I shut down all of my machines if I won't be using it for an hour or more. I always have and have not seen an issue. This goes back to my first 8088 machine in the mid 80's. None of my stuff is leading edge, all is at least one generation back. All run at the standard clock speed except for an old i5-2500K that's been mildly overclocked since day one. I have seen one motherboard die in that time frame out of probably 40 that have spent some time in my collection. Most of the 32/64 bit machines are still alive with relatives, kids or grandkids. I don't know what happened to the old stuff in Florida.
It seems that the PC world article claiming that Microsoft raised the minimum CPU spec to 11th gen or newer is BS, or at least full of conflicting information. In the second paragraph of that article there is a link to several lists of Windows 11 version 24H2 minimum requirements. In the Intel CPU list there are several 8th gen and newer CPU chips, including the Core i7-9750H that is in my MSI laptop. The Core i5-8265U that's in the Lenovo Nano and Core i7-8700 in the AsRock Desk Mini are also in the supported list. All of those machines are currently running Windows 11 22H2 without any major issues, but the two SFF boxes don't see much use. I have another Ryzen 7-7735U based SFF board that is on the AMD supported list. I'll try it later today. All of my other stuff is 7th gen and older, some way older. All are currently running W10. I'm still running a core i5-2500K that's overclocked a bit for testing stuff, a core i7-4790K for writing Arduino, Teensy, and Daisy code. My audio amp test station uses a Core i5-4690K, though it might get a CPU swap out soon as I pulled an i7-4790K out of an old machine with a dead MB. Then the old stuff goes to the grandkids from where it will never return unless they break it and want it fixed.
The machine that I'm typing this on is powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X as is its brother. Both have identical AsRock X570 motherboards.....except for one minor detail. I dropped a screw onto the motherboard while it was operational on the other machine. Sparks flew and the power supply shut down. After yanking the power cord and removing the screw, I pushed the power button. The fans spun but nothing appeared on the screen. When I was about to declare it dead Windows 11 appeared on the screen. The machine appears dead for one to two minutes on power up, then W11 24H2 appears and works normally. I can't get into the bios with the usual held keys, possibly because there is no power to the keyboard during that dead time. A power supply swap did not fix it. There are some tiny SMD parts where the screw landed near the CPU chip that are burnt. It works fine otherwise, so I'm not messing with it.
As for Android VS Apple, I have an iPhone 10S and a Motorola Stylus 2023. Both work without issue. They are on two different carriers to increase our chances of always having a working phone in our house. Even the Comcast landline goes out occasionally here in nowhereland. Which phone I carry is determined by how big my pockets are at the time. The larger Motorola is easier to read and type on. I think the camera in the iPhone is a bit better but the Moto cost $200 and the iPhone cost $500 several years ago.
It seems that the PC world article claiming that Microsoft raised the minimum CPU spec to 11th gen or newer is BS, or at least full of conflicting information. In the second paragraph of that article there is a link to several lists of Windows 11 version 24H2 minimum requirements. In the Intel CPU list there are several 8th gen and newer CPU chips, including the Core i7-9750H that is in my MSI laptop. The Core i5-8265U that's in the Lenovo Nano and Core i7-8700 in the AsRock Desk Mini are also in the supported list. All of those machines are currently running Windows 11 22H2 without any major issues, but the two SFF boxes don't see much use. I have another Ryzen 7-7735U based SFF board that is on the AMD supported list. I'll try it later today. All of my other stuff is 7th gen and older, some way older. All are currently running W10. I'm still running a core i5-2500K that's overclocked a bit for testing stuff, a core i7-4790K for writing Arduino, Teensy, and Daisy code. My audio amp test station uses a Core i5-4690K, though it might get a CPU swap out soon as I pulled an i7-4790K out of an old machine with a dead MB. Then the old stuff goes to the grandkids from where it will never return unless they break it and want it fixed.
