Micro$oft end of support for Win7 eminent.

Handy to have internet in the shop for looking up specs, constants, formulas and whatnot.  No room or patience for 2 machines out there.

Antique CNC controller (Super-Tech EMC-XYZ-BX) has no drivers or config info for Linux, figured this out after 3 different distro installs.

Turns out, Mach3 parallel port driver absolutely will not work in a 64bit environment, figured this out after setting up a salvaged machine with win10 already on it.

Started to re-purpose another older box, kept hanging on install, several hours to track that down to a flaky CPU, have to do a win7 install first because this thing won't boot from USB, finally get that all worked out and...

now having to sidestep Micro$oft account creation and muzzle Cortana and turn off all the spylemetry (that they let you), so far it has been 3 days of walking in place and I don't even know if this is going to driver up its PCI-parallel card and work yet


and being reminded that I have to go through Linux dependency hell on all the rest of the boxen by Jan 14...