Sounds like a (somehow even more) shit isp. I just tapped the “bring my own” when I signed up, and bought myself a modem/router combo at best buy.

You can’t get your own router?

Updates can both add real value, but not be worth piecemealing out as separate purchases.

Lmao you seem to hold far more hatred than I

Removed by mod

Yes*

It largely depends on what the online functionality does. Pirating software that heavily relies on external servers as opposed to your machine isn’t really feasible. But if it’s just a phone home to verify, someone has probably cracked it

Vimms lair is a good choice, though i don’t think they’re in .chd by default, rather just .iso, or a compressed .iso format. It’s highly consistent in naming conventions, and has a pretty damn near full collection. Main downside is limited downloading speed, and no concurrent downloads, but if you’re just looking to download games you’re interested in and not every ps1 game, it should be fine

Have you tried Google?

Of course not, he would have announced it already if he was

The way these strikes happen is that the right holder (or usually just some company on their behalf) joins public torrents for their content, and grabs every ip that connects. It’s entirely possible that in the few seconds you had qbit open without a vpn, enough of the program had initialized that the basics of joining the swarm started, and your ip got seen.

How do you even tell the difference between a licensed vs unlicensed windows install?

“why pay for a vpn to hide my ip when I can just use an ip that isn’t mine” –that dude, probably

I mean yeah, decompression is resource intensive, but it’s still retarded to say that the goal of it is to overstress your computer, especially considering that any reasonable setup will throttle itself before just burning up

I get why hdcp exists, but why the fuck would apple enable it permanently, for everything? They afraid of people pirating their own desktop or something?

Really the only things I’m seeing in the settings that could get you a few frames are lowering the resolution, and turning shadows down further. Beyond that, the answer is “buy a new computer”. The i7 3770 is by no means an impressive processor, and you’re putting double duty on it since you don’t have a dedicated graphics card.

You’re also underclocked compared to the published specs, so I assume you’re in a laptop where heat is a major bottleneck as well?

Use the official Microsoft tool that makes installation media. From there, you can leave it unactivated, purchase a key, or use MAS or whatever it’s called to activate for free

Am I just insanely lucky or something? I just use chrome and it hasn’t complained about my adblock once, and I watch a lot of YouTube.

Personally, I don’t like the way Apple does business. Primarily, that you aren’t just buying the product, you’re buying into their ecosystem. Almost everything apple does well only realistically works of you stay confined to their stuff. And you’re fucked if you wanted compatibility with older software. Remember when Apple just decided 32 bit was dead to them?

And while their hardware is pretty good, it costs wayyyyy too much. I just got a new pc with the top end amd cpu and an rtx 4090, and it cost under half what a Mac pro costs. I seriously doubt their ARM desktop chips are really that much better. Maybe if I were to buy a Mac and use it the rest of my life without upgrades, the efficiency of using an ARM cpu would save me the difference on electricity?

It serves to get their name/content out there to more people who would otherwise not have been interested in paying for it initially. For instance, you may be more willing to pirate a game than to buy it without knowing you’ll be interested, but after playing it, you may decide it’s worth buying.

Also, in areas where legal means to watch just fucking suck, piracy can increase the amount of fans interested in things like merchandise.

Seconding mini pc as a good option. I use a mini lenovo think station I got of fb marketplace