Then if things go bad the system could halt to a crawl because all resources are spent drawing windows.

If I have audio or an important networked program going on, they should have bigger or equal priority than window draw.

I cared enough to waste that much time writing that too long post above. That shall be a reminder to how much time is wasted installing windows. Yup with another OS and an equally slow PC you can be done in about 20 minutes.

It's funny to install windows updates if you have a somewhat slow (in modern terms) computer. Go get a torrented Windows 7 with updates rolled in till a few monthes ago. Install Windows.. with the custom stuff (updates + script that installs IE and .Net) it takes about two hours to install.
Then it takes about an hour to boot, reboot, install Firefox (downloaded with ftp.exe), change wallpaper etc., install some shit and an AV (this is a single core low power PC with 1GB and old HDD)
Then it takes a shit lot of time to find Windows updates. Two days later, it's still not finding them!
I give up. PC's getting a pain to use, I go for upgrading it to 1.5GB or 2GB. cool, turns out I've plugged a 2GB module in, it now has 3GB. The PC still is miserable but has a lot of ram just like my everyday beast!
Wait.. Now the fucking "windows updates" software that was stuck at "checking for updates" now finds updates (about 63 of them). WTF? (I had tried some .bat file found on the net to "unstuck" it, but dunno if the RAM ugprade did something or it wanted just one more reboot..)

So, in conclusion (tl;dr) there's some dark ugly voodoo that determines if Windows Updates will actually work. If it does, it's of course extremely CPU and memory intensive : if you have 1GB RAM or perhaps even 2GB RAM (which runs very low if you use programs) the PC could be so much fucking slow at installing updates that you run the risk of getting infected. I mean, two days of running Windows with unpatched old zero-days and what not! It makes me feels really dirty. Also, it's self evident that Windows 7 is about as bad as Vista on resources use.

But it was not like that time with XP + IE6 where I got obviously infected before I was even done setting it up.
Not sure if the Windows 7 PC is infected or not. Got to 98% memory use and swap hell with only windows (indexing etc. disabled), avast and firefox running (and task manager) ; firefox was only taking less than 20%. Had to kill firefox and disable the antivirus (killing firefox through task manager didn't go so well : not working, and "firefox is not responding" message not coming because of swap hell. Firefox got killed just when I had opened a command prompt which would have served me to kill it)
Got enough RAM to run, you guess it.. Windows Update! I installed that one critical update available and rebooted.

How would it work?
Yahoo is just a default search setting (if it's like yahoo when you sometimes see it as default in firefox), Ask.com I believe that's malware that hijacks the search setting no matter if you try to change it back. In layperson's words we might as well call it a virus or in old fashioned computer speak, a trojan.

The Ask.com trojan would run and set "Ask" as the search provider, thus pushing Yahoo search out of the way. It would be a rather lousy deal for Yahoo.

There's no 75% tax rate and liberals means "right wing" here (including the current government)

A DVD is really 4.7 decimal GB, so a bit over 4.375 real GB. You should know that if you're going all nitpicky on sizes.

One oil change a year would be more realistic.

I believe it's Seagate that owns Samsung's HDD storage.
There's also Toshiba, only doing 3.5" drives I believe, under some arrangement I don't remember exactly. So "two and a half" makers.

I wanted to use it so I can have a shell and grep, less, tail etc. (nothing fancy just desktop use) but I was dismayed that the Windows 7 pro I had installed did not have it. I could have gone over and reinstalled a warez Windows enterprise or ultimate but I did not bother, and switched to full-time linux instead. Well done Microsoft.

At least if you do it you're pampered and it's safe, unless you act out (say run to one particular statue and piss on it, or grope a female soldier)

I wouldn't want to travel to Myanmar, Yemen or Erythrea. I don't know if these places are better for their inhabitants but I also don't know exactly what kind of shit I would be risking going there.
In comparison going to North Korea sounds like attending religious service as a gay atheist, or visiting a mosque.

Not sure how well BIOS emulation under UEFI is working, but if it does it should be very easy to run DOS. Requirements aren't big ; even USB storage can be used seamlessly if it was present as boot, as well as USB keyboard. To be on the safe side, use an USB stick, SD card, HDD or SSD that's less than 2 TiB. Using iPXE, you can even boot from an iSCSI volume and use that.
Have a motherboard with on-board COM and LPT (one COM or one LPT are exceedingly common, one COM + one LPT common enough, two COM + LPT may be found in some consumer hardware) : they're wired to a legacy bus, ISA compatible.

Doom 3 was modable but creating maps was too complex and time consuming. With AAA games you tend to need AAA artists doing an AAA amount of work to create levels that look remotely on the level of the original ones. In a decade the tools must have gotten much better but the issue remains.
So, they must have made some simplified map creation tool where you paste pre-configured, tweakable rooms together, fill them pseudo-randomly etc.

Try this from France : go to google.us or google.com, and you end up redirected to Google France anyway. So they don't want you to do unlocalized searches, or perhaps you have to dig deeper and learn syntax or go into "advanced research".
On duckduckgo they seem to have anticipated I wanted to do that and there's simply a clickable toggle!

"Only" $200 to double the RAM. So, for $825 you get a low end computer. It would be much better to get the 1.4GHz processor and 8GB RAM if you want it to be long lived.. But that's +$100 over the default. +$100 to get +4GB RAM : that's a lot of money for an upgrade. Welcome back to the 90s, when the OEMs pretended only their branded memory would work. But this time it's soldered, on a desktop computer.

What about a room with low power, silent, diskless linux workstations. Each with an Intel or AMD APU (such as 15 watt AMD Carrizo or next-gen Atom, both are SoC on a simplified motherboard). One cheap file server/master server with an SSD, a couple fanless switches. You go there and use the workstations / game stations rather than own, configure and operate your own. Seems the running costs would be rather low. You do need a fiber optics connection to the internet for competitive low latency and concurrent use of upload though.