What made you finally start looking past the degree line on a resume? For us it was a take home test that went bad, we gave one to a guy with a masters and he could not explain his own code, then a self taught kid walked us through a scrappy app he built to track his gym lifts and it was clean and worked. So we flipped the order, now I skim their projects first and the resume last. The one thing I would say is be careful with take homes, we switched to paid small tasks because asking for free work weeds out good people who just have jobs already. We also started asking for a link to one thing they built and a two minute story about what broke and how they fixed it, that tells you way more than any list of schools.

Doubt the netbook is really the winner here, it just had a different job. Tablets were never meant to replace a full laptop for stuff like listing on eBay, they were meant for couch use and watching videos, so of course yours felt useless when you tried to do desktop work on it. My old tablet from that era still plays movies and reads comics fine, which is all I ever asked it to do. What actually killed the tablet was apps dropping support and no updates, not the hardware itself, same way your netbook is stuck on an old browser that sites are slowly blocking. You got lucky that your one task still works, but that's a small win, not proof the whole prediction was wrong.