Even if I didn't give a shit about the privacy stuff, I would like to just reiterate something I …

Even if I didn't give a shit about the privacy stuff, I would like to just reiterate something I said a few days ago. My mom got an automatic update to Windows 11, and it bricked her computer. It wouldn't boot; it would spin and then say it needed to go into repair mode, and then doing repair mode didn't do anything. My initial thought was that the disk was hosed, but of course my parents had a bunch of priceless documents that were never backed up anywhere else, so I talked my dad through flashing a USB of Ubuntu so I could boot into it [1], mounted the NTFS partition, and ran smartctl and the disk wasn't reporting any errors. I found and ran a few other diagnostic commands and again, no errors. I was able to rsync the files to my home server, so nothing was loss. My initial assumption is that the Windows Update team didn't properly check to see if the CPU was compatible, and that maybe they were calling a newer instruction that wasn't on my mom's relatively old laptop. …