in the process of wondering about it called a local PC repair guy I know who said "He can just download the Windows Media Creation Tool Kit" .
Found this forum page with some bits of installation orientation. I know Tubelab knows all this but in case peeps with knowledge level like mine are here looking for a how to . . . . . .
A Computer Expert eh? So how come you thought Nigel meant 8700KHz? He is, of course, talking about the Intel i7-8700k and i7-12400 CPUs. But personally, I have never wasted any money on i7 CPUs. I am not a gamer and lesser machines have always been good enough and a lot cheaper. I have bought cheap machines and upgraded them instead of building from scratch, ie upgraded LGA775 Celeron CPUs to Q8300. A cheap machine gave you a copy of windows, a decent box and drives cheaper than buying the parts. But today, a HP referb costs as much has a new ASUS, and I am not as sensitive to cost as I used to be. New machines are in most ways better than old hardware. HP is now selling an 11th gen i3 laptop that scores almost 10K at Passmark for less than $400. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ This 10th gen i5 is pretty quick but it only scores about 7.5K. I still avoid AMD machines because they had no thermal shut-down in the past. I should hope they have fixed that.
I have Linux on a couple old machines, but I have run into the limits of what will run the latest Ubuntu. You cannot run a recent Linux version on 20-year-old hardware. I wasted a lot of time trying to install ~Ubuntu16 on a E3400 with 1GB of RAM. I have a film scanner that no drivers are available for any system since XP.
I like Ubuntu but I depend on a list of Windows free/shareware including: Irfanview, MP3tag, total commander, VLC player, etc. Most of these have Linux equivalents, but they are awkward to use. I have tried to use Gimp and always given up in frustration. My next machine will probably come with W11, but I do not intend to upgrade my W10 machines. I know how to fix stupid windows features like hiding extensions and my non-tech friends are more likely to be able to share stuff. Several friends are using Apples and I may have to learn that system myself, but I'm not impressed with gross inefficient files like *.numbers spread sheets.
I wasted some money on a couple Blue-ray burners. You can put 25G on a BD-R, but that's not much anymore and they are slow. Linux distros are now oriented to thumb drives and not DVD disks, mostly because few machines now have any kind of optical drive. I have a pile of optical disks that will probably never use.
The worst problem with Microsoft is that they are making their system a marketing vehicle to sell sh1t. Some of that you can fix and some not so easy to deal with. To their credit, you can use a version of Visual studio for free, which I used to write a controller for a EMDR light bar in C#. Maybe I should write a media player and pre-amp app, or has anyone here already done that? (I'm lazy.)
MS will sell you a W11 disk if you are an OEM system builder. It is intended for use only on newly built systems:
If you have a legal W10 machine that is associated with a Misrosoft account, the upgrade to W11 is free, but will only occur if the machine meets the compatibility requirements.
If you have a W10 machine you can go to "settings" then click on Accounts, then Your info. You should see a clickable blue line that says Manage my Microsoft account. There you will find "Devices" Here you can see all the devices that Microsoft has registered to you. In my case there are 14 of them. Clicking on "details" associated with any device will tell you what operating system is on the device. I assume that "Windows Core" is the W7 machine, but I have not verified it. Someday I'll chase down all 14 machines to see how many still exist. Any W7 machine on this list is eligible for a free upgrade to W10. I have found that W7 machines not on the list will also upgrade to W10 but you will need to provide your account details which puts the machine on the list. Any W10 machine on the list that meets the requirements is eligible for a free upgrade to W11 IF it meets the W11 requirements, and most of my relics fall far short, except for the two I have recently tried that led to my posts here.
When converting a W7 machine to W10 it is best to do a clean install. This is not an option for W11 at this time if MS has already seen the machine and captured its hardware profile. To do a clean W10 install you can go the media creation kit route, but it is far easier to go directly to Microsoft's Windows download site, download the ISO file to a flash drive of at least 8GB, pop that into the target machine and boot from it. This will bring up the W10 installer which will handshake with MS to get the latest media for your hardware combination. When asked for the key from the install disk, use the keys from the original W7 disk or COA sticker they work fine on W10. If you don't have the original W7 disk or COA, but the W7 machine still works, download and run Magic Jellybean. You can run it from the web, an install is not needed. It will suck the CD keys right out of the Windows registry on the machine. This is a perfectly legal means of obtaining a legal W10 license from a W7 CD or W7 machine. That W10 machine is eligible for a W11 upgrade if it meets the requirements. This is stated somewhere on Microsoft's web site, don't remember exactly where I saw it but it was somewhere in the W11 stuff.
