The central Ohio dial-up ISP I was working at 97-07 was a TUCOWS mirror and I recall making cd images of their content for our members on request in the late 90s. Waiting 35+ minutes for a 2x burnt disc to fail was always pleasant. An end of an era for sure..

See here https://vimeo.com/25430951. It's not good.

It's nice and all, but they just need to bring back their Q500 Full tower case.. that's the stuff that late 90s builds were made of.. Built my first personal system with one..

Mr. President, we must not allow a app gap!

I personally have seen on several dozen systems an issue where the system performance will degrade quite significantly after Microsoft Update is installed over Windows Update. The resolve in these cases is as simple as turning off Microsoft Update. This is NOT turning off automatic updates. To revert back to Windows Update, you need to have the Microsoft Update website in front of you and then click on "Change Settings". From here, you will see a section:

Clicking to disable, applying and then restarting the system seemed to be enough to get the systems out of their zombie like state. I believe the issue falls with the way the system is constantly scanning for updates that may be available.