New Asus showing old Asus.

Under doubt, yesterday I put away my Asus N56V laptop that I bought in May 2012. It was working fine until the afternoon, when it suddenly stopped playing a YouTube video. I exited and started again, but the E: memory stick seems to have been corrupted again. (I had my browser on a memory stick because this old machine had a mechanical hard disk, and it was prone to stuttering and ever longer pauses back before I invented “multi-disking”. By putting my browser and My Documents on two different memory sticks, those two can be accessed without using the hard disk except for virtual memory as needed. I also had games and videos on separate drivers for the same reason. This worked like a charm except for the three times it thrashed my browser stick. This was the third such time.)

Also, the old Asus ran Windows 7, so Microsoft Defender would no longer defend it. Google Drive had also recently abandoned it, and I could not get new updates for Vivaldi, my browser of choice, nor for Chrome for that matter. But the lack of antivirus was the big problem. I solved that by using Kaspersky after Microsoft Defender put down its shield. Kaspersky was not only the best antivirus I have used, but really the only good antivirus I have used. But with the boss of Kaspersky being a buddy of Putin, this was probably not a good time to rely so heavily on them.

There is also the small detail that I had a veritable Christmas tree of branching USB connections to support my “multi-disking” along with other necessary peripherals. It got rather unwieldy and there were a number of power supplies involved, with their own cords and branching electric outlets to support them. So I decided to make one last backup and pack away my old workhorse while it was still in working order (albeit without a browser at the moment). I can still restore it to active duty if needed.

But it just so happens that I had bought a new Asus TUF for just this purpose, and already set it up with the basics. (Except LibreOffice, Filezilla, and Irfanview, and who knows what else.) So now the new Asus has taken the place of the old Asus. Long live the Asus!

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The Asus N56V was my last Windows 7 PC, and I miss it. Even with Start11 from Stardock software (and I don’t buy that lightly) fixing the start menu and to some degree the taskbar, there are other subtle details like not being able to set a grey background in built-in windows like Notepad, Task Manager, and Resource Monitor. I can set background colors in most third-party programs I use, but these remain blinding white unless you edit the registry, which is not for the overly cautious. (I did it, but even then it reverted to white background within a couple of hours when I was away from the keyboard. The registry still says grey but the machine cheerfully ignores it. I have to edit it again and reboot again if I want a grey background in native Windows programs.)

There are also some other oddities like having to click an extra time or two with my mouse, but that is probably either a problem with the old mouse or with the mouse settings. I can look into that later.

An old operating system is like old sneakers, you have walked in them for so long that you can’t tell if they have adapted to your foot or your foot to them.