Back again..

[ET2SN]

No, I wasn't in the hospital or jail.

My ISP crapped out on the 27th of last month and its been an adventure since then to get the bozos to FIX THEIR @#$&.




That finally happened today, but it gets even better. I'm switching carriers (this time local with a real office in town and everything) next Monday and getting the casa wired for real broadband with real fiber optics and the whole she-bang. For like 20 cents more per month than the original bums.

For those who might have been worried (and I know who you are ), fear not. I spent the down time deep cleaning this rig and dumping some old "gold standard" programs that no longer work while getting this rig optimized to work with its 'new-ish' SSD.

So, in order-

- #%$& Century Link and the horse they rode in on. The service side of things has really gone downhill in the last five years and now the crows are starting to perch. I *think* the whole issue came down to someone rewiring the phone and data nodes because they got bored. They said they ran fiber three years ago and that they were "getting around to" getting the high speed stuff into the houses any month now.
Ever experience DSL on copper wires? Yep, it don't work.

- Other stuff I trashed and purged from the rig:

AVG Antivirus. Nothing says "OLD" like AVG. It really doesn't protect anything since it now runs Windows Defender "automatically".

CCleaner. This was one of my "gold standard" programs since, like, 15 years ago. Just run it once or twice a year. Only, now they are really pushing this cloud hoo-hah and I finally checked my 'net logs and this thing was uploading 90 Gigs of something each month.

Acronis cloning software. Their old stuff might still be handy for cloning and maintaining old school hard drives but it isn't worth "Richard" on SSDs. Their newer software is (again) very dependent on uploading your stuff to a cloud somewhere. For what purpose, who knows? Maybe I was sharing pound cake recipes with an alternate Universe, or maybe not..