The machine that I'm typing this on is powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X as is its brother. Both have identical AsRock X570 motherboards.....except for one minor detail. I dropped a screw onto the motherboard while it was operational on the other machine. Sparks flew and the power supply shut down. After yanking the power cord and removing the screw, I pushed the power button. The fans spun but nothing appeared on the screen. When I was about to declare it dead Windows 11 appeared on the screen. The machine appears dead for one to two minutes on power up, then W11 24H2 appears and works normally. I can't get into the bios with the usual held keys, possibly because there is no power to the keyboard during that dead time. A power supply swap did not fix it. There are some tiny SMD parts where the screw landed near the CPU chip that are burnt. It works fine otherwise, so I'm not messing with it.
As for Android VS Apple, I have an iPhone 10S and a Motorola Stylus 2023. Both work without issue. They are on two different carriers to increase our chances of always having a working phone in our house. Even the Comcast landline goes out occasionally here in nowhereland. Which phone I carry is determined by how big my pockets are at the time. The larger Motorola is easier to read and type on. I think the camera in the iPhone is a bit better but the Moto cost $200 and the iPhone cost $500 several years ago.
@tomchr
Hmm... we beg to differ then.
I just run filters, own my own web servers, etc... so my Windows machines are not security ris0098i08080- -2-3&&&%%&%& bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt
Poof!
sk...
BTW: @Tubelab_com Shutting down and powering up a machine is the most stressful thing you can to them... have you tried just using the sleep settings? And yes, I don't buy bleeding edge stuff... I'm too cheap. My fastest now is an i7-13K series. Although at work they issued me with a fancy i9 laptop that weights like 100 lbs and needs what ZM calls a "babysitter" to cool it down.
Hmm... we beg to differ then.
I just run filters, own my own web servers, etc... so my Windows machines are not security ris0098i08080- -2-3&&&%%&%& bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt
Poof!
sk...
BTW: @Tubelab_com Shutting down and powering up a machine is the most stressful thing you can to them... have you tried just using the sleep settings? And yes, I don't buy bleeding edge stuff... I'm too cheap. My fastest now is an i7-13K series. Although at work they issued me with a fancy i9 laptop that weights like 100 lbs and needs what ZM calls a "babysitter" to cool it down.
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I walked out of the room after turning the "brother" loose on a list of W11 updates and returned to see a message on a black background. It read "Something did not go as planned, undoing changes." Then poof it rebooted before I could grab the camera. I'm guessing it ate an update that it couldn't digest. It has been playing youtube videos for long enough for me to eat 4 slices of pizza without issue. I'll leave it running for a while longer.
When Hector Ruiz worked for Motorola, he threw me out of his office as I tried to explain that a cost cutting move for the most popular pager on the planet would make is useless in a newly created RF environment called the cell phone. Saving $1 per pager made them useless near a cell phone due to "poor image rejection." I refused to buy an AMD product as long as he was the CEO. When he left, I switched from Intel to AMD based primarily on cost. AMD chips are still quite a bit cheaper than an Intel part with the same processing power. So far, Qualcomm has not been a player in the DIY PC market. They could be a big player if they choose to be. They have 15 CPU chips on Microsoft's W11 CPU list, and 10 chips on the W11 24H2 list.
Caught it this time. It's definitely an update issue, but it's already at W11 24H2, so it must be one of the nuisance updates.
That's true with most electronics. I'm not going to leave the TV on all night because of it. In my experience the most stressful thing I could do to a computer is to mess with it. If one does die, I'll have a good excuse to mess with it, which usually results in a better machine, or a pile of spare parts and a new machine build. My fastest machine is this one and its brother, both are powered by a Ryzen 9 5900X which scores a 39,052 on PassMark's CPU benchmark. The i7-13K series ranges from 33,141 for the i7-13700HX to 38,665 for the i7-13700, so we are in the same league, and maybe the same ballpark. The fastest chips scored go well over 100,000 on the same benchmark, but they are VERY pricey. The fastest chip under $1000 is the intel Xeon Max 9480 at 84,567 for $920. That 160,000 chip, only $10,811. Yeah right!
