Sadly your employer is likely in the right here. Oregon just recently passed a law requiring what you have indicated. Senate Bill 906. It goes into effect January 1, 2026. However, before that point in time, employers are not legally required to spell out anything about your employment to you at any given point so long as they fulfill the requirements to give you a timely W-2 when tax time rolls around.
As for the $1232, that is quite the amount and I would not see that as reasonable. However, it really depends on if you want to call their bluff on attorney advisement. The letter looks like something they blew out their own printer, but doctors are petty as fuck and will drag your ass into court over six pennies, or at least in the time I’ve ever known them.
However, take none of this as legal advice. More like a suggestion and you should absolutely look at whatever your local laws are. Oregon JUST got on the bus about requiring employers to provide exactly the documentation you are requesting. I know, but some States still don’t have a legal requirement to provide paystubs. And Federal law absolutely doesn’t require that, they only require the whole “things you need to fill out your taxes”. In many of the States that don’t require it, if your employer does hand it off to you, it puts a ton of responsibility on it being correct on the employer. So some will literally go to a CPA for this one off, which is a much higher rate than a regular book keeper.
But yeah, your Government just recently addressed this, but it doesn’t go into effect until next year. So sadly that new law does not help you here. However, you should absolutely speak with your department of labor to see if there are avenues you can take.
Windows 10 has already had 10 years of support. ESU extends this one extra year. If you have hardware that cannot meet Windows 11’s requirements, there are other OSes available that will happily run on that hardware. Which is what brings us to the real issue.
Microsoft’s near monopoly on consumer grade PCs and Apple’s vendor lock in. This is the core issue.
Ten years is a very long time for support. If you need support past that length, you need a different OS. Apple does good to keep Macs made in the last five to seven years still able to run their newest OS. They are some of the worse offenders on this. But even with a different OS, there’s still a limit to how far you can take hardware. You could put the best optimized software on really old hardware and that won’t change that the underlying CPU is old.
The older hardware gets the harder it is to keep supporting it. Case in point, there reason you can’t get TLS 1.2 that pretty much every site now requires onto Windows 95 era machine is the underlying hardware cannot keep up with the required computational needs to support that encryption. And if you happened to install Windows 95 onto modern hardware, the number of changes to the OS to get access to the underlying hardware is pretty much an upgrade to Windows 7.
Ten year old machines are doing alright for the time being, but we have to move on. TLS 1.3 is here, has been here since 2018. The stricter requirements for security, require more advanced hardware.
And I just mention TLS as a single example of what we’re talking about here. Modern hardware advances and attackers and users get those at the same time. While software security schemes do ensure security long after the hardware has become dated, there’s a point where it won’t matter anymore what software you toss onto the machine. It’s just so out dated it doesn’t matter, no software is securing it. Now that’s usually a lot longer than ten years, but it’s not much longer.
You can take a very lightweight Linux distro and pop it onto a Pentium 3 machine. It will technically run. But you are lacking SSE2 and even if you recompiled to remove SSE2 optimizations and strictly held to 586 ISA, you’re not going to enjoy the performance on the machine. For even the most simple tasks like unpacking a 7-zip. You will fare very unwell to some attacker who has a modern Threadripper machine.
I love old machines but the rest of the world is moving forward. Yes, software could technically cover for more than ten years, but not much more. But it’s silly to think that a Athlon 64 (2003), the oldest CPU you can technically get working on Windows 10 because of the NX bit requirement, would be able to keep pace on today’s multi megabyte sized website. Hell even the X2 models that were the first to be “dual core” would have issues with how modern web browsers handle things because Athlon 64 X2’s model for multiple processors is vastly different than how modern CPUs do it. It wouldn’t take anything for someone to feed it a website that would bring the system to it’s knees.
The thing is 15 years a very long time in the world of technology that’s ever evolving. Software can only go so far. 15 years is absolutely you need a different OS if that’s your requirement territory. But when you start hitting 20 years, your going to see breakage no matter what software you throw at it. It might be very slight at the 20 year mark. but each year after that it’s going to become more pronounced.