The Level of Tech Insanity in 2024

I dug out my old Acer 5920 Laptop lately and I wanted to try OpenBSD on it. It yielded varied success - I could install the system after some help but it kept crashing; namely radeondrm decided not to play nice with my video card. It resulted in a rather lovely glitch, but rendered the screen unusable. FreeBSD worked, but I was (and still am) keen to get OpenBSD working, because, dunno, it seems cool.

I was asking for some help on Mastodon and very quickly Solène ¹ and @claudiom@bsd.network very quickly jumped in and offered some very good pointers. But none of the obvious solutions seemed to get me to a point where I can actually boot up X11, and one of the things suggested was perhaps upgrading BIOS and Video card BIOS.

But this was no small feat. Acer's website yielded absolutely no results; there was a single download for something like "Acer Live Updater" for Windows. I thought, what the heck - I will install Windows temporarily, flash BIOS, and get back to my life.

Lesson 1: Windows (and MS) really is useless

My friend Iohannes was updating his Video Card's BIOS the other week and he needed to install Windows 11 for a moment and he really lamented how horrible the experience was. Unix / Linux / Mac (etc) users love to hate on Windows, which I always thought was a bit unfair. I mean, it can't be that bad, rigth?

Well.

The laptop is really an old machine, so Windows 11 for a BIOS update was out of the question. I wanted to put Windows 7 back on it because I knew that it ran smoothly on it - Windows 7 was the last Windows version I used daily on any computer I own; and it was this laptop that I used it on.

I gathered that MS now made their ISO's available online, so I wanted to download it - but apparently because MS decided to "End Of Life" Windows 7, they didn't provide an installer.

The only thing that WAS available, without going on dodgy torrent trackers, was the "Crusty Windows" collection of bootleg / modded copies of Operating Systems. ² Most of the Windows 7 mods are hilariously OTT and VERY 2000's. First I grabbed a very minimalistic version—something that "weighed" a mere 380 Mbytes (in comparison to the 4.6Gbyte default image), and while it ran, nothing worked because all the drivers were stripped out of it, I couldn't even get a USB drive to work to copy files.

I ended up getting some stupid OTT version that kinda worked; except for the internet: what Internet Explorer 8 (!!) still loaded was VERY hit and miss. Mostly, miss.

This was totally useless without internet, and painfully slow in comparison to X on FreeBSD. (In hindsight: I used such a slow system for YEARS and thought the problem was the laptop!), but it seemed like a workable solution for the time being.

Lesson 2: Link Rot

So after 2-3 days of downloading pirated copies of Windows I finally seemed to have the means to proceed with the BIOS flashing; but where do I actually get the ROM files?!

For the Video Card (Radeon Mobility HD3470, 256Mbyte) I found the ROM files easily via random forums I never heard of before (techpowerup), ³ but for the Motherboard's BIOS I couldn't find the files. (I'm also interested - where did techpowerup get all those files from?! Why aren't they so easy to discover via the vendors themselves?) Acer's website, of course, "moved on" - the only thing that was on offer there was something called "Acer Live Update", so I downloaded that. And it did NOTHING because whatever files it was supposed to grab from the depths of Acer's Corp's bowels are now all gone.

To cut the story short: I found an 450Gbyte .zip file on Archive.Org (❤️) which was a mirror of the now dead Acer FTP server. Thank God that Archive.org enables you to browse .zip files, because I was NOT going to download 450Gbytes for what turned out to be a single 1 Mbyte ROM file.

So I have the ROM, I have found the flasher tool on more dodgy websites, I have a spare USB drive...

I copy everything over and it doesn't work: something something privileges something something. No idea what. Didn't matter if I ran it as administrator. Maybe this just needed a more recent version of Windows. I couldn't tell.

So I downloaded Windows 11 - all 6.8Gytes of it; managed to write it to a USB disk, and then tried to boot the installer... Well, 30 minutes in it still didn't get past the initial loading screen, so I thought, if "high tech" sucks so much, I need to go "low tech".

Lesson 3: DOS is still king

So I remembered that I spotted a DOS version of the BIOS flasher tool on some forums; "PHLASH16.EXE". I thought I'd give that a go.

I downloaded FreeDOS ⁴ because it seemed like the best game in town at the moment, and it could boot off a USB stick. And honestly, I was floored by it: IT JUST WORKS. But also, browsing their website, how much DOS has come along! FreeDOS' full install is now almost 600 Megs - which, for something I used to install off some floppy disks, is insane. But the selection of stuff out there!

=> Giz a deek, as they say around these parts.

Commands and programs I never heard of - and what a great thing that is. There are some excellent text editors, for example, but also a full USB stack now (as long as whatever you want to use is plugged in at boot), and just the number of games bundled by default, or the fact that there are web browsers available like Dillo or Arachne, or music players like the trusty mplayer... Honestly!? If I had these when I was 10...

I also managed to find a DOS-based AMD / ATI GPU Bios flasher tool online, called "amdvbflash_dos_4.68" on techpowerup, so I thought I'd grab that too, and once again, put everything on a USB stick... which I inserted at boot; and after a single complaint from PHLASHER that I need to disable himem.sys in order to run it (I had to add a single ; character to a .SYS file to disable it from loading), it worked. So did the GPU flasher, after following the readme.txt.

Conclusion: Things are going VERY wrong.

In 2024, in order to update a now ridiculously simple looking computer, I had to downgrade to DOS, then wade through 450Gbytes of dead internet, download about 15Gbytes in dysfunctional Microsoft software, so that, eventually, I could cram 1 Mbyte into some bit of silicon. The tech ought to be "well matured", the laptop is, I think, about 15 years old!

But link rot, planned obsolescence, and all that, have just turned what in the end was a simple 2-minute task into a 3-4 day nightmare of dead software.

I don't think I want to touch Windows again after this, it's just not worth it - and I think I will start donating to the internet archive, because they saved my bacon so, so many times.

But the web really does feel like it is dying, and it is dragging so much along with it.

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=> ¹ Perso.pw - Solene's gemini capsule | ² CrustyWindo.WS | ³ Techpowerup | ⁴