When Hector Ruiz worked for Motorola, he threw me out of his office as I tried to explain that a cost cutting move for the most popular pager on the planet would make is useless in a newly created RF environment called the cell phone. Saving $1 per pager made them useless near a cell phone due to "poor image rejection." I refused to buy an AMD product as long as he was the CEO. When he left, I switched from Intel to AMD based primarily on cost. AMD chips are still quite a bit cheaper than an Intel part with the same processing power. So far, Qualcomm has not been a player in the DIY PC market. They could be a big player if they choose to be. They have 15 CPU chips on Microsoft's W11 CPU list, and 10 chips on the W11 24H2 list.
Caught it this time. It's definitely an update issue, but it's already at W11 24H2, so it must be one of the nuisance updates.
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Actually that one is Windoze: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...kmdagsys/fd3d61e8-df06-4784-b7ac-cb248c028804
But you believe what you believe.
I run my own packet filtering too, by the way.
Tom
I don't even check what version of Windows updates I run.
We use Xeon chips in the embedded world... they're actually quite good in an an SMP design... many cores.... The Qualcomm chips use tons of ARM cores.... even more fun to program than Xeons.... you got your M, your R and your A cores. DMA microcode forever!
Apple went to ARM in their iPhones a while back too. I guess their latest Macs are also using them.
The current embedded designs marry the cores with an FPGA. Even better. I see no real advantages between Intel and ARM at that level... they are what they are. Take Xylinx, etc... serious work people... serious RTOSs. Robust, reliable...
Fun stuff, makes Windows and Apple stuff... boring. Sorry, I just don't mess with that. Toys for application programmers.
I work with firmware. That's where I make my money. There is no money to be made on the PC world.... just a bunch of application programmers and off World hackers and sometimes they mess with a kernel process and the end result is... Crowdstrike.
You got your Windows, cheap, widely supported and loose, and your Apple, expensive, limited and tightly controlled. Choose your GUI weapon. But gimme a CLI.
Linux is fun but it's not greatly supported for tools that make you money... Unix is a much better environment indeed that Windows and Apple but it does require a bit of learning, yet you can do meaningful things in Unix that you can not do in the other commercial products without licensing and NDAs and special tools... In Unix, with gcc, make, vim, grep, find and the shell I can do lots of real work. I can run Git as well. Add xterm and we're set. I know a few people who bought Mac books and the first thing they did was to junk the Apple GUI and install their own presentation manager, I also know others, like me, cheaper, that got Windows machines and plugged in a USB stick with Ubuntu on them. Heck, I have one right by my keyboard.
In case of an emergency, insert this...
Given a fast enough core, I can make Unix/Linux/Android run at near Real Time speeds.. Fast enough, with smart devices, that it can be a useful thing, like an Android phone or tablet... that's why I stay in touch with those OSs.
But I stay out of the Windows vs Apple competition. They're just tools for me, so I use the ones that are supported by the tool vendors.
Otherwise, I'm cheap... I can get go to the Dell Outlet and buy i7 MFF machines for under 500 bucks... and for some audio applications, I can get a MFF Dell, HP with an i5 for 200 bucks. And now I can get a Chromebook ( Android Tablet) with Tidal HiFi and a WiiM Ultra and do audio bit perfect all day long... 550 bucks....
As far as running my work running all weekend long... well... in my case that kind of stuff runs in an embedded target and neither Cupertino nor Redmond have any say on it. Somehow, I've never had a PC hung up on me... perhaps because I run my PCs light? The hard work is done in an RTOS.
We use Xeon chips in the embedded world... they're actually quite good in an an SMP design... many cores.... The Qualcomm chips use tons of ARM cores.... even more fun to program than Xeons.... you got your M, your R and your A cores. DMA microcode forever!