I briefly mentioned that MS makes a hardware profile of your PC and keeps it associated with your individual Windows license. Making major changes to the PC can trigger the dreaded "this copy of Windows is not genuine" warning leading to reduced functionality after a time limit. This usually takes a contact with someone at MS to resolve. Often a single hardware change does not trigger a not genuine event but swapping the motherboard and CPU does. The "lightning fried my PC" story has worked for me twice in the past. I don't know if it will work again, but it was several years ago, so it might.
Amazon put the bait in front of me today, and I took it. I got a Ryzen 9 -5900X CPU chip for $334 on the Prime Early Access Deals today, so a CPU swap in my W10 Ryzen 7 machine will occur in the next week or so. Maybe the truth will work with MS if needed. It is one of the machines that will not upgrade to W11 even though it meets all of the criteria. There is no way I will actually put W11 on it, I just wondered why MS won't let me try.
- OEM IS TO BE INSTALLED ON A NEW PC with no prior version of Windows installed and cannot be transferred to another machine.
- OEM DOES NOT PROVIDE SUPPORT | To acquire product with Microsoft support, obtain the full packaged “Retail” version.
If you have a legal W10 machine that is associated with a Misrosoft account, the upgrade to W11 is free, but will only occur if the machine meets the compatibility requirements.
If you have a W10 machine you can go to "settings" then click on Accounts, then Your info. You should see a clickable blue line that says Manage my Microsoft account. There you will find "Devices" Here you can see all the devices that Microsoft has registered to you. In my case there are 14 of them. Clicking on "details" associated with any device will tell you what operating system is on the device. I assume that "Windows Core" is the W7 machine, but I have not verified it. Someday I'll chase down all 14 machines to see how many still exist. Any W7 machine on this list is eligible for a free upgrade to W10. I have found that W7 machines not on the list will also upgrade to W10 but you will need to provide your account details which puts the machine on the list. Any W10 machine on the list that meets the requirements is eligible for a free upgrade to W11 IF it meets the W11 requirements, and most of my relics fall far short, except for the two I have recently tried that led to my posts here.
When converting a W7 machine to W10 it is best to do a clean install. This is not an option for W11 at this time if MS has already seen the machine and captured its hardware profile. To do a clean W10 install you can go the media creation kit route, but it is far easier to go directly to Microsoft's Windows download site, download the ISO file to a flash drive of at least 8GB, pop that into the target machine and boot from it. This will bring up the W10 installer which will handshake with MS to get the latest media for your hardware combination. When asked for the key from the install disk, use the keys from the original W7 disk or COA sticker they work fine on W10. If you don't have the original W7 disk or COA, but the W7 machine still works, download and run Magic Jellybean. You can run it from the web, an install is not needed. It will suck the CD keys right out of the Windows registry on the machine. This is a perfectly legal means of obtaining a legal W10 license from a W7 CD or W7 machine. That W10 machine is eligible for a W11 upgrade if it meets the requirements. This is stated somewhere on Microsoft's web site, don't remember exactly where I saw it but it was somewhere in the W11 stuff.
I briefly mentioned that MS makes a hardware profile of your PC and keeps it associated with your individual Windows license. Making major changes to the PC can trigger the dreaded "this copy of Windows is not genuine" warning leading to reduced functionality after a time limit. This usually takes a contact with someone at MS to resolve. Often a single hardware change does not trigger a not genuine event but swapping the motherboard and CPU does. The "lightning fried my PC" story has worked for me twice in the past. I don't know if it will work again, but it was several years ago, so it might.
Amazon put the bait in front of me today, and I took it. I got a Ryzen 9 -5900X CPU chip for $334 on the Prime Early Access Deals today, so a CPU swap in my W10 Ryzen 7 machine will occur in the next week or so. Maybe the truth will work with MS if needed. It is one of the machines that will not upgrade to W11 even though it meets all of the criteria. There is no way I will actually put W11 on it, I just wondered why MS won't let me try.
