IE8 was the last IE that would work on XP, and you had to have XPSP3!!! It does everything I want, without any internet!!!
1 Like
That is the key to it. If you want it in your shop to drive a lathe or something… it will be fine forever.
Forget the internet… if you want to be part of that world, your hardware and software have to keep up. There is no Yesterday’s Internet.
There are Yesterday’s Computers, like Yesterdays Tractors. There is even website
https://www.yesterdaystractors.com/
They can still be useful . My 60 year old tractor does our farm work. Admittedly it just spent 8 months under repair… but now it runs like a new machine.
There is no similar site for old computers? There is an opportunity here!
3 Likes
I found a OS9 Mac in mine and a Win7 one which kept bugging me to upgrade to Win10… (but both are unsupported anyways?!)
1 Like
How about this?
2 Likes
And if you do go on the net you can go back to old sites via
I found my first site I did for my club back in the 90’s which was really funny seeing old photos of members is had forgotten and lost contact with.
2 Likes
I had a look at VCandG.
Yeah, that is close to what Yesterdays Tractors is like
1 Like
I never realised that. Could be fun indeed.
1 Like
Hi Neville,
Thanks for sharing your perspective on search engine preferences. I must admit, it can be quite difficult to understand how people can have such strong preferences when it comes to choosing one search engine over another.
I agree that privacy concerns do play a significant role in these decisions, especially considering the vast amount of data collected by search engines, particularly from mobile devices and connected PCs. It’s almost like a reversed engineering paradise for those interested in gathering such information.
How would you recommend addressing this issue? Should we be encouraging users to consider privacy more carefully when choosing their preferred search engine?
Looking forward to your thoughts,
1 Like
I dont know.
I think we need to sort out how much of the privacy violation is search engines versus browsers versus OS’s
I avoid Win, but I use Android , which is nearly as bad.
I use DDG when I can, but not Tor
I am fence sitting on search engines… in the absence of info, I take the default.
Privacy does not worry me. The public domain is just that… not private. I dont think using google , for example, is any worse than being seen walking around town doing your shopping.
In cases where we need security (eg banking) there are methods. For the rest of my activities I just accept that they are public. The benefits outweigh the negatives.
That is probably not the answer you expected. I am an outlier.
4 Likes
That is a really good replay, Honest from a user perspective. This is what counts in the public eyes.
3 Likes
I’d like to think so too.
4 Likes
I use Google search here on Firefox. I’m familiar with them, and they have served me well. FWIW, I agree with Neville, anything I do on the Internet is tantamount to going outside. Anyone who wants to can see whatever I’m doing, so I always make sure that my connection to my bank is secured, and encrypted (a HTTPS connection suffices), and I have Ublock Origin installed on my browsers. For me, that’s enough, since I keep my computers and installed software as up to date as I can.
Ernie
5 Likes
Historically I used Yahoo. It always served me well. When Google was up and coming, I always resisted because it didn’t seem to ever give me any better results. I saw no reason. It was just a trendy thing to do.
For a year or two I’ve been using Bing. I’m sure they’re not much different than Google in either results or privacy. I’m not too worried about privacy.
But this past weekend I found out about SearXNG. You can host your own search instance that uses the search engine of your choice on the backend, but you control the frontend. Pretty easy to host yourself using a container. There are also third party hosted sites you can use.
2 Likes
Here is my Tailscale funnel to a locally hosted SearXNG instance.
It is on my laptop and won’t be available all the time.
One of these days I’ll get an AWS account or something so I can just host things on an instance that doesn’t cost me much. 
4 Likes
This thing looks very interesting! I’ll look into it further when I have more time. Thank you for this link!
Ernie
2 Likes
I have a friend that is still using Win 7 on her desktop. A couple of years ago I gave her one of my old laptops with Win 10 on it and she still did not want to learn Win 10 (make the switch).
3 Likes
Hi @callpaul.eu,
Late to the conversation, but there are work around that will let you install Win 11 on non-supported PC.
Have a good day,
Howard
2 Likes
Down in my basement, I have a very old laptop that has Win 95 on it. No CD, no USB. Only 3 1/2 floppy disk.
2 Likes
So official EOL is not end of existence.
Keep it another 10 years, it will increase in value.
3 Likes
But she also has a linux machine which she never uses. The windows one was a gift from her son, so keeps using it, till he upgrades it. Small ssd and not enough memory…… but she could just move her files to the linux box which is faster, more memory bigger disk …. No pleasing some.
Also I dont want the pain of doing it.
1 Like