AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

as a part of recovering from this mess (mechanical hard drive failure, followed by bad bios flash - fixed the bios, but the hard drive was not salvageable), i slipstreamed up to the latest xp updates. now, i'd normally do this by testing first, but the drive was wiped so that step got skipped.

one of the reasons i stick with xp (and will continue to more or less indefinitely) is that hard drive operations on my hardware are very slow with newer versions of windows due to a driver signing conflict that reduces to the computer industry being inept and incompetent, which is the result of capitalism. root of all problems. i ranted about this a few weeks ago.

but, what am i getting after the updates? the same fucking thing as i'd get with windows 7 or vista. it's taking an hour to copy a gb of data to an external drive, because of a bunch of stupid security bullshit. supposedly, anyways. as mentioned before, i think microsoft is just trying to coerce me to buy new hardware. it's preposterously corrupt, really.

of course, i'm not actually going to buy new hardware, i'm going to uninstall the "security updates". but because i'm slipstreaming, this is a time consuming pain in the ass.

i'm going to have to test it first before i go through the process. the thing i need to determine is if the security bullshit is getting in the way of multitasking or not. i can deal with slow copy operations for now. but i can't deal with broken multitasking...