Most silly excuse was my boss refusing to install Linux because he just had a friend give him original windows 98se licenses for the PCs we just bought for the company.

Well it gets less silly thinking that getting the eprom programmer software and orcad 4 working on Linux was probably impossible.

Then it was outright the best decision ever, because those machines never required a reinstall and worked flawless for the 5 years I was there working. Never understood the bad rep W98Se had. Never used it on my personal rigs of course.

Not sure in Linux, could be a driver or kernel configuration. I don’t know a way to double check it. When booting into windows it’s at x16. So not a hardware or bios issue.

Hardware info (hwinfo) or similar. Be able to check all voltages, speed and temps while testing new hardware. For example my ARC A770 has little to no info, and shows running at pcie x1.

Edit: mistakingly thought link width was x4, but looking at it again shows x1

ViRGE 3D, upgraded the memory with 2 chips to play Tomb Raider.

If your goal is to make yourself more valuable to employers/clients the best path is to specialize in some critical and niche enterprise tech. People that are good at stuff businesses were lured into using get paid very well. In my case it was SharePoint, but that’s just an example.

Knowing your way around the OS is taken for granted in these positions, so you have one piece of the puzzle, which is great, but you need the other pieces.

But be careful, if I have to choose between two experts, one with basic win+linux and the other only linux, I’m choosing the former.

I recall having the image not found error last time. A mix of creating the USB with another program and tinkering with bios solved the issue. Sorry can’t be more specific, but Linux is all about tinkering, so have fun :)

155.000€ for new 5 bedroom 200+ m2 duplex in my small town in Spain.

No HOAs! supermarkets and schools are in walking distance ;)

Cheapest is around 30K, but why bother?

On the other hand, if you are buying cheap it’s usually because you aren’t familiar with the product and it’s characteristics. So you can take it as the price for learning about said product and what you really want from it.

For example, I got a cheap electric scooter for my wife on her birthday. We are new to these things, and didn’t even know if we would use it at all. Fast forward a year and we have used the crap out of it, even the kids can’t stop taking it out for a spin, and we now know what to look for and what sort of power and features we want when it comes time to replace it.