I was starting to have that problem and solved it by downloading and installing a little free program called "DesktopOK". There are others.
You save your desktop icon configuration to that program. Then if they get scrambled by an update you use the program to rearrange them automatically back to what you had saved.

 

Not to veer wildly off course, but I spent a lot of time in DEC in the late '70's early '80's as well. Did a lot of major memory upgrades from 8 to 16k of memory

 

You pups! At least a few know what a memory hog is.

I recall it cost me $150 to upgrade my Heathkit H8 (1000s of individual solder connections and it worked first try!) from 8K to 16K of static RAM so I could run Benton Harbor BASIC which loaded off a cassette tape and took a couple of minutes to load if the checksum magically matched at the end of the load. Had a stock market analysis program I ran Friday night and the printer came on sometime before morning. The upgrade BASIC was MBASIC (Microsoft BASIC) one of their first products. Not sure it ran on the 8080 but probably did on the exciting and exotic Z80 CPU. We had to scrutinize every line of assembly language code back then to fit in memory listed in K and not M (certainly not G!

-- Chuck

 

ok wise guys what was jmp .+1 in octal? and was a pdb8 big or little endian?
remember those big 32k tapes?
static RAM??? real engineers used core.

growing up in the boston suburbs not far from maynard, we had access to the scrapyard.
i had my own PDP8.... sadly i never did get it to work.

 

So you were out there on Rt. 9 with DEC and the others?

 

grew up a mile or so from rt9. and by the way I corrected to PDP-8 duh!!!
eventually I worked for Prime though and not DEC.
It was great until it wasn't anymore.

 

FIrst PDP I played with had single-pole/single-throw switches that had to be set correctly to boot. About two years before paper tape which was a huge leap forward.

 

toggle in that boot sequence baby.
I cut my teeth on that.
I had a buddy who could go so fast you couldn't actually keep trace of what he was doing.
click click click load, set accumulator, swipe right to left and click click click click, load and go.

 

broke down and ordered another bank of 12 gig of memory and a 1TB SSD. the old 128Gb C was juts out of space.
That should cove me until the next machine.

 

New Firefox is faster sometimes and way slower others. Not impressed.

Today I was on the IMDb website and a blue box with white letters appeared on my screen that said "Mandatory Updates must be Downloaded". It had no Microsoft logo, nothing. You could click inside the box to see what they were, but of course that's what they wanted me to do. I could do nothing else, not even shut down my browser. So I hit ALT-Ctrl-Delete and brought up my Task Manager, but the blue box overlayed even that! Could not shut down any program. So I held down my ON button until the computer died. Started it back up and have not seen the blue box again. I wonder if IMDb was hacked? This is the first time I've ever seen this. BOLO.