And to get to those "settings" you can hit Win + Pause on the keyboard...
If you register for Insider, you can download an ISO.
That's how I got a licence for W10 Pro for free instead of paying 250$ for it 🙂
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/getting-started
Also, my experience with it says W11 is much more refined and simply works better than W10.
I considered grabbing a 5900X but it's not enough of an upgrade from the 3900X. I'll probably wait for Zen 5.
If you register for Insider, you can download an ISO.
That's how I got a licence for W10 Pro for free instead of paying 250$ for it 🙂
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/getting-started
Also, my experience with it says W11 is much more refined and simply works better than W10.
I considered grabbing a 5900X but it's not enough of an upgrade from the 3900X. I'll probably wait for Zen 5.
(1) ARM is widely used in the SoC embedded world ( System On a Chip)... it is very common to see more than 50 ARM cores in a Smart Phone SoC, often quite a few more. In higher end applications, such as spacecraft, you still see older RISC and PPC but they are really on their way out as custom FPGA development can use ARM cores very easily... heck, currently I'm working with a Xylinx chip that combines FPGAs and six ARM cores.
(2) I don't see Microsoft, or Apple, move their PCs to ARM core.
(3) Apple was interesting when they used PPC. We use to buy them because could use them as prototypes for embedded applications. When they went to x86 it became a big yawner. I have some friends who do use Apple but the first thing they did was to scrapt the GUI and run native Linux.
(4) Ubuntu.. hehehe... there's a 22 year old Pentium in my data closet running it. It hosts Apache for my locan LAN.
(5) Then you got Raspberries.
It was replaced by NT 4.0 and later Win XT. It was a natural progression since OS2 was in reality NT 3.5.
DVD-R... what? Are you like in 1999?
Burn it into a USB flash drive, it's been like that for oh... 15 years now?
VIA have an ARM license, and made embedded CPUs with integrated North Bridge way before Intel did on the i series CPUs.
They have moved away from desktops to other areas, a visit to their website may prove useful.
I still have a working PIII-733 with a VIA motherboard, now in storage, great sound quality. I changed most of the caps on the board to Keltron long back, and found a few dry joints in the board at that time, one expansion slot started working after re flowing the joints.
Biostar made...circa 2001.
I have no ties to any sellers mentioned here, and even Intel had embedded (permanently soldered) Atom chips on 945 boards, also this is a fairly common design for cell phones and industrial PLCs.
Some PLC have a dual or quad 266Mhz ARM cores, and work quite well...
Sir Clive Sinclair's vision of wafer scale integration is at least coming true as SoC for cell phones and similar devices...
They have moved away from desktops to other areas, a visit to their website may prove useful.
I still have a working PIII-733 with a VIA motherboard, now in storage, great sound quality. I changed most of the caps on the board to Keltron long back, and found a few dry joints in the board at that time, one expansion slot started working after re flowing the joints.
Biostar made...circa 2001.
I have no ties to any sellers mentioned here, and even Intel had embedded (permanently soldered) Atom chips on 945 boards, also this is a fairly common design for cell phones and industrial PLCs.
Some PLC have a dual or quad 266Mhz ARM cores, and work quite well...
Sir Clive Sinclair's vision of wafer scale integration is at least coming true as SoC for cell phones and similar devices...
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That become de factor more than 10 years ago.
How would you like to see SoCs with multiple A7s, A9s, A15s, M1s, R5s, etc... MANY of them. Tens of them. In a cell phone, a HDD, etc...
My new Samsung A33 5G has an octa core CPU.
I did not know it has more than those elsewhere In the device...
Thanks for telling me...
I did not know it has more than those elsewhere In the device...
Thanks for telling me...
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The smart phones will have several application cores for a bunch of non-phone, non-text applications... that's your "octa core".
But for main control it will use some M and/or R cores which are real time and based on a flat memory space.
All of these cores usually live in the processor block, with direct access to the L1 and L2, memory manager, at least one system DMA and ports to the AXI buses. Seeing shared L2 and L3 is awesome. Makes for very fast interprocessor communications.
Synchronous Multi Processing (SMP).