Apple went to ARM in their iPhones a while back too. I guess their latest Macs are also using them.
The current embedded designs marry the cores with an FPGA. Even better. I see no real advantages between Intel and ARM at that level... they are what they are. Take Xylinx, etc... serious work people... serious RTOSs. Robust, reliable...
Fun stuff, makes Windows and Apple stuff... boring. Sorry, I just don't mess with that. Toys for application programmers.
I work with firmware. That's where I make my money. There is no money to be made on the PC world.... just a bunch of application programmers and off World hackers and sometimes they mess with a kernel process and the end result is... Crowdstrike.
You got your Windows, cheap, widely supported and loose, and your Apple, expensive, limited and tightly controlled. Choose your GUI weapon. But gimme a CLI.
Linux is fun but it's not greatly supported for tools that make you money... Unix is a much better environment indeed that Windows and Apple but it does require a bit of learning, yet you can do meaningful things in Unix that you can not do in the other commercial products without licensing and NDAs and special tools... In Unix, with gcc, make, vim, grep, find and the shell I can do lots of real work. I can run Git as well. Add xterm and we're set. I know a few people who bought Mac books and the first thing they did was to junk the Apple GUI and install their own presentation manager, I also know others, like me, cheaper, that got Windows machines and plugged in a USB stick with Ubuntu on them. Heck, I have one right by my keyboard.
In case of an emergency, insert this...
Given a fast enough core, I can make Unix/Linux/Android run at near Real Time speeds.. Fast enough, with smart devices, that it can be a useful thing, like an Android phone or tablet... that's why I stay in touch with those OSs.
But I stay out of the Windows vs Apple competition. They're just tools for me, so I use the ones that are supported by the tool vendors.
Otherwise, I'm cheap... I can get go to the Dell Outlet and buy i7 MFF machines for under 500 bucks... and for some audio applications, I can get a MFF Dell, HP with an i5 for 200 bucks. And now I can get a Chromebook ( Android Tablet) with Tidal HiFi and a WiiM Ultra and do audio bit perfect all day long... 550 bucks....
As far as running my work running all weekend long... well... in my case that kind of stuff runs in an embedded target and neither Cupertino nor Redmond have any say on it. Somehow, I've never had a PC hung up on me... perhaps because I run my PCs light? The hard work is done in an RTOS.
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Not that cheap and not that expensive.
Windoze 11 Pro is about $180 if you have to buy a licence. That's not exactly what I'd call cheap.
If you compare, say, a MacBook Pro to the cheapest PC laptop you can find, sure. The PC wins on cost. But if you make a reasonable comparison, for example comparing a decent Lenovo Thinkpad or a higher end Dell to the MacBook Pro you'll find that the PC is not that cheap anymore.
MacOS gives you a linux/UNIX terminal. It even comes with vi.
I have some older Mac minis and Mac Pros (the old 4,1 and 5,1 "cheese graters") that I paid $50 (CAD) for at my local eWaste recycling place. They work just fine. One Pro is my NAS (TrueNAS) and one of the minis used to be my firewall (pfSense) until I desired to have inline packet filtering, which the network card in the mini didn't support.
But hey. We don't all have to like the same stuff.
Tom
I have bought most of my PC components from Newegg, enough that they often send me flyers with "Exclusive deals," AKA, bait. I opened an email one day last year, couldn't believe the deal, and took the bait. Deal? How about a SFF motherboard with a Ryzen 7-7735U chip on it for $150. All you need to make a working PC is RAM, an SSD, a stout laptop power supply and a case. Limit 1 per customer. I ordered one, then tried to order another with my daughter's name and address, but they were sold out. The same thing in a plastic case still sells for about $500. I bought 32 GB of DDR5 Laptop RAM, dug up a suitable power supply from my junk box and made a tiny PC. It will go inside a music making machine that I have been working on. I got it out of its box today and let it eat some updates. It ate the W11 24H2 update without a burp. It's been playing Youtube video at 4K all day without issue. I ran the Passmark Benchmark test which puts the CPU at 22,204.
