I was wondering how to weave this into a story, which is a bit of a mugglewank, in which drugs and other unsavory muggle products can solve all of the wizarding problems. I kinda want to make a crack series of oneshots, but that's just getting ahead of myself.

 

I’m not exactly sure how a synthetic opioid would solve any of their problems. Like, it’s a bit of a funny turn of phrase I suppose, but it isn’t much beyond that.

 

I was thinking about LSD to cure Neville's parents, etc.

 

I'm not going to write it for you, but you can start with the idea you wrote here -- who tries to use LSD? Where do they get it from? What are the amusing and unexpected repercussions? The unintended fallout? Start from there.

 

How easy is lipstick to remove from fabrics? Is it feasible for a group of girls who write their names in lipstick onto an inside corner of a tent to find these names years down the line? If not I’ll have to use a different method of achieving immortality.

 

The few times I had to deal with lipstick on clothes and the like it took a bit more work then a simple wash. But it is certainly possible to get most of it - if not all of it - out of the fabric. So if someone actively tried to clean the tent it would be illegible or gone entirety.

But if the tent was just packed away for five years, it should still be there. Most lipstick is wax based and has antioxidants to keep the colour vibrant. And while lipstick does expire, if the tent is in a cool dark place, like a attic or a basement, it should still readable.

But that's mostly what I learned by osmosis over the years. So perhaps someone with some actual hands on experience has a different take.

 

What operating system was used in various offices in 2004? I'm specifically asking about Los Angeles area.

While I'm aware that Windows XP came out in 2001, it is still used by some offices even in 2020, so in 2004 I guess Windows 95/98 would be still used in lots of places?

 

Depends on the business, I'd say.

Places which use significant amount of home-rolled automation, without actually being tech-companies tend to stick to ancient OSs long after their lifecycle has ended. I wouldn't be surprised if a bank was on a mix of 98 and 95 (older machines, or machines which are critical to some long-standing operation could quite easily be left on an out-of-support version like 95). It's possible that a few would have been updated to XP too, as the compatibility between XP/98/95 was generally better than Vista/XP and so might not have posed an issue to their little home-made (by some guy who left the company years ago) apps.

More tech savvy companies would mostly be on XP, with perhaps a few older legacy machines for running tests etc.

 

Thanks! One of the places in the setting is a Computing Company, so I'm guessing since they specialize in the stuff they'd have XP.

Other few places are either home or hospital computers so it would be believable if they had 95/98.

 

While for the most part private companies are faster to adapt new technology than public operations, the it company where I did an internship still had a lot of older stuff. A lot of programs work better on outdated systems, because that's the ones they were originally build on and updates for the more specialised stuff are often slow in coming.
At least that's what they told me.
Laboratories are even worse, some of the equipment in our part of the university only works in tandem with truly ancient software and hardware. Our it support has an impressive collection old hardware to cannibalise in order to keep the critical stuff going xD.

 

Then there's the more business-oriented line of Windows NT and Windows 2000. Those would be more suitable for a bank or hospital than 95/98, which were more consumer-oriented. XP unified the lines to single product.

Edit: and in case of banks and other institutional users, some of them still use some truly ancient mainframe systems, because that's the only thing that really works reliably. Of course you'd still use Windows (or Unix or Linux) PC to connect to them.

 

Any org with a primarily Windows Directory system at the time would have been pressing for Windows 2000 clients, as Win95/98 weren't securable, and WinNT 4.0 boxes were less user-friendly. Windows XP wasn't considered business-stable until 2003, and most orgs were slow to adjust their deployments after all the year-2000 anxiety had forced spending on upgrades. At the time Windows AD was gaining traction against the dominance of Netware (and for premium orgs, Lotus Domino) for client management and email.

EDIT: also depends on the industry as far as business control; AS400 was still widely deployed in manufacturing environments, using hard terminals.

 

For hospitals its very believable, in fact 98 may easily have been the new thing just being rolled out around that time.

I know of hospitals that still have machines on 95 and 98, because they're using scanners and lab equipment so old that it can't talk to anymore more modern than 95 or 98.

And in hospitals IT has historically been close to the bottom of financial priorities. They'd rather get a new nurse than upgrade the computers, for obvious reasons.