the windows 8 laptop

Gotta face the fact that my decrepit Windows 8 laptop won’t last forever.

I use it for two very important things:

• Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Back in the day, Photoshop was a one-time purchase for $300. You got a CD-ROM you could install on as many computers as you wanted. On launch, it says “would you like to register your Adobe product online?” and you say NO, and that’s the end of it. I’ve used this on so many computers. But it won’t run on newer versions of Windows, so my laptop is the last bastion.
• Work. My laptop has Word, which my desktop doesn’t. It’s widescreen, making it much nicer than my work laptop, which has about the screen size of a toaster.

Mostly, the laptop has been a trooper. Five years ago, it developed a dead zone on the keypad. My workaround was to get a cheap USB Dell keyboard which sits above the native keypad. Everyone makes fun of this but it’s fine.

Recently, though, it’s developed actual performance issues. Lotta weird random stuff.

1. At random intervals, it will deselect the active window. This also makes the mouse cursor invisible. The solution is to alt-tab, which is simple, but still annoying (especially because you can’t alt-tab to another program afterwards, you have to manually click the taskbar).
2. Sometimes Windows Media Player decides to open random non-media files. This can happen repeatedly, e.g., I have eight windows of it trying to “play” an image file before I close them all.
3. Similarly, sometimes Dropbox opens a bunch of Firefox tabs that I have to close.
4. Windows Explorer is giving issues. There was a two-day period where it froze constantly. I thought I was cooked. It fixed itself-ish, but the taskbar often freezes and I have to restart it. Also, sometimes, mousing over file names bolds them and changes the font (??)—idk what’s up with this, but I have decided it also warrants a program restart.

“Sounds like this person has approximately 2 computer mana” you are probably correct, but to point out, my desktop doesn’t do any of this shit. Meanwhile worm is of the opinion that a Win 8 machine is a walking security black hole and shouldn’t even be allowed on the internet.

Anyway, none of the issues are gamebreaking but I feel like it’s a sign of bad things to come, and someday I may have to lug my toaster back and forth from work and purchase a new graphics program. 

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edit: YOOOO I googled the photoshop thing and found you can make it work by running it in compatibility mode for Windows 8. I HAVE PHOTOSHOP ON MY DESKTOP AGAIN

Now if only I had Word! That one’s harder. I have Word on my laptop because, at the beginning of the pandemic, Mom was like “I can put Word on five computers” and set me up through her work website. Unfortunately, she doesn’t recall doing this, much less how to do it, so she can’t give me Word on my desktop.

Fun facts: My Word stopped updating in February 2023, due to (duh) lack of compatibility with Windows 8. Recently at work we had a three-hour seminar on how to use Microsoft Copilot, which was fucking useless, but doubly useless in my case because my primary work machine doesn’t even have Copilot lmfao. Self-inflicted problem. It’s fine.