Friday Shipped & Scarred · #16

The Optimizer Could Freeze the Desktop. Then a Stranger Sent Me 50 PLN

That might be the strangest week PC Workman has ever had.

By Marcin Firmuga·2026-07-10·5 min read·Friday Shipped & Scarred #16

On Monday, my optimizer could freeze the Windows desktop. By Thursday, a stranger with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D and a flashed 750W RTX 4090 had sent me 50 PLN and offered his PC as a test bench.

This week was about proving v1.8.2 would never repeat the white-screen freeze I found under stress.

Shipped this week

Not shipped: default administrator startup, and the stubborn sidebar bug. The sidebar gets rebuilt next week. I would rather say "not done" than call it finished.

Then a GitHub power user changed the direction of the whole week. He ran PC Workman on hardware I cannot test myself, offered before-and-after data from an upcoming motherboard replacement, supported the project with 50 PLN, and asked hck_GPT questions I did not know how to answer:

Those questions became four new roadmap issues: Hardware Upgrade Compatibility, Local Hardware Compatibility Library, Windows Repair Command Advisor and Driver Store Cleanup Advisor.

hck_GPT is growing past optimization tips. The next step is a local Windows and hardware maintenance assistant. Explain first. Show the evidence. Warn about risk. Never fake certainty.

50 PLN will not fund a company, but honestly, it made my whole month. A year ago I struggled to convince anyone to run my .exe. This week someone offered me an RTX 4090 as a test bench and paid me to keep going. That is the shipment I will remember.

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This is the project behind the post. PC Workman is a free, open-source Windows system monitor with an offline AI assistant - everything described here is real, shipped code. Download it or read the source.
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Marcin Firmuga

Solo developer · HCK_Labs · building PC Workman in public

Every edition is written from that week's real commits. Newest posts premiere on LinkedIn - the archive lives here. More about me: my story.