relatedly to me getting those bookmarks, i got a situation i was having with my mail figured out and i finally have the usb sticks

i have transferred my freestyle install to one so i can boot it on baremetal. so far it seems to not be enjoying this, still waiting around at the circle-dot loader with occasional freezes. presumably going from sitting inside a VM to sitting on a usb stick on real hardware and having the partition table change out from under you (resized it from 40GB to 64) is like cosmic horror for computers

monitor turned off briefly and then turned back on
dear celestia i wish windows had the thing where you could hit esc and just peek at what it's doing like how plymouth does

reboot it to see if it'll load if it hasn't booted by the end of this poll

NEVERMIND it apparently sensed my impatience. text has appeared: "getting devices ready"

computers is magic

a percentage has appeared. "getting devices ready 14%", it says. okay

Booted
now logging in, kinda slow but it is working

oh it is very unhappy. apparently it decided to set the paging file size to 0 and is now complaining to me about it, and the taskbar is doing some reaaaal funky stuff

also for some reason the cursor and text is extra large?? did switching to bare metal somehow change the dpi or something?? i can't figure it out because the taskbar is still broken

trying again, this time writing the install image to one drive and having it install on another, in the hopes that that'll be less confusing

well i think the appropriate way to say it at this point is that the confusion has been offloaded from the computer to me, as i attempt to track down a 1803 copy of some driver due to a single version bug that rufus has alerted me to

neither massgrave nor adguard has it so i'm dling from a copy on 1337 that comes with some KMS version and just hoping whatever malware's probanly in here doesn't affect the single driver i need to pull out of it.
if that doesn't work plan B is just to see if there's a windows modding discord server i can pop into because there's gotta be some nerd in there with an untouched 1803 iso

i hope my suffering is at least vaguely intelligible and entertaining to someone

found the "precrack" and also the driver i was looking for. might try putting it on archive.org and linking to it from cohost (all the top search results for "where do i find this" are reddit threads that are either empty or just have people going "dont do that?", so i wanna seo snipe that mess) and seeing what happens once i'm done

letting rufus and an attempt at a second boot from the usb i cloned a vm image to that this thread started with race. rufus got a headstart but the usb should have to, considering i let it setup once. neither is going anywhere particularly quickly

i think maybe booting windows from a usb stick is a bad idea y'all. especially a version specifically meant for VMs. just a hunch

vm usb stick is crying and gasping in front of the finish line (stuck on a black screen with a cursor after login)

vm usb stick has technically booted but i'm still struggling to get it *working*

trying to open the settings menu to change the dpi and it keeps opening and then crashing. rufus has made a blazing 7% more progress

rufus is done. i gave up on the vm stick a good bit ago and just started messing about and turning it into a multilive stick with antix, tails, and netboot.xyz on it.
meant to also put libreelec or some sort of live image with a persistence file that could stream stuff but right now i'm testing to see if freestyle is viable on stick at all.
if windows on the go or whatever doesn't do it i'm just throwing in the towel on that lol

see i'm glad i livetooted this because now i can compare how much quicker it is to the vm stick (answer: it's not blazing fast, but it's also not making me contemplate the impermanence of life anymore!! )

hearing a windows xp error sound from across the room while grabbing something to eat

it's broken, but it's broken *faster* now

if the settings menu crashes again i'm going back to trying to make a streaming media center liveusb

it works it works it's over i got it working it works now i had to sign in and out but it works now if this doesn't persist across restarts i am going to violently detonate it's OVER

it is oppressively slow, buggy, and i think id have to step up to shucking my broken laptop for its drive and using a usb to sata converter to get anything approaching a usable speed but i did it

for reference it is "seizes up trying to install ublock origin" slow

explorer got caught in a boot loop while i was trying to take a screenshot showing the "windows xp professional x64 edition" reported identity next to "trusted platform module 2" and "uefi-capable pc" in device manager while i was logged into here so i'm letting the poor thing rest

dear princess celestia, today i learned that ventoy is, as far as i can tell, better in every conceivable way than reimaging the usb stick you use for installing media over and over. i did not learn that windows is bad. i already knew that. your faithful student, twilight sparkle