videos I watched ad nauseam.
I didn't do all that much with that install. It was pretty slow, especially without the guest edition drivers being installed. Atleast I don't think they where installed? Regardless it probably only had 512MiB allocated to it, there wouldn't of been much I could've done with it.
Other then not hyper fixate hating on something anymore (which might have been a first for me by then!) I largely lost interest and moved on, albeit with a very short lived interest in Microsoft's software.
I did set the default search engine to Bing on my stuff for a short while though. Why the flying fuck did I do that? Lol.
But then: Microsoft Office 2013!
The IT department at my elementary school didn't update the machines to Windows 8, they all stayed on Windows 7. I don't blame them tbh.
They did, however, install Office 2013 on the machines. The then new Metro GUI was hard baked into the program.
During one of the lessons the IT class teacher was following us though the new GUI. Eventually we all get to the standard File Open/Save dialog box supplied by Windows 7, so the old GUI just.... Showed up.
Yeah the software capitalists can be really silly with the "MAKE ALL OUR STUFF HAVE THE SAME DESIGN LANGUAGE" thing, especially when there'll be instances where the old design pops up lol.
So the teacher, she makes a throwaway comment, along the lines of "now the GUI we're used to is back" with a hint of "The new design they're pushing sucks am I right, or am I right" to her inflection.
Which would've went over the heads of almost all of my classmates. Most of them would've been more concerned with reasonable stuff like cartoons or Minecraft! Most of us probably didn't even use Windows 8 at that point, or even have any form of context around the whole start menu thing that happened!
People like to go on about people not giving kids enough credit, which is very much true, but they're still kids. An eight year old probably roughly knows what death is alongside the its contexts.
But you won't be able to hold a meaningful conversation regarding software piracy. They don't know the material reality regarding capitalist IP laws, they haven't learned about them yet, let alone the material conditions that arise from it!
Except, as you just read, I <b>did</b> understand the context around that throwaway comment! So I made my own throwaway comment, something along the lines of "But I kinda like the new GUI".
That must've pissed her off. I don't remember all too much from 4th grade, a mixture of both time and deep irritation from being forced to move from one wing of my district's elementary school to it's other, but I do remember there being generally ✨bad vibes✨ between me and her from that point on.
Which, if that is what caused the ✨bad vibes✨, then she's an incredibly petty asshole!
I no longer mess with virtual machines. Haven't done so in years! I just.... I like my physical hardware you know? Something you can grab with your hands!
It has probably been about ten years since I last touched Virtualbox, and that was sometime during fuck-face-Trump's first term (I really hate how he got a second term what a CUNT!) on my Dell Inspiron 700m running..... I was going to say Debian, but I might of still been running Lubuntu on that machine.
Anyway, it messed up APT/DPKG, which was really annoying to clean up. Not as annoying as when that laptop went into "sleep paralysis" while Lubuntu was updating though. That uh.... Yeah. Messed up the install! Was really annoying to clean up. All because it partially entered sleep mode, but without actually entering sleep mode!
ACPI on that machine is so crap tbh. Infact under modern Linux it thinks the sleep button is constantly depressed or something, causing the machine to constantly go to sleep. (Although now that I think about it, might be the broken lid switch!)
Resuming from sleep also.... Doesn't work properly. Doesn't matter what OS! Linux...... I think partially tolerated it? Windows just full on crashes lmfao. Although Windows Vista remains partially interactive, responding to mouse and keyboard inputs, but interactions either do nothing for fully crash Windows.
The Dell Inspiron 700m is a little weird tbh. Otherwise lovely laptop! Was given it as a kid, very lightly used. It's now HEAVILY worn out and sits in a computer bag for its retirement.
Sadly I don't have that original Dell Inspiron 1501. I'd end up accidentally destroying the motherboard, which was the final nail in the coffin for that laptop, and it was thrown out.
I did buy another 1501 though!
By the way, did you know there's atleast two different versions of the Inspiron 1501? One has PCMCIA, while the other has ExpressCard? My childhood laptop was the PCMCIA version and came with Windows Vista, while the one I have now has ExpressCard but has a Windows XP license sticker.
I believe I've found my niche though: Old feature phones! Or "flip phones" for the "normies" in the audience, although that specific term refers more to a physical form factor then a general hardware/software platform. (Remember "bar phones"? "Sliders"? Wait, are modern smart phones bar phones?)
More accurately, I like doing security research on these phones. Even found some memory corruption bugs!
For fuck sake, I have a RAM dump of the LG Voyager (VX10000) loaded up in Ghidra for reverse engineering and combing though looking for anything interesting/useful.
Got both the J2ME and Qualcomm BREW SDKs installed on my Windows 7 machine. (Imagine noting you have mobile phone app development experience and when questioned you pull out a fucking flip phone lmao.)
There's this bug in the Teleca/Obigo web browser on the LG Voyager where the pointer for where the "I beam" cursor is located can be updated and end up pointing out of bounds, leading to both an info leak and ability to overwrite adjacent data on the heap. Finally figuring that bug out felt SO GOOD!