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macos not only gives a terminal with csh/tcsh you can have any shell available in un*x world. Available at no cost
and usable interactively as well as in scripts. Then add perl python etc and nothing is missing ( except for powershell
which when i was forced to use in a project reminded me of an empty deserted old factory, with water dripping on the
floor, electricity partly available but no furniture except for a few empty boxes. No tools exept for a hammer and a blunt screwdriver that had the magic property that it did not fit any screw).
Downloading a free kit gives C and C++ in full version with any other language ported to ux*x available.
If you saved the disks from every copy of Windows you ever bought going back to XP I believe, you should have lots of usable licenses. Those old disk keys still work! There are a few caveats and exceptions. A key from a home edition will only work on a home version, likewise pro works with pro. The current Windows downloadable ISO will install the version that matches your key. MS pulled a scam with Vista, charging extra for the "Black Edition." Keys from that disk will not work for anything! Some users say that all Vista keys are unusable, but I found a workaround. MS sold a disk in the early W7 days that offered to upgrade 1 to 3 PC's from "older versions of Windows" to W7. Use it to turn 2000, XP, and Vista machines into W7. Once the machine is running W7, use the "Magic Jelly Bean" key extractor to get a disk key from the W7 machine that works in W10 or W11.
Many PC that were covered by a blanket maintenance contract have keys that will not work for upgrades when extracted. You get a "this key is invalid" message. All the PC's in the Motorola plant where I worked had unusable keys, and there was no COA sticker on the machine. I believe that is why my stickerless Lenovo Nano will not take updates. I bought it used on Ebay with W10. I did find a bunch of scrap PC's in a salvage yard in Florida that came from NASA. They had COA stickers, so I snapped a picture of a sticker with my phone, and the key worked for W10!
Once I had to call Microsoft to reauthorize a machine. The proper story there is "lightning killed my machine and I had to replace the motherboard." MS "profiles your hardware" and generates a number that's hidden inside your machine. If something changes the number in a suspicious way, you will get the "Windows copy not genuine" message. That hardware profile is called the "Device ID" and can be found under Settings->System->About, device specifications.
I have not bought a license for a Windows machine in a long time. These old disks still have useful keys. I marked each disk with the machine that the keys are currently on to avoid reusing them, which could get both machines de-authorized.
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To me the very cool thing about C/Nix is they are essentially married. As a 40+ year C writer, for me, writing what others would write in a script is easier for me to code in C. And because of the marriage, the calls are there to do any system thing you want. I recall the magic for me started back in college when I finally understood the (for a newbie) indecipherable main(int argc, char *argv[])... code that is used to decode command line args/switches. Then you discover stuff like the C calls to chown, chmod, stat, readdir... that you can do anything in your code. And because of man pages that cross reference other man pages you can learn more by going down the rabbit hole. I essentially learned multithreading via man pages as well as a good bit about networking. C/Nix is a culture.
That's hilarious! Great tip.
Which is just a matter of typing python in a terminal and clicking OK to "install advanced command line tools". Yep. Love it. I always have a python interpreter going. It's very handy as a calculator. It understands scientific notation. 🙂
Tom
The 10 year old grandkid doesn't want to share a PC with the 12 year old so I offered to make him one since I have already built one for the other two grandkids and mommy. Their uncle offered up an old monitor that was so old that it has a DB connector for Video. This created a snowball that has left the workspace that I normally use for making music / noise and playing with DIY music synthesis looking more like a graveyard of partially disassembled PC's. Of course the 10 year old wanted a different color than the other kids, so I bought the case with the orange stripe that looks greenish brown in the picture for his. Purple and green were already in use at their house. The motherboard with a Core i5-6600, an SSD, and 16 GB of ram came out of the plain black case to its left. The motherboard in queation does not have a DB video connector, and the only MB that I have with a DB video connector is in the rack mount unit on the table. I grabbed that PC from its resting place up on a shelf. I do not remember tha last time it saw power, or even what was in it except for the masking tape sticker I put on my old PC's that are likely parts donors. Upon popping its lid, I found the MB to be too big for the cheap little case.....NEXT!