Then you have a multimedia block, a matrix switch fabric block, the modem block, the IO interface block, the power management block, the AXI bus fabric, etc... with cores and DMAs all over the place. RAM of all types, system NAND, a vendor SD card, a user SD card (Android), etc, etc... they are actually way more complex than a PC.
And the whole thing is affordable due to volume.. those SoCs designs are taped to fab plants ( Taiwan mostly ) and become ASICs. They are lots cheaper than an FPGA.
I am coming from a Ryzen 7-3800X so The Passmark score goes from 23308 to 39315, a sizable but not earth shattering upgrade. That move however frees up the 3800X to go into a yet unpurchased budget motherboard which will replace the board in this machine which is running a core i7-7700T chip and MB that originally lived in a battery powered music production studio which is currently being rebuilt. That move would take this machine from a Passmark CPU score of 7608 to 23308 which is a sizeable upgrade also making this PC W11 compatible should I decide to go there in the future. The i7-7700T board can then go back to making music.
I started my Engineering career at Motorola when two way radios used discreet parts with leads that were hand stuffed into a PC board (the HT-220). The CMOS processor (RCA Cosmac 1802) was not yet born, and the cell phone was not even a dream. There was a rudimentary frequency synthesized version of the MX-300 radio made in the late 70's with an 1802 chip in it.
I joined the cell phone group in the late 90's and left in the early 2000's. It was the most stressful 4 years of my life since every day brought a different panic. These were the days that turned a taxi cab dispatch radio into a cell phone with walkie-talkie functionality, and Fleet Call morphed into Nextel. I remember seeing the DSP chip unsolder itself on some early breadboards. The Motorola DSP of the day couldn't handle the task, so the first Nextel cell phones had two DSP's and a microprocessor. The AT&T branded Cirent DSP just handled the modem duties for phone calls. It still got quite warm. Cirent is a chip fab in Orlando that was a joint venture of Cirrus and Lucent. Phones have evolved a bit since I left that world.
According to UserBenchmark, the effective speed is only 14% faster between 3800X and 5900X. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X/4047vs4087
I'll go boot into Windows and see what this benchmark says both on my 3900X and my i3-2170u Craptop 🙂
Many of the PC, CPU or video card benchmarks found today place a high value on gaming which is not important to me. Fortunately some of the requirements for my Ryzen machine align with gaming machines. The core i7-7700T machine that I am using now however is fully sufficient for the tasks I perform on it, the most strenuous being 4K video playback. It however scores a 37% on Passmark's your PC VS the world due to the lack of a video card. The same PC gets 57% with a GTX1050 in it, but adding the card makes zero difference in my workflow, so it is in a different machine.
The Ryzen machine I have is used mostly for two very different but demanding applications, music synthesis, generation, recording and manipulation, and video editing. The these impose different challenges on my PC which is a compromise build imposed by my budget. At the moment music manipulation is more important than video editing since music is real time and small errors ruin everything, while video rendering is usually an overnight thing anyway.
My video editing is often based on assembling a large number of still frame images into a video stream. It takes 9000 images to make a 5 minute video at 30 FPS, twice that for 60 FPS. Here the video card is the bottleneck. Sometimes there are video streams of different sizes (a GoPro is the oddball format) that need to be scaled and rendered to 1080 or 4K video. Here both the video card and the CPU's math performance are the limitations. After setting everything up, I have seen the render time for a 5 minute video stretch into several hours. It would take a lot of money to shorten this time substantially so I perform several tests on short segments before setting up for an overnight video rendering. I am using a GTX1660 video card and anything that would approach doubling its performance is well beyond my budget.
I use VCV Rack, a freeware virtual modular music synthesizer. There are hundreds of virtual modules often written by different authors, and not all use the PC's resources equally well. Often a module can run in a single core, so when running lots of modules sheer core count boosts performance more than having a few high performance cores. I am going from 8 cores to 12 so I could see a 50% lower CPU load with the CPU swap.
I use Ableton Live or FL Studio for music making. Here the number of cores count, but so does the single core performance, especially in floating point math. I usually send MIDI data from the DAW out of the PC via the USB sound box and into a DIY synth of my own design, bring the generated audio back into the PC through the sound box and record it to the disk. Usually multiple MIDI tracks are being output and up to 8 audio tracks are being recorded simultaneously. Both DAW's have a CPU meter, and I have been able to use all of my CPU's power on some crazy experiments.
