What's the status of Excalibur / 6 in regards to pulse audio? Can you have a completely Poettering-free system with a default install? Or do you have to remove it from that as well? Has anyone done it yet and figured out how hard it is? Would the steps discussed here already work the same for the new version?

Hmm, an SSD is basically a very large USB stick. I guess it would heat up. I wonder if the internal temperature sensor is available through the interface? Does hddtemp work with SSDs? Or would you have to use some other utility to make the sensor available to GKrellm?

If it's drawing from BOTH 12v and 5v at the same time, yes, it would clearly use more power. It's not clear from the label that it does so. Those ratings could be for different modes or different power connections. It's been a while since I had to worry about HD power.

But now I have a new thing to check on SSDs. Another brand I got access to, PNY, shows only 1 amp for a 2TB SSD. Quite a difference from the Crucial, and for more storage. Hmm....

OK, I finally remembered to use the solution I found in certain threads. Disabling the automatic download of currency exchange rates does indeed solve the problem. It now loads and runs normally.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=441309

dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/refresh-interval 0

It seems bizarre. Why did they do such a clumsy thing? Wasn't it easy to predict that the URL might be moved, or more likely, the owners of the website would notice the odd traffic and move it?

This is just one aspect of the drive to lock down 'general purpose' computing. Remember, there is DRM functionality built into our CPUs since at least a decade ago. I forget when they started, but it's been there a while. Generation after generation of equipment, they add more of this stuff. The point is going to come where they can lock it down and the old stuff will be too far behind to be useful.

How much work is there on "Open Source BIOS" for lack of a better term? We will eventually need to be able to flash something new into our motherboards with fewer corporate control options.

If it's a known issue it's something not linked to the word 'calculator' because nothing turns up. Could you possibly give me a pointer?

It's odd how you can ask the same question multiple times and never be understood. Is it so impossible to create an HDD that can boot on multiple systems like a "live" CD, that no one can even comprehend the question? I would think it would be possible to tell your OS to install all available drivers and use a slightly modified boot process similar to what a live CD uses.

Yes, I discovered the "Easy Fix" MSI. An amusing name. All it does is add TLS 1.2 support. Applying that solved many problems. It stopped whingeing that it was not a legitimate copy and was able to check for updates even beyond the antivirus. Many things turned up that I was not even aware of. Some of them dated 2021, after the end of public support. Maybe they released some of the 'extended support' stuff for free after the final end of all support? It's taking a while to download and install them. But it seems worthwhile to get them.

Edited to add: And yes, Firefox now works properly also.

Well, my first thought was logging, which is supposed to be different on Windows when using an SSD compared to an HD. There is supposed to be much less, to reduce the wear on SSDs. Logging of everything has been so automatic in *nix for so long I wondered if there was any concession to hardware wear. And then there is the automatic disk optimization in Windows, but Linux doesn't do that at all. There may be other operational differences, though, so I was just wondering.