Guess I'm a bit too young for that still lol. We got a pair of ISDN2 lines in 1994 (so technically also 256k lol) at home, but I was too young to remember that. With cable internet coming in 97, that was technically still slower than bonded isdn at the very start.
In a way I was very privileged growing up when it came to Internet. My dad's company at the time paid good money to get all the latest (often testing phase) stuff to his house in return for being available 24/7.
Talking about Lan uplinks, in the early 2010's I had the joy of working with a 20gb uplink at a small university LAN (the sysadmin got a good amount of free pizza and beers for that one). I spent a large amount of my savings on a 10gb NIC only to find out my hard drive couldn't keep up lol.
Didn't some company have a script running that would randomly kill stuff to always test redundancies?
I vaguely recall someone telling me that about netflix
People having to work with Microsoft stuff (not just windows) have gotten so used to needing to find workarounds for everything that those genuine issues have become the baseline expectation.
Only having to fill in a wrong email/password a few times sounds like peak user experience compared to the shit I have to pull in Azure/Power BI/AD at times. My genuine first reaction when reading that post was "ah of course, that makes sense".
Personally I use Linux for server/container stuff wherever possible. With the occasional excursion into Manjaro to see what's happening on the desktop side.
I am repping Rufus here, not windows. Painful as it may sound, truth is that most people creating windows usbs would do so from windows.
The tool you're talking about might be Ventoy. Which is indeed a great way to make any type of bootable usb stick. Once installed you can just throw all sorts of isos (and more) to your usb drive and it'll generate nice grub menu to pick from.
You'll just have to use the classic oobe\bypassnro method instead to install windows. (The fact that you have to use a workaround to create a local account at all is still BS, there's no denying that.)
I just did it this morning, when you burn the ISO to a usb drive using Rufus you get a nice little menu that allows you to pre-set a local account, disable the TPM check and more.
The biggest pain is downloading the windows 11 iso in the first place. You can only do that when the site believes you're not already using windows.
Bypassing the online check on setup is basically required on new hardware anyways, since most 2.5g/wifi6+ networking drivers aren't included in the installer.
Pockets
That's ThinkPads tho
There's a couple SD-WAN solutions out there that you can do this with. Essentially route all your traffic through one or more VPSes while still keeping things like port forwards and STUN working properly.
I've had to use it to enable proper video feeds to and from people that had Spectrum as their ISP.
HEVC actually requires a $1 license you can get from the ms store. It's a royalty thing. OEMs often ship PCs with that license already enabled.
There are more applications than just windows Media Player that won't play hevc files/streams without that license installed.
VLC doesn't really seem to care about those things though and it's better than the default anyways.
Kinda the same thing as winrar. They rather have consumers get used to it so the companies they work at have a higher chance of buying licenses. That's where the real money is.