Boy

Once we’re warriors

Excellent movies - but terrible reality of what is like living poor in New Zealand in the 1980’s and 1990’s

Fatal Racing

Yes! There is a website somewhere that has a tonne of fake os screens - updating/upgrading windows, bsod loop etc.

Run a scary looking one of those, disconnect mouse/keyboard so it can’t be interrupted and let the boss discover it

Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.

My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.