FL studio has a page detailing what's important when building a PC for use with a DAW here:
https://support.image-line.com/action/knowledgebase/?ans=214
The Ryzen machine I have is used mostly for two very different but demanding applications, music synthesis, generation, recording and manipulation, and video editing. The these impose different challenges on my PC which is a compromise build imposed by my budget. At the moment music manipulation is more important than video editing since music is real time and small errors ruin everything, while video rendering is usually an overnight thing anyway.
My video editing is often based on assembling a large number of still frame images into a video stream. It takes 9000 images to make a 5 minute video at 30 FPS, twice that for 60 FPS. Here the video card is the bottleneck. Sometimes there are video streams of different sizes (a GoPro is the oddball format) that need to be scaled and rendered to 1080 or 4K video. Here both the video card and the CPU's math performance are the limitations. After setting everything up, I have seen the render time for a 5 minute video stretch into several hours. It would take a lot of money to shorten this time substantially so I perform several tests on short segments before setting up for an overnight video rendering. I am using a GTX1660 video card and anything that would approach doubling its performance is well beyond my budget.
I use VCV Rack, a freeware virtual modular music synthesizer. There are hundreds of virtual modules often written by different authors, and not all use the PC's resources equally well. Often a module can run in a single core, so when running lots of modules sheer core count boosts performance more than having a few high performance cores. I am going from 8 cores to 12 so I could see a 50% lower CPU load with the CPU swap.
I use Ableton Live or FL Studio for music making. Here the number of cores count, but so does the single core performance, especially in floating point math. I usually send MIDI data from the DAW out of the PC via the USB sound box and into a DIY synth of my own design, bring the generated audio back into the PC through the sound box and record it to the disk. Usually multiple MIDI tracks are being output and up to 8 audio tracks are being recorded simultaneously. Both DAW's have a CPU meter, and I have been able to use all of my CPU's power on some crazy experiments.
FL studio has a page detailing what's important when building a PC for use with a DAW here:
https://support.image-line.com/action/knowledgebase/?ans=214
The Ryzen 9 -5900X CPU chip was in my mailbox this morning. I ripped the big rack mount PC from its rack tossed it on the bench for an expected total teardown to remove the MB so I could get that fancy multicolor glowing LED powered CPU cooler off. Popping the lid off for the first time in over two years provided surprise number 1. I partially removed the video card letting it dangle from its 12Volt power cable. This allowed me to get to the clips that hold the glowing circle of color on the CPU without removing anything else. 5 minutes and a bit of Artic Silver later and the CPU's were swapped. I reinstalled the GTX1660 connected up a few cables including a 4K TV, and fired it up. The BIOS screen popped up a warning saying that a new CPU had been detected and the BIOS defaults were installed. I saved, exited and restarted. This led to a looping sequence that flashed some of the red POST error LED's on the MB a few times, then the machine restarted by itself, and booted Windows10. Windows needed some drivers, so I went to Windows Update where it found what it needed and also installed a couple updates and asked me to restart the machine. Upon restarting and returning to Windows Update I found surprise #2. My PC is now suddenly Windows 11 ready, and MS is prompting me to upgrade for free, NOW......UH, not yet.
The only change was the CPU chip, and the old Ryzen 7 3800X IS on the compatible chips list, so again, What's UP? Once I have played with W11 on a non critical machine, I may install it here, but for now I'll stick with W10.
Surprise #3 came when I ran before and after Passmark benchmark tests. As expected, the CPU score improved from 22633 to 40214, both slightly higher than the published Passmark scores. Likewise, the overall PC score improved from 7019 to 7901 which is the 85th percentile VS the world rising to the 93rd percentile after the swap. Surprisingly the 2D graphics score improved a little and the 3D graphics improved about 10%. The memory scores were pretty unimpressive with either CPU chip being in the 63rd percentile even though there is 32 GB of good quality DDR4 on board. The BIOS probably doesn't see the XMP profile for these memory DIMMs so some tweaking is in order.
I need to try some real world benchmarking with the virtual modular synth and some video rendering as soon as I can find the notebook with the testing I did early in the year when VCV Rack V2 came out.
