Tractors often are allowed to run on untaxed fuel, so it is theoretically possible to ban everything except tractors and say, semi-trailer trucks and ambulances. Though, maybe people would then drive farm equipment to work.

Indeed, I have Windows 7 actually refusing to install on a motherboard from 2014. I did not try with the hard disk in MBR mode, but that's because I had already partitionned it in GPT with way more than four primary partitions and installed a linux dual boot (swap, linux OS, another linux OS, a home partition, a data storage partition, room for the Windows partition somewhere in there..)

I guess we're waiting for Windows 10 for that one.. or add another HDD so that Windows 7 can be installed on a MBR one. But here's hoping that we don't have to go to UEFI setup to toggle a setting everytime.

Two decades ago would be about when Hyundai cars were introduced to Europe. That is pretty significant, we don't hear of cars from Vietnam or even China (I believe China has a huge car industry, but it's not sold globally and we can't even cite one constructor from China whereas I know S.K. has Samsung, Kia, Hundyai and SsangYong. I forgot Daewoo cars)

A decade ago : South Korea known for being where most RAM is made, and then a ton of flash memory as well. We can't have our PC compatibles and shit without South Korea, in the same way we can't do without Taiwan for the motherboards or Thailand for the hard drives.

I suspect that a lot of high end stuff is not quite reliable, like some high end desktop motherboards. It's expensive, but there's no hard guarantee it isn't made with hard cost reductions like everything else, and it's made in lower quantities... when low end crap can be made in very high volumes, production problems are sorted out and newer revisions fix some problems.

I won't speak for reliability of laptops though. All I know is grandma's laptop, which never left its desk and never was exposed to liquids and other hazards still is going fine and looking good after about 8 years.

Let me make an ad hominem attack on your source. The Weekly Standard : they're no better than neo-nazis. It's a propanganda mouthpiece founded to get the US to invade and occupy Iraq for fuck's sake. They're more interested in killing people than in facts.

I learned of a new problem with some Hewlett Packard desktops : an incompatibility with newer graphics card on not so old models (with Intel Sandy Bridge) and no BIOS upgrade to fix the bug.
That, and no way to lower the RAM speed on those OEM PCs to keep the PC stable when the RAM, motherboard or memory controller aged not too well.

On the other hand I've had some trouble with assembled hardware, software related, for doing dual boot or multiboot.. I have the bug of Windows-7-on-multiboot-fails-to-install-SP1 on my old BIOS based machine, and the friend's machine on UEFI gives me headaches : used to be that Windows 7 refuses to install (ha!) but I'm having trouble with grub2 seemingly failing to update itself (?) or stubborn on keeping the same configuration, so the dual boot to two linuxes still defaults to the "wrong" linux and the other linux doesn't use the new kernel I've installed.
So, due to the transition to UEFI you still can suffer crap even if you stay away from OEM PC.

No option to pay a monthly fee and be able to draw money from every fucking ATM?
That is a nice "luxury". Walk to any random ATM and that's all (though the "official" ones will also display account balance and allow a minimum draw of 10 euros rather than 20 euros)

That can be possible. Funny thing is I thus don't give a shit about paying by phone, "contactless payment" and such since I always have cash no matter how meager it is.. The modernity and computer networking can stay where it is, on fixed, wired and perhaps mildly armored hardware.

I'm on the continent from the other side of the pond and I don't pay ATM fees, monthly bill for the debit card covers it already.
I can do wire transfer for free (in country or Europe) with no e-mail involved (except confirmation I receive). But it's mainly for paying the rent and similar, and I have to add the recipient account's "wire numbers" beforehand. Using e-mail for funds transfer seems weird, e-mail seems kind of crappy and insecure.

It's ridiculously good while still at the bottom of the price curve.
While I still use whatever thing from the 90s, that's a keyboard I tried (in new condition) and gosh that's a keyboard I can pick and use and not miss a keyboard from the 1990s. For what it's worth I like it much better than the "gaming" Logitech keyboards.

No features, not even a key to launch the calculator. Too bad there's no PS/2, because fuck it that's what PS/2 is for. But it's available in white, or is it beige.

not only that : there surely is a way to put a keyboard on a tablet. And not a separate keyboard, or a keyboard that turns it into a baby laptop, but a keyboard on the tablet itself.

It is not that terrible, because a shit lof of "telemetry data" is collected and thus they should know what the printer was, error messages of the print spooler or even some internal state of the service.
Or so I would think.
When Firefox crashes and asks to send the crash report, I never add information, or perhaps once in a thousand time.

I don't get the hate about Mozilla, the "File Edit View..." menu bar is enabled back with a couple of clicks and then what I'm getting is good enough. Still gets faster, lighter and less crashy because all of the work is under the hood, and last month replacing Ad Block Plus with ublock made it faster/lighter too.

ISIS recruits idiots who grew up with Call of Duty and modern zombie movies (rather than say, Doom and Counterstrike 1.x). They do the killing and splatter for the fun of it. Some mix of dude bro fun and complacently useful fervor.

A friend comes over, before he leaves we copy about 7GB of data to his USB drive (empty, by the way) and that takes about half a hour. That's what I am bitching about. Copying from hard drive to hard drive on 100BaseT network was so much better (with no stall when doing concurrent copying)

And writing music to USB thumb drive is painfully slow. Most ones will give you a few MB/s of write speed, and it is compounded by the fact you write some hundreds of file so there's slowdown at each "boundary" compared to the favorable case of writing a few big files.

A 128GB SD card might do well, if that's your main music collection you're fitting here. At least, it stays unchanged most of the time. You still have to not mind the slowness and at that cost you could have had a 256GB SSD in the laptop.