The sticker says that it has an activated copy of W7, so I plugged it in. Somewhere along the line it acquired W-10 PRO with a 2021 installation date. There was some scribbling over the CPU number, and it did indeed have a core i7-4790K chip which is an oldie, but GOODIE. I relieved it of its GT650 graphics card and left it to eat some updates. So far I have opened and tested 8 PC's in this little operation. Some have been returned to their resting place as possible parts donors, and some have returned to active duty. I took the other 4790K machine all apart to find that my intended upgrade wouldn't fit in it's already too small case. It was going to receive a RX580 video card to replace the RX550 but the 580 was a bit too long.
The sticker says that it has an activated copy of W7, so I plugged it in. Somewhere along the line it acquired W-10 PRO with a 2021 installation date. There was some scribbling over the CPU number, and it did indeed have a core i7-4790K chip which is an oldie, but GOODIE. I relieved it of its GT650 graphics card and left it to eat some updates. So far I have opened and tested 8 PC's in this little operation. Some have been returned to their resting place as possible parts donors, and some have returned to active duty. I took the other 4790K machine all apart to find that my intended upgrade wouldn't fit in it's already too small case. It was going to receive a RX580 video card to replace the RX550 but the 580 was a bit too long.
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Everything went smoothly with the orange PC until I popped the old GTX650 video card in it and tried to download the drivers. Now Windows Update throws one of several errors, all of which point to a corrupt Windows Installation. I am currently downloading a fresh ISO for W10 from Microsoft. I get to start over at square one. I don't remember exactly when I downloaded the ISO used to make the machine, but it was last year.
I will get back to the Linux thing once I clear out the PC graveyard. The PC that is least likely to behave with Windows gets Linux. Right now it's the Lenovo Nano, or the AsRock Desk Mini because it has more CPU power.
I will get back to the Linux thing once I clear out the PC graveyard. The PC that is least likely to behave with Windows gets Linux. Right now it's the Lenovo Nano, or the AsRock Desk Mini because it has more CPU power.
I downloaded a new W10 ISO from Microsoft, installed it and everything works. Even though the ISO was the latest from MS, the PC still needed to eat about a dozen updates. I left it playing YouTube videos all night and it's still running now, so it gets packed up and sent on its way.
Windows 10 goes end-of-life on October 14, 2025 so you won't need to worry about those pesky updates after that. 😁
That's one very nice motherboard.... remember when a "PC" motherboard was something like 12 by 18 inches?
But, if you look into the stuff in your cell phone... the whole thing fits with an SoC the size of your thumbnail... if that big. The reason why the motherboards for your PC are still so large is because they got to make room for the DDR and PCIe sockets. Otherwise the DDR gets soldered in and a simple SD-Card works great... just like the Raspberries.
Sure, the big multicore CPUs are large to manage heat... unlike the mobile devices where power management takes about 25% of the R&D budget so power and heat are managed without burning a hole in your pants pocket when the battery overheats...
BTW, I quit building stuff.... I like to buy low mileage used ( as in enterprise stuff coming out of lease ) or stuff like "already built" in the Dell OUTLET... Also, I started to buy stuff from my employer's IT.... corporate leases last two years and for my non-work purposes what used to be a "top of the line R&D" machine two years ago is more than sufficient.
And, guess what, for 200 bucks I can get them with Windows included. For 600 or 700 bucks I can get a brand new SFF i7.
