This was an amazing and informative answer. Thank you.

Grainger seems alright. Better than Uline anyway.

He’s definitely on the jazz!

I could be way off base here, but I’d probably start with the 32-bit version of Windows 7 to hack it into working.

First, you want a 32-bit OS – unless you can get one of the 16-bit OSes virtualized well, but I have no experience with that. 32-bit Windows has NTVDM for running emulated 16-bit apps. 64-bit Windows only has the WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows) emulator for running 32-bit apps.

Also, Windows 7 has a large collection of shims and compatibility layers built in, plus a ton of tweaks you can do with the Application Compatibility Toolkit. I don’t know if there are ACT limitations with 16-bit apps though since I haven’t had to do any serious work with it since the XP -> 7 upgrade wave.

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

– George Carlin

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

– Hanlon’s razor

Yeah Win11 will probably be a noticeable performance hit on that. Especially Explorer which they made dog slow when adding tabs and the new context menu.

The Office apps and browser will probably be about the same.

I’m running Windows 11 on a 12 year old X79 platform. Runs just fine.

But it was definitely top of the line in its day and 48GB of RAM keeps any system relatively snappy.

And then, even if they do pay out, they just jack up your rates to make it all back. That’s if they don’t just drop your coverage completely.