The only change was the CPU chip, and the old Ryzen 7 3800X IS on the compatible chips list, so again, What's UP? Once I have played with W11 on a non critical machine, I may install it here, but for now I'll stick with W10.
Surprise #3 came when I ran before and after Passmark benchmark tests. As expected, the CPU score improved from 22633 to 40214, both slightly higher than the published Passmark scores. Likewise, the overall PC score improved from 7019 to 7901 which is the 85th percentile VS the world rising to the 93rd percentile after the swap. Surprisingly the 2D graphics score improved a little and the 3D graphics improved about 10%. The memory scores were pretty unimpressive with either CPU chip being in the 63rd percentile even though there is 32 GB of good quality DDR4 on board. The BIOS probably doesn't see the XMP profile for these memory DIMMs so some tweaking is in order.
I need to try some real world benchmarking with the virtual modular synth and some video rendering as soon as I can find the notebook with the testing I did early in the year when VCV Rack V2 came out.
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What's up is when you reset the CMOS you probably changed the defaults to enable TPM... My system used to default to off for that, a bios update enabled it by default since W11 came out. I also had to force XMP profile to 3200MHz. It was defaulting to 2400MHz.
I am running a Aorus X570 board...
I am running a Aorus X570 board...
I am running an ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 board. Before ordering the Ryzen 9 chip I reflashed the BIOS from the original version to the latest version. I tested for functionality but probably didn't go to Windows Update since I knew the CPU change was coming. The new BIOS could have turned on the TPU, but the machine passed the PC health check requirements before flashing the BIOS. I guess it doesn't matter now.
I have a Ryzen 7 3800X that needs a home, so I have a 32 GB memory set coming tomorrow and another ASRock X570 motherboard coming next week. I'll try both sets of memory in the Ryzen 9 machine and leave the best performing set in there. The newly minted Ryzen 7 machine will be a test bed for W11 if and when I can get it to run on it. This will probably put my second gen i5-2500K machine in the hands of one of the grandkids where its life expectancy gets shorter.
I ripped into the machine again today to swap out the power supply. The computer has worked fine with the supply it had, but it was a 450 watt unit. I stuffed in a hungrier CPU, so I ordered a 650 watt supply back when I got the Ryzen 9 chip but it didn't arrive until yesterday. I also played musical memory DIMMs but as you surmised it didn't make much difference because the BIOS reflash had set the memory speed to 2133 MHz to insure startup. The DIMMs that were in the machine were rated for 3600 MHz so they went back in. This seriously boosted the memory performance in the Passmark tests.
I now have all the parts to build a new PC around the Ryzen 7 that I pulled from the machine, except the cooler. I have a box full of assorted coolers, but not a one of them will fit the motherboard. I ordered one from Amazon that was in stock at the Pittsburgh warehouse for delivery tomorrow, but Amazon just decided that I wasn't in a hurry and changed the delivery date to Monday. I'll probably set the MB up on its box and "glue" a cooler to the CPU with some Artic Silver for testing and Windows installation on the MB mounded SSD.
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The "Desktop PC" is alive and running W10. I have not yet figured out how to get the secure boot functions to work despite using the exact same BIOS settings I used with the other identical MB and the CPU chip I pulled from that MB. The 1 TB SSD with Windows 10 on it is hiding under the video card. The cooler is from an old Intel based MB. It is just stuck to the CPU chip with thermal paste. Even so the idle temps are around 40C which is cooler than it ran with the fancy Wraith LED cooler that came with it which were 50C or more. Granted it now has unrestricted airflow as opposed to living inside a box with three spinning HD's, wedged between this power supply and a GTX1660. The card used here is a GTX1050 which doesn't even need a dedicated 12 volt cable from the PSU.
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The secure boot issue was traced to a statement I found with Google in an obscure thread on a Microsoft forum somewhere. It stated that secure boot only works in GPT / GUID based drive volumes. I had just installed W10 from a flash drive containing an ISO image I downloaded from Microsoft some time ago, but the boot volume on my SSD was indeed MBR. There is a utility called MBR2GPT that will change a MBR volume to GPT, so I used it, then applied the MS W11 Upgrade Assistant and the PC is now running W11. Maybe MS should add that to their list of W11 requirements. The proper CPU cooler should arrive tomorrow.
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