seen this exact pattern in small business FoxPro setups too, DBFs on a share are one dropped SMB connection away from a corrupted index. if you're stuck maintaining something like this the least bad move is nightly copies of the whole folder to a second box, and actually opening that copy in the app now and then instead of just checking that the file sizes match.
This is an _excellent_ example of what anyone who has been professionally responsible for backups means when they say "it's not a backup until you've restored from it, booted into it, opened the app, and accessed the data"
There's still so much software out there that is an absolute lynchpin to a business that will never have the kind of durability/compatability many take for granted. The only thing that has changed in the past 2 decades is the operating system running the VM. In 2026 they are still yelling across the office or exchanging phone calls when one has finished and signed out so that the other can sign in and pull the updates.
It often isn't taken seriously or is written off because it's a "small business", but those 2-8 people run a book of business that clears this comment thread's lifetime earnings annually.
this fixes a real annoyance on older workstation boards where above 4g decoding is a requirement but the option isn't even in the bios menu. saw a build recently on an x79 board where it had to be exposed with a hand patched bios before anything like this or a modern gpu would work at all.
thanks for the throwback, I remember having to hand patch the bios on my x79 system to use a gpu with 12GB vram. Fun times. My motherboard also mysteriously stopped working shortly after…
I patched my old Haswell system to add an NVMe DXE so I could boot from a modern SSD. I currently have a Lets Note laptop that definitely has UEFI, but pretty much pretends to be BIOS - apparently it's possible to modify to expose UEFI features but I have yet to try...
Same problem with postmortems. You get a clean AI writeup with root cause, timeline, and action items all in the right sections, but none of it tells you what was actually checked or ruled out along the way. Reads like it explains the incident, but you can't tell if the fix was ever tested or just sounds plausible.