For mobile personal use, I use Chromebook or Android Tablets, and I can get those from Costco for under 200 bucks... add a 1TB SD cards and we're set.
The only license I need is for Windows Office Professional 2010, which I bought via my employer's program, in '10. Heck, I just reinstalled it into a newer machine and the license works fine. I don't need no stinking Windows 365 lease.
Windows 11 Pro seems to be stable now. I might upgrade two of our Dell MFF machines from Win 10 Pro...
I think the real turning point, from my point of view, was when USB3-C came along. Most peripherals moved from an internal PCI connection to an external interface... Heck, for my wife I run a USB-C hub it includes the power, USB and RJ45 and DP connectors. The USB handles the keyboard and mouse... so a single cable to her MFF little box is all I need, it has a couple of tiny 2TB SSDs inside and everything else is handled via a small box behind her monitor.
The introduction of ever faster, cheaper Android Tablets and Chromebooks sealed the deal.
Yet, my keyboard is expensive.... and yes, the "return" works just like a typewriter.... so do the carriage knobs on either side.
But, if you look into the stuff in your cell phone... the whole thing fits with an SoC the size of your thumbnail... if that big. The reason why the motherboards for your PC are still so large is because they got to make room for the DDR and PCIe sockets. Otherwise the DDR gets soldered in and a simple SD-Card works great... just like the Raspberries.
Sure, the big multicore CPUs are large to manage heat... unlike the mobile devices where power management takes about 25% of the R&D budget so power and heat are managed without burning a hole in your pants pocket when the battery overheats...
BTW, I quit building stuff.... I like to buy low mileage used ( as in enterprise stuff coming out of lease ) or stuff like "already built" in the Dell OUTLET... Also, I started to buy stuff from my employer's IT.... corporate leases last two years and for my non-work purposes what used to be a "top of the line R&D" machine two years ago is more than sufficient.
And, guess what, for 200 bucks I can get them with Windows included. For 600 or 700 bucks I can get a brand new SFF i7.
For mobile personal use, I use Chromebook or Android Tablets, and I can get those from Costco for under 200 bucks... add a 1TB SD cards and we're set.
The only license I need is for Windows Office Professional 2010, which I bought via my employer's program, in '10. Heck, I just reinstalled it into a newer machine and the license works fine. I don't need no stinking Windows 365 lease.
Windows 11 Pro seems to be stable now. I might upgrade two of our Dell MFF machines from Win 10 Pro...
I think the real turning point, from my point of view, was when USB3-C came along. Most peripherals moved from an internal PCI connection to an external interface... Heck, for my wife I run a USB-C hub it includes the power, USB and RJ45 and DP connectors. The USB handles the keyboard and mouse... so a single cable to her MFF little box is all I need, it has a couple of tiny 2TB SSDs inside and everything else is handled via a small box behind her monitor.
The introduction of ever faster, cheaper Android Tablets and Chromebooks sealed the deal.
Yet, my keyboard is expensive.... and yes, the "return" works just like a typewriter.... so do the carriage knobs on either side.
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Good to know about that Dell outlet. Similarly, for Macs I discovered there are several outlets selling used Mac Minis on ebay, maybe elsewhere too. For a few hundred bucks an Intel mac mini can be had, about twice as much for Apple chips. My guess is that these are from server farms, but maybe there are companies that use lots of macs. I've been running my i5 mini I bought this way for 3 or 4 years without issue. I had to have an Intel chip mac to be compatible with my rather old sound interface.
It's funny you should mention respect..
I was reinstalling W10 as I often do, when I came to the screen that asks to connect to the internet.
The response is "I don't have internet".. So what do they do? They show you a second screen in case you're holding out on them.
It ambiguously suggests a microsoft account is required for worthwhile privacy and security.
Then they try to get people to press the wrong button by not putting a border around this 'limited' way to proceed. (someone has put a lot of thought into this)
Ooft.
