brickfrog

My suggestion is to install Ubuntu with whatever desktop environment works for her. Since you're using Ubuntu too, and you're essentially going to be her tech support, it'll just be easier all around to stay on the same distro at least for now.

More importantly, how Windows-centric is she? Some people may prefer Gnome since using it is just a bit less complicated to use without needing to set a bunch of different settings. But if she's expecting the Windows style start menus and such then maybe she'll prefer KDE. Or there's always installing Linux Mint's Cinnamon on Ubuntu, Cinnamon would be easier than KDE for a ex-Windows user I suspect (https://ubuntucinnamon.org/ also exists apparently).

Hmm I think your issue is specific to Windows Sandbox. I've only ever used full VM software (Microsoft Hyper-V, VirtualBox, etc.).

Never touched Windows Sandbox but it sounds like a sort of hybrid VM/Container thing.. I could be wrong :) hopefully someone else knows more about using that or maybe you'll need to post in another community to ask about it.

EDIT: Looking into it a bit more, Windows Sandbox isn't actually a VM. So you're really asking if you can run multiple apps (VPN+torrent client+whatever) inside a sandbox app like Windows Sandbox..I don't think that's how sandbox apps work, they usually are for sandboxing a single app, so you may need to experiment and figure it out. Everyone looking at your post is thinking you're asking about VMs, not sandboxes :P

e.g. see this https://superuser.com/a/1775271 answer

also https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-faq

Yes that would work fine, you can pretty much run anything inside a VM. So yeah a properly set up VM with internet access + VPN client + anything else you want to install will work.

Not too sure what the issue is that you are encountering, you'd need to update your post with a lot more info. My suggestion is to start over and make sure the VM is set up correctly e.g. install the OS in the VM, verify it has normal internet access. Then install the VPN client in the VM, verify VPN is working properly. After that qBittorrent or anything else can be installed inside the VM. (probably best to save snapshots of your VM after each step in case you screw up and need to roll back)

Not as popular but there are other apps that do TV automation, SickChill and Medusa for example are still active forks of the old SickBeard/SickRage software.

There are probably others I'm not thinking of right this second, nowadays people mostly prefer using the *arr stack for automation (Sonarr, Radarr, all the other arrs).

More likely those seeds are super-busy so it just takes a while to keep a consistent upload. these type of seeds tend to be on a ton of other low seed torrents. So any new seeds helps.

And of course there's the seeds that just don't have great connections e.g. could be a laptop that is literally only online x hours a day or even week, or they can only upload at night or whatever.

4 seeders

4 seeds means it's not actually a dead torrent. Slow uploading sure, but not dead. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, if it's going at 8% per week it should finish on its own in roughly 13 weeks assuming the speeds don't change much. That's going to be a while but once you've got it you'll be seed number 5 as long as you keep seeding it on your end.

If I can find find the exact releases of as many roms as possible in the collection from other singular sources, can I resurrect this torrent by just copy+overwrite into the unfinished folder?

Sure that may work in theory. Just keep in mind you'd need to find tons of ROM files that are exact bit-by-bit matches of the files in the torrent - otherwise overwriting mismatched data into your currently downloading torrent would make things slower for you since you'd now have to re-download that data to get back to 8% or whatever.

EDIT: Looks like you lucked out, congrats seed #5 :)

The WD sales are decent if you're buying new so if you're feeling like it's time for a purchase this might be worth it for you.

I did the same earlier this year though in my case I tend to buy the current gen large capacity WD Reds & stick with them for a few years at least. When their 24 TB / 26 TB drives went on sale they actually were cheaper than what Newegg / Amazon had done with their own sales up to then so for me it was worth it.

The other thing to keep in mind, if you're in the U.S., the whole tariff situation isn't going to make this stuff any cheaper in the future.

I am downloading through Mullvad, which I know doesn’t let you forward your ports. So I can appreciate that that seeder’s settings and mine might not be super compatible.

Are there any other peers in that torrent swarm? If it's just you (leeching peer) and the lone seed (seeding peer), and neither of you have ports open, then you won't be able to download any torrent data.

If there is another peer in that swarm, or another peer joins later, and that new peer happens to be fully connectable (port forwarded) then you'll be able to download the torrent data through them. If this is your situation then all you can do is try your luck and wait for another peer to come by.

Or if we rule all of that out - it's possible that lone peer just has a very busy torrent client. They could be the lone peer on tons of other torrents so it would take quite a while before their torrent client gets around to sending you torrent data. If this is the case then it's the same as above, just have to continue waiting.

Strange, they don't even have support via IRC or similar? Most trackers handle support that way but I'm not sure how this one is doing things.

Hopefully a member there will see your post and maybe send you those details.

Time to update https://endof10.org/ , LOL.

Annoying for the IT peeps that have to deal with this. Guess they'll have to decide whether it's worth continuing using the hardware with a replacement OS (Linux, ChromeOS, etc.) or more likely retire all the old hardware.

Anyone in the know on how many Windows 11 SE devices were actually in use? Seems most schools would have gone the more obvious route with something like ChromeOS for a "web first" experience unless M$ and vendors were pushing these things out at massive discounts in the first place.

Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It's not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It's an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.

OTOH if you're happy using the terminal and/or scripting then ffmpeg would be a better bet.

PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists "Devices" and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn't able to test that here.

VS HDD seems a bit unlikely. The typical cheap optical media isn't designed or meant for long term archival. There are more expensive types that are meant for long term storage but I'm pretty sure that's not what OP is talking about, especially if it's just random blank discs from thrift stores, etc.

But to your point even cheap optical media might outlast SSDs since those tend to lose their saved data if stored unpowered for x years.