What are your target applications, or is it general-purpose?

Physics degree - no jobs. Electronics co employed me on the basis that I could code a bit. Gave me a PBP11 and said "make it control a tomographic isotope emission scanner". Now (semi-retired) I do it for fun.

Something odd happened with win10 overnight. Not serious for me, but my desktop was scrambled.

They also have an annoying tendency to use colour combinations like black print on a dark red ground. And they seem to make the font inversely proportional to the age of the target reader.

Firefox has saved my bacon a few times!

I generally work to "round days", and apportion hours at the end of the week. eg if I go shopping on a particular day, I knock a couple of hours off. If multiple jobs are on, I try to only concentrate on one a day, otherwise apportion hours approximately. Keep track of the mess on Excel. No complaints in the last 25 years.

I've noticed Google search is definitely getting less effective.

Fuses do actually degrade with age, especially if the're rated a bit near the running current. The inlet fuse will almost certainly be subject to many times its rated current for a short interval every time the PSU is powered up (due to charging up capacitors), and each time they'll warm up a bit and lose a bit more "life". Could be your fuse just got too old and tired.

Possibly start with a Seeed Studio Xiao board, and bootstrap your way up from that? Just an idea.

That closing curly kicks my OCD right where it hurts.

I had to migrate several projects from 6 to .NET back when. I found re-writing was pretty straightforward, the only thing that really slowed me up was not being able to use arrays of controls (which the VB6 projects used extensively). Worked out a work-around (which needed much more coding, but ran eventually). Good luck.

Ta. Know what you mean. I rolled my own.

Is is just for COM ports? Does it do file transfer (hyperthing type) stuff? Guess I should try it and stop wasting your time.

I had a similar-ish problem with some code on an Arduino Nano. Everything looked good until it called one particular library function - then went barmy. Changing to a Nano Every (lots more flash and RAM) fixed it, with no other changes.

Agreed. Here's five lines of text!

I've had a couple of HP printers and cameras, and come to the conclusion that installing HP software is an absolute no-no. If it won't work without, it goes back. Also, I'm currently using an Epson printer. "Genuine" Epson cartridges would cost more than the printer (about £60 vs £50), so I get 3rd party, about £16 a set.

I loathe lights on the PC, beyond maybe Power On and disk activity (if there's a mechanical drive). Waste of electrons and photons, and a nasty distraction.

I've used VS for many years - mostly VB and VB.NET, including a pretty big .NET system controlling a multi-million € scientific machine. Last couple of years I've been using it for Arduino C/C++ stuff. I guess I haven't been stretching VS, as all the bugs I've come across have been of my own making.

Bugger. And Ooooh! - it was in a gravity field - that 9.8m/s/s really screws things up. Forget I mentioned whatever it was we were talking about. "Love justice, you who rule the world" -Dante Alighieri

Simple kinda mistake. I tested a 40mm fan, 12V, using a magnet and Hall sensor. Got about 6,000 rpm (in free air).