Why? The Home and Pro versions are almost identical, except for a small handful of few features that home users would never miss and limits that would never bother a home user*. It's really just a way for Microsoft to extract more money out of businesses for Windows while providing an almost identical product. It's actually pretty clever (or evil, depending on your perspective) if you think about it.

*I realize that Windows 7 Home has a 16GB limit which is pretty easy to run up against nowadays, but it's 5 years old now and Windows 8.1 Home has a 128GB limit which would be hard to hit with "consumer level" hardware.

It's very intentional, as Thinkpads have changed very little in appearance since the first ones came out in the mid 1990's years ago sporting 486 processors. That's over 20 years of laptops that are pretty much instantly recognizable as a Thinkpad by anyone familiar with them.

I for one like their simple, clean, no nonsense styling, and functional design (though Lenovo has been mucking with that a bit more than I like). But each to their own.

Most new laptops now are omitting the optical drive. It's getting to the point where if you require an optical drive your options are starting to look pretty limited, especially since the remaining models with optical drives tend to be the larger workstation/desktop replacement models. This is understandable, as I rarely use an optical drive anymore. On the other hand, the lack of USB ports is baffling.

Given that it's Oregon, there will be plenty of water just "dropping" in. I would invest in some large sheets of plastic and/or some tarps, and some buckets myself. Get a bunch of those chlorinated tablets that treat water, and while it may taste terrible, should be perfectly safe to drink. Now, things like food/gasoline might be a bit tougher to come by.

Don't forget IE for the ActiveX!

You do realize that Chrome comes bundled with its own built-in Flash plug-in, right? Unless you meant you installed one of the Chrome alternatives that strip it out (Opera, Comodo Dragon, etc.).

If you buy/lease a new car every few years, it will add up as you'll be paying $300-$500/mo indefinitely. If you buy a new car and drive it for 15-20 years until it's basically fully depreciated out, the cost spread out over all those years isn't that much more than the string of beaters you would have gone through in the same time span.

I have that, and while it helps, when you do have want to activate some flash widget/video/whatever, you'll end up still slowing your browser down.

I've actually found on Windows, IE seems to be the only browser that works well with Flash-heavy sites for long periods of time. Other browsers seem to either slow down, hang, crash, or have problems with the Flash plug-in crashing. Hopefully it won't matter soon anyway, as Flash seems less and less useful as time goes on and I don't even bother installing Flash on most of the computers I use anyway.

Chances are they'll just be converted into a "minimum maintenance road" which means that it won't be plowed and they'll only do the bare minimum to keep it passable. Given Iowa's climate, it may only take a few years before you'd want to have a 4WD or a high clearance truck to try and drive some of these roads as they'll quickly deteriorate and develop large potholes. It'll also be obvious which roads still get traveled and which ones go basically unused, which could help them decide what they want to do with them.

Does Seamonkey include an NNTP client? I remember using the one in Netscape Communicator way back in the day, until I finally forked out the money to buy Forte Agent. Good times.

Even if your Windows 7 license is "consumed", if it's the Pro edition, surely you would able to use the downgrade rights to reinstall Windows 7 (or 8)?

Windows 8/8.1 dropped XP Mode, so I seriously doubt they'll bring it back for Windows 10. Especially since Microsoft doesn't update the XP VM anyway.

On the other hand, you should be able to use the 32-bit version of Windows 10 and run your 16-bit installers natively just fine.

The Tesla is a large heavy car. My guess is that it would look like those big car versus Smart Car crash tests where the Bolt would get tossed back like a toy and the Tesla would barely slow down.

The P4 really didn't take off until about 2002 or so. The first ones ran on Socket 423 which required Rambus memory. They were expensive, not really any faster than the P3, were hobbled by small L2 caches, and ultimately Socket 423 ended up being a very short-lived dead end socket. It wasn't until about 2002 when Socket 478 came out, chipsets that supported SDRAM and later DDR memory, and the Northwood P4 that had 512k of L2 cache came out that the P4 started to catch on.

That's almost certainly a 5:4 screen running a 1280x1024 resolution. Screens like that are still somewhat common and not that expensive, but you won't find one in Best Buy. Actual 4:3 monitors are pretty much extinct, with almost no one making 1024x768 or 1600x1200 (or less common sizes such as 1440x1050 or 2048x1576) monitors anymore